SAY CHEESE VOL. 1
Since his early days with Larry League, Randy Provolone has always existed slightly outside the frame — a character half inside the joke and half writing it. Where much of the 2010s Atlanta underground blurred irony and sincerity through meme-heavy chaos, Randy approached it like sculpture, reshaping the city’s digital detritus into something strangely self-aware. Say Cheese Vol. 1 marks the moment that instinct crystallized. Recorded during the tail end of Atlanta’s SoundCloud aftershock, it captures him wrestling with form and fatigue, still funny but less flippant, using parody as autobiography.
Across its sprawl, Say Cheese Vol. 1 functions like a scrapbook of the post-Larry League psyche. Samples pull from everywhere — Strawberry Fields Forever, Californication, Horse With No Name, even Bohemian Rhapsody — yet none of them land as nostalgia plays. They’re repurposed artifacts, filtered through 808s and basement reverb, as if the canon itself were being bootlegged from inside a trap house. Randy’s voice drifts between lethargy and conviction; his humor, once a shield, now folds into existential commentary.
The project’s sequencing mirrors its contradictions. “Awful Lot,” the opening prayer, floats on a Beatles loop that turns psychedelic warmth into resignation — “I just dropped an awful lot / hope it’s not my last one copped.” Moments later, “ATLfornication” flips the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ California hedonism into a smog-covered sermon about Atlanta’s own excess. “Starlink” and “Madman” stretch the mixtape’s emotional palette in opposite directions: the former glows with post-country melancholy, sampling Morgan Wallen into digital gospel, while the latter weaponizes the Mad Men theme against capitalism’s sleek absurdity.
Midway through, “Devil2GA” and “Weight” descend into fever-dream realism — biblical imagery refracted through SenseiATL’s production, Randy’s drawl orbiting psychedelic Americana. Later, “Cullowhee” leans into its Three Days Grace sample like an accidental rock ballad, equal parts heartbreak and relapse. By the time “Bohemian Rackz” re-imagines Queen’s operatic maximalism as Atlanta braggadocio, the mixtape feels like an entire subculture caught between irony and confession.
Lyrically, Randy is still sardonic, still irreverent, but his targets have expanded. Where the Larry League era skewered the internet, Say Cheese internalizes it — self-diagnosing the attention economy with religious precision. He raps about court summons and xans with the same cadence he uses for theology, as if the two were interchangeable forms of American ritual. Even at its most chaotic, the tape is unnervingly coherent, every joke carrying a bruise underneath.
Say Cheese Vol. 1 thrives in its refusal to decide what it is. It’s mixtape and memoir, parody and requiem, art-school collage and corner-store diary. If the title sounds flippant, the music underneath isn’t — it’s Randy documenting the act of smiling through apocalypse, of posing for a camera that may no longer exist. In the landscape of Atlanta’s ever-mutating underground, Vol. 1 stands not as a comeback or a continuation but as proof that irony, when stretched far enough, starts to sound like prayer.
