Anywhere But Here, the latest effort from Pro Era rapper Nyck Caution, opens with a slice of devastating imagery. On “December 24th,” Caution recalls returning to his native Brooklyn after a tour date in Philadelphia to surprise his father for Christmas. When he arrives, the NYPD has blocked the entrance to his childhood home like a crime scene; his father, he learns, lies dead inside. As a narrative hook, it’s the sort of deftly captured, life-altering precipice found on the intros to Ready to Die and Me Against the World, Clinton-era coming-of-age classics that Pro Era has long attempted to replicate. But the gut-punch specificity of “December 24th” makes it an outlier on Anywhere But Here, the album’s hollow interiority representative of the collective’s ongoing identity crisis.
When Joey Bada$$ introduced his Murrow High schoolmates on 2012’s 1999, they arrived with the verve of eager theater kids who’d stumbled upon a shopworn copy of Enta da Stage. As the years passed, Pro Era strove to shake the revivalist tag but struggled to to distinguish themselves otherwise. On 2017’s All-Amerikkkan Bada$$, Joey flitted between street-corner chronicles and we-the-people generational spokesmanship, yet couldn’t quite commit to either; the group clung to a nebulous ideal of New York City as a cultural institution in hopes of ascribing their music with secondhand prestige. 2019’s supergroup outing Escape From New York sought an updated musical context, but by that point the prospect of Kirk Knight and CJ Fly rapping over trap beats landed like a joke without a punchline.
The conundrum is particularly acute for Caution, a 27-year-old white man from suburban Mill Basin (Nyck is an acronym for, sigh, “New York City Kid”) who befriended the late Capital STEEZ as a teenager. His nimble vocal technique evinces his outerborough roots, but his writing is more akin to J. Cole’s aspirational navel-gazing and Machine Gun Kelly’s opaque melodrama. On the one hand, he’s a working-class, middle-American underdog; on the other, he’s convinced of his claim to a hip-hop legacy. This self-styled contradiction imbues Anywhere But Here with adolescent moodiness. “I need a reason to be better than I am/At the moment I been broken, putting pieces of the puzzle back again,” he raps on the title track. Both the sentiment and rhyme pattern are echoed on “Session 47”: “Every tomorrow I’m runnin’ again/Don’t really know who I’m runnin’ against.” Caution’s ambiguous tales teem with nameless demons, detractors, and lonely-at-the-top laments.
That’s not to say his targeted vitriol is any more effective. On the Joey Bada$$ duet “How You Live It,” Caution’s verse opens, “I drop the bag off, early morning I jack off/So when I fuck your chick, afternoon, I last long”; within a few bars, he’s bemoaning the vanity of Instagram models. He gripes about mumble rappers and internet hype on “Dirt on Your Name,” threatening to take his ball and go home if he doesn’t get his overdue accolades. His grievances are informed by a peculiar bootstraps logic—a conviction that only those who’ve put in their 10,000 hours are entitled to rap glory. Of course, if that were actually the case, Nyck Caution would have to find something else to grumble about.
Like his group members, Caution has taken pains to distance himself from Pro Era’s earlier golden-age sound. Production-wise, Anywhere But Here models a frictionless anonymity, with contemplative, Statik Selektah-type beats courtesy of Canis Major, Dreamlife, and Erick the Architect. Caution is a chameleonic collaborator, which works in his favor: the Denzel Curry track “Bad Day” sounds like a Denzel Curry track, with both rappers speed-rhyming over a frenetic bassline. Caution’s third-person autobiography on “Product of My Environment” doesn’t stick the landing, but the song is redeemed by Kota the Friend’s guest verse and producer Freddie Joachim’s lively groove. In the company of his pals, Caution is notably less morose.
But on his own, he’s such a blank canvas that you can more or less project whichever attributes you’d like upon him. Is he a true-school torchbearer? Sort of. A solemn diarist? Sometimes. A token of middle-class angst, adapted for an audience who came to hip-hop through their smartphones? Maybe so. Anywhere But Here exposes the limits of Pro Era’s student-of-the-game reverence, their submersion in technical and aesthetic trappings at the expense of the bigger picture: Jay and B.I.G. weren’t just interesting people because they were rappers, they were great rappers because they were also interesting people.
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