Cousin Stizz’s manager Tim Larew tells the story of his early single “No Bells,” a cautionary tale, an accidental party anthem, a cornerstone of Suffolk County.
This article first appeared in the 2024 issue of No Bells magazine.
At the risk of sounding cliche, 2015 was a year decorated by dreams coming true. After working meticulously behind the scenes with Cousin Stizz, plotting on how he’d enter the national rap conversation, we rolled out his debut mixtape Suffolk County: the arrival of a hero Boston didn’t know it needed.
The list of pivotal moments on the road to the breakout mixtape is too long to leave unabridged, but zooming in on “No Bells” makes that task a bit less daunting. The follow-up to Stizz’s buzzy debut single “Shoutout,” “No Bells” was cooked up in the fall of 2014, not long after Future’s Monster mixtape surfaced and became the soundtrack to our lives, our hustles, and my cross country drive to set up shop in Los Angeles.
There were a lot of unknowns that first week of November; I took off for LA, days after my 24th birthday, with my good friend James Pereira (now well known as JMP) riding shotgun. We crammed everything I owned and his 2-week bag into my Honda Civic and headed west from MA, fueled by a combination of 87-octane gas and dreams. I was a year and some change removed from graduating from Boston University and all I had to hang my hat on career-wise was managing two local newcomers—Stizz and Michael Christmas—and writing part time for Pigeons and Planes. I was invigorated and grateful for it all, but trying to justify that life design to my parents who funded my education was…not fun. But at the time, nothing mattered more than the vision. If one of the guys got $250 for a show and my commission covered a tank of gas, that meant more to me than a salary and benefits. The thrill of the unknown and achieving what could only have been imagined yesterday was the driving force. There were unknowns with Stizz specifically too. “Shoutout” opened some incredible doors—to label interest, to Lyor Cohen’s literal house, to a fruitful relationship with OVO—but there was no follow up single on the horizon, and certainly no tangible business.
There are certain songs that hold space in your heart and memory bank forever, and for many reasons, “No Bells” is one of those for me, accompanied by a slew of moments I’ll never forget. The first one occurred on day two of our cross country drive; I couldn’t tell you exactly where in the midwest we were, only that hundreds of miles of plains had passed by and there were hundreds more to come. My phone pinged with an email from Stizz. This was customary; he went to the studio, he bounced the files and sent me what he recorded, regardless of how excited he was about it. This song, though, was a rare first listen no-doubter, a sure smash, an immediate “run that shit back.” The same thing Chance The Rapper said to me when I played it for him months later on the way to Drake’s Coachella-headlining set in that same Honda Civic.
Over a sparse, mesmerizing beat from DumDrumz—a producer from south Florida who discovered “Shoutout” and was an instant fan—Stizz chanted “Who you know from out here, your name ain’t ringin’ no bells boy,” popped his shit on the verses, and let the outro ride for almost a minute, leaving listeners to reckon with what they just heard.
The genius irony of “No Bells” is that it was somehow both a warning shot to city dwellers who step into the wrong hood with the wrong affiliation, and a simple, innocuous call-and-response record. Despite its venom, “No Bells” made Boston and its champion more relatable than ever before. Suffolk County was effectively Stizz’s account of his life story to that point, not unlike many debut rap albums. Bar for bar, “No Bells,” and every other song on the project was devoid of embellishment. It’s what ultimately made Stizz believable and worthy of celebrating.
Homemade “Who You Know?!” white tees littered the Gucci Park basketball court in the center of Stizz’s Fields Corner neighborhood on the day of the music video shoot in mid-August 2015, three months after the song’s release. Here, the phrase was a blinking yellow light. If you’re going to proceed, make sure you belong, and proceed with caution. At the Middle East Upstairs a month later, the famed venue across the river in Cambridge that Stizz historically sold out in three days for his first ever headline show, “Who You Know?!” was a communal psalm. If you were there and chanting along, you were supposed to be there regardless of where you came from or what you looked like. Your presence alone meant you were part of the family. The folks outside of the venue were the names that weren’t ringing bells.“No Bells” had a publicly promoted Chance remix that never surfaced. “Shoutout” was remixed by Playboi Carti and Stizz won the fight vs. me about releasing it (it still managed to leak on SoundCloud years later). Childish Gambino tried to find a way onto the project in the final days leading up to its release. Drake was a fan, Kanye was a fan, the list goes on and on. Ultimately, Suffolk County and “No Bells” ended up solely affiliated with Boston and Stizz, the only feature being the late Roxbury star Jefe Replay, and in hindsight, there may not have been a better outcome. “No Bells” was birthed from Stizz’s lived experience and became an anthem for the city, a “you can do it too” theme song for me and countless others that even inspired a magazine from the same state that watered all of the seeds. Instead of trying to force a national moment, Stizz stuck to his roots, preserving his spot in history by crafting a Boston rap classic.
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