Album Review: BEEMER ON BROADWAY by CRIMEAPPLE
Between pig-foot stew and personified Cuban links, the Hackensack rapper sounds like he’s having more fun than anyone in underground rap.
Most rappers who release a dozen-plus projects in under a decade spread themselves thin. The guy from Hackensack who named his first series after a Jaguar on Palisade Avenue has done the opposite, covering each pairing with Buck Dudley, DJ Muggs, Big Ghost Ltd, Apollo Brown, Preservation, DJ Skizz, V Don, and Evidence (one of the best rap projects out right now) like a residency at a different restaurant where he already knows the chef. CRIMEAPPLE picks the venue, eats well, and dips before the check gets boring. BEEMER ON BROADWAY swaps the single-producer model for a six-deep rotation, the widest bench he’s worked since his self-titled album in 2020, and the variety suits him. The title follows the Jaguar On Palisade formula, car plus Jersey geography, but the shift from one kitchen to several loosens his cadence in ways the locked-in collabs sometimes don’t.
A vintage BMW advertisement sample starts “Blue Angel” off, some mid-century voice prescribing a “brisk commute,” and then Preservation’s filtered loop kicks in and CRIMEAPPLE starts stacking medical terminology like somebody who reads WebMD for punchlines. “The game got hepatitis,” he says, and before the bar settles he’s already comparing inflated egos to encephalitis. The wordplay is dense but worn lightly. He’ll toggle between buying property in the Dominican Republic to stay out of the public eye and X-raying his friends for loyalty in the same breath. And the verse ends on “only my mama thought I’d get commas off the monologue,” which compresses a whole biography into twelve words.
Splitting production across Preservation, LOMAN, QThree, Wino Willy, Comma Uno, DJ Skizz, and Cuffedgod gives each song a different room to stand in. LOMAN’s three contributions (“Fireworks,” “Open Road,” “Jean Paul”) bounce hardest, his drums leaving enough pocket for CRIMEAPPLE to drawl and speed up inside the same couplet. Comma Uno’s tracks are sparser and meaner. “Broadway Interlude” sounds like a freestyle carved into a headstone, and “No Reason” gives him the emptiest backdrop here to just talk, deadpan and dismissive, about a rival whose five hundred dollars is “frivolous funds, dinner for one.” Wino Willy’s beat on “Patio Bonito” runs the muggiest, a swampy loop that matches the song’s opening sample: a man traveling with three coronels and seven machine guns.
DJ Skizz produces the kind of slow boom-bap that makes you tilt your chair back, and CRIMEAPPLE spends all of “Rosie Perez” personifying his jewelry as women. Rosie goes around the world, Japan and Italy. Two “white bitches” named Anise and Claire are “twenty-four, VVS faces.” They’re heavy together and sometimes hurt to wear. He mentions Rosie has a tattoo with his name on her clasp. The conceit runs both verses, the interlude, and the outro without ever winking at the audience, and once you realize you’ve been listening to a love song about a Cuban link, the misdirection has already worked. It’s the only track here that commits to a single formal idea from top to bottom, and CRIMEAPPLE rides it with the kind of focus he usually saves for his Muggs collabs.
Spanish runs through these eleven tracks without subtitles or explanation. “Patio Bonito” opens with a Colombian sample about colonels and machine guns. Mir Nicolas raps his entire “No Reason” verse in Spanish, buying a three-hundred-dollar necklace without thinking, calling Buenos Aires the new center of attention. “Pigs Feet” starts with a father sending his kid to school in Spanish, and CRIMEAPPLE drops Spanglish ad-libs across “Fireworks” and “Broadway Interlude” without translating. When he says customs keeps asking why he’s in Colombia ten times a year on “Patio Bonito,” it’s funny and factual in equal measure. Bilingualism is not something CRIMEAPPLE exhibits sporadically. It is the source of life in the world we have all shared.
In the last stretch of this project, he revamps Biggie’s “What’s Beef?” question on “Beef”; children are starving around the world, Spotify is paying pennies per usage for his lyrics, AI is replacing people at work, and oppressively wealthy individuals are performing, “wicked shit to kidnapped babies,” he states before citing Michelle as a woman who has died in his life from substance use. Every “beef ain’t” has shrunk the number of minor “meat” issues; every “beef is,” replaced those issues with measurable ones. The next track “Pigs Feet” via the greatest image in the whole album depicts a mama taking out a pot to cook for her children when there was no other food. He observes on the loop that “me and my brothers wore the same shoes,” as he has just spent ten songs talking about things like jewelry, cars, DR land, and competing egos, but the sentiment has value now.
The example of how Jay Worthy relates to the Social Experience of being “Jean Paul” brings this universal point home. He expresses the experience of his son witnessing the Section 8 experience of his father. He writes of sleepless nights trying to figure out the meaning of “peace.” He states that he considers CRIMEAPPLE to be “one of the truest young players in the USA” with all the wisdom associated with having paid dues to become a veteran. Estee Nack also brings a very different and significant perspective to the album on the track “Patio Bonito” when he remembers his brother under conditions he cannot explain (through a kite), while representing his dead friends, and cruising the Bahamas, all in the same breath. Both of these features on the album provide an opportunity for the two individuals’ respective chapters to connect with each other. Seafood Sam issued a more straightforward opinion on “Open Road” when he identified himself as “like a cross between Raekwon and John Wick,” portraying the depth of ambition, however, did not clearly define his ambitions and/or intentions in his verse.
CRIMEAPPLE has gone on record to say he is “one of the greatest ever to touch a microphone,” and he’s “top 89 dead or alive,” since the number 89 is atypical in number, some may think that is why the number is factual; when he states that the hook on “Pigs Feet” returns to the themes of mama’s stew and wearing the same shoes, along with “Crime so nice, when God made him, should’ve made two,” folks should take him at face since he isn’t trying to be funny with a reference to pig’s feet.
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Rosie Perez,” “Beef,” “Blue Angel”