Shoreline Mafia has taken the rap world by storm this past year with their carefree attitudes and innovative spins on classic West Coast music. I’m a big fan of Shoreline personally, but I feel like one of the members of the group, Master Kato, sometimes gets unfairly overshadowed by his counterparts. I say this is unfair considering he has so much skill and consistently delivers quality music, but he seems to get overlooked at times.
A prime example of this is on his song “Diamonds” which he dropped a video for the other day. Although Shoreline is known for their hyphy, West Coast anthems with piano, synths, and the rest of the works, Kato thinks outside the box with this one. On “Diamonds”, the beat is almost chilling and definitely more mysterious than what you normally hear from the group. Kato uses this to his advantage and although he discusses a lot of the same topics as usual such as drugs, money, and violence, he gets creative with the way he delivers these subjects. The visual is clean and simple, with some wavy effects that come into play throughout. It’s not the wildest video I’ve ever seen, but it does a great job of putting a face to a name for the Shoreline stud.
I have a good feeling that Master Kato is going to continue to impress as the year progresses, and I believe that he’ll get a chance to step into the spotlight even more than he has previously. I can’t wait to see what surprises the West Coast group, in general, has for us either, because I know there’s big things ahead after the massively successful year they just wrapped up. Check out “Diamonds” and keep an eye out for what both Master Kato and Shoreline Mafia in its entirety have in store coming up.
Words by Danny Adams