The hook at the center of “Con-Artist” first rang out in 1983, on the Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five single “New York New York,” which called the city a place of big dreams where nothing is quite what it seems. Twelve years later, Los Angeles group Tha Dogg Pound lifted the same hook for a “New York, New York” of their own, complete with a video of the group towering over Manhattan and kicking down buildings at the height of the East Coast and West Coast rivalry. Big Brody Ode borrows it a third time, and the chain of hands suits a song about who takes what from whom.

Ode, then recording as Capital Ode, made the track with producer Drum Fu for their 2015 mixtape PerfectHairForever, which never reached streaming services until this tenth-anniversary remaster by engineer Jonny Wolf. Drum Fu builds a creeping, eerie boom bap loop under the bars, and the verses read like a field guide to hustlers: strangers who turn friendly right before they rob you, thieves working the subway, and rappers who “bore you to sleep then start selling you dreams.”

Ode stitches in lines from New York greats, quoting Jay-Z by name and nodding to Nas, Busta Rhymes, Fat Joe and De La Soul, and the open credit puts him squarely with the honest borrowers he spends the song defending. The remaster even lets present-day Ode cut into an old line about signing with Diddy to deliver a flat, one-word refusal. The final verse saves the best scam for last, a true story about a promoter who offered Ode an opening slot for Bronx rapper Ron Browz, then asked Ode to pay for the privilege and threw in a discount.

Ode laughs and passes, and the song makes that refusal its whole argument. A track about thieves, assembled from debts it openly acknowledges, shows exactly how borrowing works in hip-hop: say whose line it is, then pay it back with interest.