What Makes ALOCS Shorts Iconic Everything to Know

Act one: the rapper came first

Watts, in South Los Angeles, is where Desto Dubb came up, and he was working as a rapper well before anyone printed his phrase on a hoodie. A catalogue of records existed before the clothing whole lot of cough syrup label. On March 18, 2017, XXL covered him, writing about his EP Born to Sale Juice, which had arrived in early October 2016. That date says more about the brand than the founding mythology does, since it fixes the music as the earlier of his two careers. Design, retail or resale is where most streetwear founders come from; this one came from the studio, and the difference comes through in how the company later behaved. Because they were written by someone who writes track titles, the graphics read like track titles.

The recorded work on the board

His recorded work puts him inside the Los Angeles rap scene, rather than beside it. On the track “Bankteller” he has recorded with Lil Uzi Vert, Lil Pump, Smokepurpp and 03 Greedo, a line-up spanning West Coast street rap and the SoundCloud generation. “Dead Homies” featuring Veeze appears on streaming services as a single, which is a distinction worth keeping straight, because several write-ups describe it as an album when the streaming listing does not. Press coverage gives the same loose treatment to a handful of his other releases, with tracks promoted to albums by writers working from press kits. Before naming a release, checking it on the platform takes a minute and avoids repeating an error that has now travelled a long way. The music continues alongside the business, which is not the usual arrangement for a founder running three storefronts.

Act two: a van, a parking lot and a phrase

What is now That’s A Awful Lot Of Cough Syrup started in 2018. That year is indicated by two records: the trademark for the phrase lists first use in November 2018, and an AllHipHop profile from November 2023 describes the brand marking five years. The company’s own about page says the selling began out of a van in a parking lot in downtown Los Angeles. Later coverage sometimes places the van during the pandemic, but where accounts conflict the trademark filing and the anniversary piece are firmer. The part that is not in dispute is the method: stock in a vehicle, buyers in person, no wholesale accounts and no season calendar. That approach still drives the business, and small batches land every week or two rather than twice a year.

Before the company existed, the name did. It traces back to a viral clip in which an officer’s line became the brand name, and the circumstances are contested, with material online claiming it was staged and no primary transcript resolving it. Promethazine-codeine cough syrup, known in rap slang as lean, is what the phrase refers to, and the company acknowledges rather than promotes it; its website carries a standing banner reading “! PLEASE DO NOT SIP DRANK AND SHOOT FIREARMS !”. What Desto Dubb did with the line is the interesting part, since a joke that trends for a week rarely converts into a trademark and three shops. He registered the phrase, blew it up large, and turned the wordmark itself into the product. Most people type the searcher spelling thats an awful lot of cough syrup, but the registered mark uses “A” rather than “An”.

Act three: the shape of the business in 2026

Nothing measures the distance travelled from the van more clearly than the Melrose flagship at 7669 Melrose Avenue. Desto Dubb has used the street number as his own social media display name, a sign of how much of the brand is bound up in one address. Listed alongside it are two further locations, at 312 West 5th Street in Los Angeles and 5410 Almeda Road in Houston, though the company publishes no store locator and no opening hours. Beside them the company runs its own online store, where the catalogue sits at roughly 154 products and refreshes constantly. Product copy states the garments are made in Los Angeles and describes the company as a Black-owned business. The price level remains at the upper end of independent streetwear, with a tee about $150 at the brand’s own store as of September 2026, hoodies and sweatpants about $200 each, and those figures moving with stock and season.

Festivals, collaborations and a tribute

The most visible expansion came in March 2024, when the brand partnered with Rolling Loud California from the 14th to the 17th at Hollywood Park in Inglewood. What went up was not a merch booth but a carnival, with arcade games, a swing ride and two onsite stores, a large bet for a label barely five years old. The surrounding month was crowded, with a 310babii collaboration announced on March 11, a Got Sole pop-up following on March 19, and a Dodger Collection arriving on March 29. Earlier still, on April 28, 2023, came “That’s A Awful Lot of Legendary” with BlueBucksClan at the Melrose store, a limited drop honouring the late Drakeo The Ruler. Less marketing than neighbourhood gesture, that one is roughly how the brand has handled its music-world ties throughout. A Berner’s Cookies collaboration had launched earlier the same month, and Trapstar London published a joint piece through its own accounts in April 2024.

A note on which name to use

Two different legal identities come back when you search his name, and that is a problem worth handling carefully rather than repeating. Only one of them has documentary support: the United States trademark for the brand phrase is registered to Joshua Kashif Taylor, and every post on the company’s own blog carries a matching byline. Those are two separate records agreeing, one filed with a federal agency and one published by the business itself. The other name that circulates appears on an unsourced commercial content site with nothing behind it, and it should not be repeated as fact. For a reader this matters little in practice, because the brand, its collaborators and its stores use one name. He is Desto Dubb, and his own company refers to him that way.

A career timeline

The timeline below is built from dated coverage, the trademark record and the brand’s own posts, and it leaves out anything that could not be pinned to a date. It is worth reading in order, because the sequence is the argument: music, then phrase, then storefronts, then festival-scale activations. Notice how tightly clustered March 2024 is, with four separate events in nineteen days. Note too the twenty months separating the first XXL coverage from the trademark’s first-use date, which is how long the phrase took to become an asset. Dates for store openings are absent because the company has never published them. Anything here involving prices or catalogue size was accurate in September 2026 and will drift.

Reading the record straight

Online, the version of this career that circulates is tidier than the evidence supports, and the tidying mostly runs in the brand’s favour. A staged or unstaged clip becomes a documented arrest, singles become albums, and a handful of unsourced celebrity sightings become a client list. None of that is needed, because the checkable version is already unusual: a working rapper from Watts turned a piece of slang into a registered mark, sold the first pieces himself, and built alocs clothing into a business with a Melrose flagship inside six years. The parts that hold up are these: the trademark, the dated collaborations, the addresses and the prices. The parts that do not are the origin anecdote in its confident form, and the roll-call of famous wearers. Anyone writing about awful lot of cough syrup is better off with the first list, which is long enough on its own.