Early on Institution, the sprawling third mixtape from Kodak Black, the wunderkind MC offers a glimpse into the future of Southern rap—and what he sees looks an awful lot like him. Though just 18 at the time of its release, the Pompano Beach, Florida native wastes little time before conjuring the image of young kids running up to him, asking him for dollar bills to take to the corner store, hailing him as a father figure. In the years following Institution’s release, this dynamic would bear out across the industry, with aspiring rappers (and established stars) in the region and across the world mimicking his hairpin turns of phrase, his defiantly tic-riddled vocals, and his musical omnivorousness. Yet for as widely imitated as Kodak would become, few artists in any region or era can claim to have anchored such a rhizomatic record as this. Despite Kodak’s youth at the time it was written and recorded, Institution is brimming with perspective, with lived experience. He sneaks a pen into a cell to write songs while locked up, then warns a carceral pen pal that he’s put on some pounds during his stint behind bars; he invites the listener to imagine large bills raining from the sky on one song, pieces of Section 8 paperwork on the next. “That loyalty more valuable than gold,” he raps on the wrenching “Heart,” one of the numerous examples of Kodak presenting betrayal as a fate worse than death. Elsewhere, he uses the length of jail correspondence as a barometer of love and four-year age differences as unbridgeable divides. Institution is sonically ambitious. It’s the force of Kodak’s personality that ties together the wildly disparate collection of beats, which include contemplative acoustic numbers and shimmering relics of turn-of-the-century major label soul sampling (“Gospel”) and a mutation of slow-creep G-funk (“In Too Deep”). Sometimes Kodak gleefully adopts conventional rap song structures, and other times he punctures them—as on “Hollyhood,” where his disgust with industry fakery is so totalizing that he can’t even bring himself to make the complaints rhyme.