Album Review: BE VERY AFRAID (Vol. 1) by Chase B
A well-connected DJ-producer’s debut mixtape has plenty of famous friends but no clear reason to exist without them.
Every big-ticket DJ in hip-hop’s orbit eventually faces the same question: what happens when you put yourself on the cover instead of standing behind the guy whose brand sells the tickets? For the better part of a decade, the answer for Chase Benjamin was to keep spinning. He came up in Missouri City, Texas, spent summers in Harlem, taught himself to DJ from YouTube clips of Kid Capri, and landed a residency at New York nightlife rooms while still a student at Howard. Travis Scott brought him into the Cactus Jack fold, and Chase B became the guy behind the decks at tours and festivals, the co-producer on “Franchise,” a contributor to the JackBoys compilation, a credit on a handful of singles with Don Toliver, Sheck Wes, Gunna, and Quavo that kept arriving without ever coalescing into a full-length. BE VERY AFRAID (Vol. 1) is that full-length, or close to it. Some of the songs are five years old, and some were recorded days before the release. Chase B has called it a mixtape and a curation. Both descriptions are accurate. Neither one solves the problem of whether there’s a personality holding any of it together.
Played front to back, the record has a curious flatness. Two instrumentals bookend separate stretches. “Be Very Afraid,” a Teddy Walton co-production, opens the record, and “SEOUL GLOW,” which pairs Chase B with Vegyn and Daniela Lalita, sits somewhere in the middle. They hint at a producer with taste that drifts beyond club rap, but neither one connects to the songs around it. The features rotate in with their own energy and leave without any of them bumping into each other. Babyface Ray slides through “365” telling you to call him wavy. Two songs later, Dougie F is back in his bag, his Goyard, his tote. Sheck Wes pops up twice, once throwing money to heal pain, once admitting he can’t see a woman in the picture anymore. Swae Lee remembers not being able to buy things at the store. None of these guests sound like they recorded in the same building, let alone for the same record, and the production doesn’t push back hard enough to impose a common thread.
Swae Lee gets the most specific image on “Street Sweeper” when he mentions putting ice on his fingers and comparing the gesture to freeze tag, then pivoting to Questlove and a five-second rule about dropped cash. That kind of free-associative detail at least gives you a person in the booth. Babyface Ray on “365” has a sly moment telling you he’ll add a little more for the ones who waited, but the bars run through upgrade talk and bottle-service logistics without building on it. Zona Man, on the same song, mentions dreaming about millions and having too much pride to let things go, two ideas that could open up if his bars gave them any air. GT crashes a rental and makes plays at a 7-Eleven; Dougie F thanks the Lord for forgiving his sins and says a woman shows up at his door like a Jehovah’s Witness. Some of these lines are funny in the moment, but almost none of them ask you to remember them.
The songs about women and distance such as “Off at 7” is built on a simple, almost sitcom-scale premise. She gets off work at seven, he lands at nine, and neither of them can close the gap. Sheck Wes sings it with a warmth he doesn’t usually bother with, and by the second verse, he’s conceding that he hurt her feelings without meaning to, that they went too many miles, that he can’t see her in the picture anymore, and it’s time to cut it out. That small arc, from reassurance to resignation, gives the song weight that most of the mixtape doesn’t earn. “Satellite” has a less complete version of the same idea, with Don Toliver pushing Benzes while keeping his distance and SoFaygo asking whether she’s being true to her soul. SoFaygo’s bridge, where he tells her to keep her patience because he grants wishes but stays away when he’s weary, carries a loneliness the hook can’t quite match. On “Facts,” Travis Scott admits her body is dumb but he’s feeling dumber, and Big Sean drops maybe the record’s best full turn, rapping about knowing the difference between wanting to take and knowing what it takes, calling himself an underground king with slaps that get overplayed, and saying he’s getting used to confetti. Sean sounds like he prepared. On a mixtape full of phoned-in appearances, preparation stands out.
bribandz, on “INDIE**,” sounds like she walked into the wrong studio and decided to stay anyway. She’s the least-known name on the tracklist and the most commanding presence, counting money before she sleeps and calling fame a pressure and her own focus someone else’s penalty. One bar tells people not to return to their vomit. Another says she’ll never spend bread on a man regardless of how many figures she has, and when she gave money to one, he started thinking he was JAY-Z. There’s a specificity and a meanness to her writing that nobody else on the record matches. HVN, on “Options,” comes from a darker place, taking losses, doubling doses, calling drug use a hobby and then admitting that when the drugs keep calling there are no options. He raps about being a lone wolf who paved his own way and became everything he said he’d be, but the chorus keeps pulling him back to the place where self-medication isn’t a choice anymore. Both of these songs bring a different gravity to the mixtape, and both feel slightly orphaned by the material surrounding them.
Chase B spent five years collecting these songs, and the strongest ones succeed because the guests showed up with something to say. Sheck Wes working through a breakup, bribandz drawing a line around her money and her independence, Big Sean rapping like he remembered he was good at this. The weaker ones fail because nobody pushed back on autopilot: another Goyard bar, another stack-it-up verse, another woman bending over on a sofa. A DJ-producer’s debut tape lives or dies on whether the person assembling the room gave it a reason to be a session instead of a hallway. BE VERY AFRAID has too many hallway moments. But when it locks in—when Sheck Wes admits the distance won, when bribandz won’t be anyone’s wallet, when Big Sean tells you the difference between wanting to take and knowing what it takes—the tape stops being a guest list and briefly becomes somebody’s record.
Above Average (★★★☆☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Facts,” “Off at 7,” “INDIE**”