Over the course of his Hurry Up and Die and Cocaine Riot mixtape series, the Queens rapper Chinx pieced together a gruff, promising sound. Versed in the foreboding thump of Atlanta trap but very much New York in spirit and form, Chinx at his best (the mischievously weird "I'm a Coke Boy", from Cocaine Riot 2), suggested that Coke Boys could be more than just French Montana's goon squad. Then one May morning the unthinkable happened: Chinx was killed as shots were fired at his car outside of a venue he’d just performed. He was only 31, married with three children and a fourth on the way.
As a method of coping with the loss, his manager and close collaborators gathered to honor their friend the only way they knew how: workshopping the sessions he’d left behind. As a result, Welcome to JFK is a different kind of hip-hop debut. Instead of pointing the rapper toward the places he could go, JFK hint at places he might’ve gotten. From the dejected Auto-Tuned opener "Experimental", in which Chinx sings "I swear I want this to last us a lifetime", to the foreboding closer "Die Young", the specter of mortality haunts the proceedings.
Despite all of this, it's a testament to Chinx's still-growing pop smarts that Welcome to JFK is sometimes a lot of fun. "Experimental"’s mournful opener is quickly offset by a stream of upbeat shots at radio play. "Thug Love" and "The Other Side" spring for help from outside singers, the former calling Jeremih for the chorus and the latter tapping Ty Dolla $ign in full goon regalia. The real gem of the batch is "Yay", a bratty bit of spiteful money counting that is concise and catchy without sacrificing Chinx’s dopeboy veneer.
For the stretch of songs from the wistful pep talk "How to Get Rich" through the closing Coke Boys posse cut "Die Young", Welcome to JFK tenses up and eases off the good times. Chinx walks his audience behind the triumph of "Go Get It" and "Yay" to illuminate the hard decisions and paranoia that accompant success on the streets. "Pray" pairs him up with Chicago Coke Boys affiliate Lil Durk as each ponders mortality and their legacy. In the latter, Chinx raps chillingly about a nightmare in which he gets shot in the head, only to dive into a chorus essentially eulogizing himself. Welcome to JFK doesn’t allow much comfort. The album is by turns a succession of punchlines so snarky it’s upsetting Chinx won’t be around to write more of them and an unnerving trip into a mind coming to terms with the ever-present reality of sudden death.
