Cozz

Dreamville affiliate Cozz has a distinctively personable take on the West Coast rap style, delivering honest, sometimes emotionally raw and confessional bars in flows that varied from fast and intricate to more restrained. Cozz took a brief hiatus after his 2018 album Effected, but returned in 2021 with new single “Fortunate.”
Born in 1994 in South Central Los Angeles, Cozz didn’t even start rapping until the beginning of 2013, but his honest style fit in with the rising popularity of “reality rap.” In early 2014, the rapper born Cody Osagie uploaded “Dreams,” an introspective cut that impressed J. Cole, who signed Cozz to his Interscope-supported Dreamville imprint. The track landed on Cozz’s 2014 debut, Cozz & Effect, which also featured the Meez-produced single “Cody Macc” and registered on Billboard’s Top Rap Albums chart at number 17. A slot on a Dreamville package tour and a contribution to the label’s Revenge of the Dreamers, Vol. 2 preceded the early-2016 release Nothin Personal, a mixtape for which Meez either produced or co-produced every track. After an assortment of featured appearances on tracks by Bas, Ari Lennox, and a few other fellow artists, Cozz resumed headlining output with the 2018 singles “Questions” and the Curren$y collaboration “Badu,” as well as second studio album Effected and mixtape Aftermath of My Dreams, made in collaboration with DJ Megan Ryte. The next several years found Cozz lying relatively low, showing up on a few tracks of the 2019 Dreamville compilation Revenge of the Dreamers III and its expanded edition the following year. In 2021, Cozz returned with new single of his own, “Fortunate.” ~ David Jeffries