When Greg Beamish throws it down for his city, he goes all in. Judging by the bars slung throughout the Vancouver rapper’s latest release, Disposable Income, the MC is pumping his extra cash into local business by packing his rolling papers with the finest B.C. bud. More ambitious a sell, however, are the Van City–minded verses on “Chad Kroeger Money”, which attempt to get West Coast rap fans celebrating the polarizing bro-rocker, if only for his fiscal dominance. This is clearly the focus, since the song, balancing boom-bap rhythms with Molson-soaked guitar solos, goes so far as to note that the Nickelback leader “writes songs that are bad, but he makes a lot of money and I think that’s kind of rad.”

“I’ve never seen a group in music conjure up so much hatred,” Beamish says of the successful but much-derided chart-toppers as he sips on a pint of Schwarzbier at a table in off-Main brewers 33 Acres’ tasting room. “I’ve never met a person that likes them, but obviously somebody does; I think they do a pretty good job in that respect. I was trying to, with my tongue in cheek, stick up for Chad Kroeger. I don’t think he really deserves all the hate he gets.”

Helping further spread the word about B.C., Disposable Income likewise gets Beamish smoking as much homegrown as possible (“Blaze”), getting a buzz on with West Coast locals (“Walking Down Robson”), and shouting out B.C.–bred hero Terry Fox (“Terry Fox”). The nice-guy angle wasn’t always Beamish’s forte, having first worked his flow from Tsawwassen house parties into the local battle-rap scene. Slinging slurs eventually grew stale for the rhymer, though.

“I don’t really want to make fun of people,” he says earnestly of his current m.o. with an aw-shucks smile. “Battling has progressed into studying someone’s Facebook and calling up their little sister. I never really saw much of a future in that anyways. I wanted to be an artist that makes songs that people enjoy.”

Despite revamping his ideals, bad habits can be hard to break. Beamish is still getting his digs in on “My Shit’s Tight”, going to war against his enemies with barked-out attacks like: “I got two fists built like two bricks/With two hits, crack your fucking ribs like toothpicks”. Adding insult to injury, the oral assault caps with him stealing a girlfriend or two to have dirty sex in a Lexus.

Backing his brags on the eight-song outing is beat work from Stroker DeLuca. The pair first encountered each other when a teenage Beamish opened for the producer’s Def Poets Society project nearly a dozen years ago, and later evolved into a studio relationship that has resulted in both Beamish’s 2011 set Premium Boss Playa Status and Disposable Income. This time around, DeLuca fits the tracks with everything from a head-bobbing mashup of ’70s prog-rock samples on “Greg Beamish” to a mojito-sweet mélange of steel drums and gunshot sounds on “Cuba Cabana”, a cut that also includes vocal appearances by the producer, J. Dohe, and Lord Diamonds.

“We get in a little trouble on vacation in a made-up, Cuba-esque location where we have to rescue our friend J. Dohe,” he sums up of the fictional story, which quickly goes haywire after a drug deal set up by a cabbie turns into a kidnapping plot. Alluding to the song’s cast of dubiously accented villains, Beamish offers: “I hope we didn’t offend any Cubans with that song, because there are a lot of clichés and stereotypes thrown in there. It’s all in fun, I don’t think it’s too bad.”

Grounded more in reality is “Terry Fox”, an inspirational track built around chiming, ’80s-era keyboard work and rhymes comparing his own ambition to Fox undertaking his legendary Marathon of Hope. While only just briefly, it’s also the only song on Disposable Income to reflect on Beamish’s personal life beyond partying, saluting both its titular philanthropic athlete and the rapper’s mother, who died of breast cancer when he was a teenager.

“I’ve been pretty reserved, not letting too much of myself out there,” he says of keeping his family life close to his chest. “I tried to block that bad shit away. I do mention it at the end [‘I’m doing it for him and my mom I had to bury’]. I think I want to let my audience get to know me before I start dropping really emotional stuff. As a music listener I was never a fan of the really emotional Eminem songs. I always like the good-times stuff, myself.”

Despite this, Beamish is hoping to let even more of his personality sink into his verses as he continues to evolve. Currently the head waiter at a Yaletown eatery, he’s been considering bringing his fine-dining expertise into his hip-hop career, though he realizes it’s a niche element that’s already been nicked.

“Action Bronson came out and beat me to it,” he says, referring to the New York–based foodie MC, for whom Beamish actually opened in Vancouver last fall. Still, the project could be served up in the future, and the rapper already has a thematically on-point title for the record: Mise en place.

“It’s French for having things in place,” he explains, “That’s an expression that gets thrown around the restaurant a lot. By my next record I’ll hopefully have things in place.”