Ever since 1999, the rappers and producers of the Beast Coast collective have been pegged as Golden Age evangelists and neoclassicists. They were a New York City squad with throwback New York City values, out to restore the soul to what de facto leader Joey Bada$$ called rap’s “very trash state.” A supergroup made of three smaller Brooklyn rap groups—Pro Era (Bada$$, Kirk Knight, CJ Fly, Nyck Caution, Powers Pleasant), Flatbush Zombies (Meechy Darko, Zombie Juice, Erick the Architect), and the Underachievers (Issa Gold and AK the Savior)—they spent their early years trying to conjure Biggie’s era by showing utmost reverence to the sacred land he stood on.
As they’ve grown up, the crew has softened a bit on revivalism. The Pro Era kids started singing more. The Zombies ventured into trap. Joey Bada$$ ghostwrote some of “Rockstar.” On Escape From New York, the first album by Beast Coast as a unit, they seem eager to escape their own provincial past. “This is actual, like, music,” Meechy told Hot97. “Nothing wrong with the boom-bap shit, but we didn’t really try to follow a format that everybody tried to lay for us.” Produced primarily by Erick Arc Elliott and Powers Pleasant, with Elliott serving as the project’s executive producer, Escape From New York turns its title into a metaphor. Beast Coast attempt to move beyond the boundaries established by the hallowed ground of their home, finding a deeper inspiration in brotherhood.
Despite their intentions, the album still often feels like wandering into a pointless cypher. Elliott pushed against nine-minute songs or “this Wu-Tang reincarnation kind of thing,” but most of the songs are still huge posse cuts, just with more condensed verses. Some songs have as many as nine. Some members squeeze in for a measly four bars. Sometimes it can be like watching too many people cram into an elevator; everyone would probably be better off if a few stepped off and caught the next one. They go to such lengths trying to ensure that everyone gets enough mic time that the process can feel restrictive. They don’t even get particularly cute with the matchups: Flatbush Zombies largely stick with their own, and Nyck Caution and Kirk Knight, who already teamed up for 2017’s Nyck @ Knight, almost always appear together.
There is a level of comfort that also feels like complacency. “I play these songs for people sometimes and they’re like, ‘Is that you or Joey?’” Meechy Darko told Complex. “I love that, because it’s me and Joey going after each other and that means we are in sync together.” But that smudging can also speak to a lack of originality. While they all do tend to follow one another, there isn’t much synchronicity in what they choose to rap about outside of “Problemz.” There is very little continuity. It can be difficult to get three performers on the same page, much less ten.
Cream rises to the top in situations like this, and Joey Bada$$ and Meechy Darko separate themselves from the pack. Bada$$ remains the best rapper this crew has to offer; the most technically proficient in a collective that prides itself on that sort of thing, and the artist with the highest ceiling. Meechy raps with such personality that he’s the only person who benefits from shorter verses. He could chew up scenery during a cameo. “You never get what you deserve, just what you negotiate/You want the bag, I want the safe/Click-clack, nobody safe,” he raps on “Rubberband,” howling like a berserk preacher. On at least two occasions, he gets two verses on the same song, and he earns them. On the flip side, no pairing underachieves quite like the Underachievers, who seem to shrink away at nearly every occasion. They suffer the most in this rigid format. There isn’t nearly enough time for their verses to pick up any momentum. The other members of Pro Era may as well be cardboard stand-ins most of the time.
Escape From New York is most engaging when it doesn’t try to force droning lesser rappers on listeners and instead focuses on making the “actual music” Meechy talked about. Songs like “Snow in the Stadium” and “Desperado” show that this group is, in fact, capable of producing not just functional but enjoyable rap songs under these tight conditions. But there isn’t enough of this balance, and a lot of that work is undercut by songs reinforcing the pecking order like “Puke,” a hookless bar-fest that crescendos into an all too meta Bada$$ breakdown: “I don’t even keep score, bitch I got the win/They need me like oxygen/On me, the whole block depend,” he raps, and it’s hard not to read that as rap Atlas bearing the entire Beast Coast on his shoulders. Bada$$ is the most talented and most famous member of the collective, and the Zombies have carved out their own little niche, but the Beast Coast album’s most insurmountable challenge is convincing the listener that the rest could ever hope to escape New York without them.
