Misplaced nostalgia for old New York’s violent, drug-ravaged neighborhoods aside, the rapid gentrification of the city has turned a place once left for dead by government into a profitable, clean tourist spot for yuppies and families. Except the NYPD’s crime report fixing and influx of moneyed art students betrays the very real fact that parts of the city are still very much dangerous. The South Bronx, East New York, Washington Heights, Queensbridge, the Staten Island projects, and large portions of South Brooklyn have yet to benefit from the sanitizing touch of gourmet coffee shops, cheap condos, and organic grocery stores. Part of the death of NY rap, aside from a lull in creativity, has been that a lot of hardcore NY rappers are reliant on increasingly fabricated or outdated tales of crack, gats, and homicides. Coney Island’s Broke Safety is not one of those groups.
On their self-titled debut, Coney reps Nems, Mr. Weirdo, Manson, and OTR successfully make a whole greater than the sum of its parts; each MC has an individual style that avoids the sameness that makes most group or duo projects sound redundant. After all, if you’re buying to something with multiple rappers on it, wouldn’t you want them to sound like different rappers? Anchored by underground vet and former battle MC Nems, the project is an exhibition in New York styles – all hard accents, grimy delivery, and tough subject matter – but even though the themes are consistently focused on bragaddocio, hardness, and struggling, the sound of the album itself isn’t as uniform. The standard morose piano beats are there, but they’re broken up by soul samples, surprisingly ethereal tracks, minimalist breaks, and triumphant horns. One of the most standout features of the record is Mr. Weirdo himself, a young MC who brings an almost playful scheme-heavy, fluid flow to the proceedings that adds a good amount of youthful style to what could’ve been a standard old guard “punch you in the face” kind of album.
