Album Review: Circa 01’ by Kastaway & Backpack Beatz
Kastaway and Backpack Beatz were eleven and thirteen when The Blueprint dropped. Circa 01’ remembers that year from the inside instead of curating it.
Before anything hits on “Intro (Kingdom Kome),” JAŸ-Z is already lecturing through a spoken-word sample about discipline. “If you don’t have no foundation and no structure,” he warns, an album “just comes out all over the place.” Yet Kastaway and Backpack Beatz were thirteen and eleven respectively when the year on the cover happened, and Kastaway was already writing rhymes at his grandmother’s house while his collaborator pulled a copy of The Blueprint out of a cabinet at basketball camp and never put it back. “I came out the womb neglected with lack of effort,” Kastaway raps on “Miyagi (On Our Way).” “Mom said I was a gift, her mama questioned my presence.”
In a lower register on “Piece of My Heart,” Kastaway lets a soul sample carry him through the steady, laid-back percussion. “I’m a 19th and Trumbull baby, that’s where I got my start/Lawndale got a piece of my heart,” he raps over the drums. The address arrives first; the verdict never does. When he pivots to the day a child watched a man die, the adult he turns to answers exposure with more exposure: “I probably wouldn’t have seen that murder if I had fairer skin/I’m anxious, so the first thing I did was call the reverend/He took me out to Bellwood to see somebody dead again.”
Walking heavy-footed into “Books and Bricks,” A.M. Early Morning syncs every syllable to a downbeat: “Sloppy-ass work never be the plan/Detroit’s a book son of bricks.” His verse builds the cold so Kastaway can skip his own throat-clearing entirely. A counting cue—“One, two/Now he comin’ for you/Three, four/And we kickin’ in your door”—pulls the Detroit-to-Chicago handoff out of him: “The block was my dorm room ‘cause I ain’t go away for college/I was nailed to some trauma, I could never be polished/’Til they find this manicure, I’m borderline psychotic/The other half is a prophet.”
Inside “Still We Pray,” Kastaway moves to third person for the only time on the album, tracing a twelve-year-old boy whose teachers, as he raps, are “complaining they struggle with controlling him/Pops in and out, mom never try counseling him.” The boy is a composite of the kids Kastaway works with through his restorative justice day-job in Chicago. He steals cars and does two months in county. One couplet flips the diagnosis halfway through: “But what they don’t understand is he really his own man/‘Cause according to mom and pop, he wasn’t in they plans.” Roy McGrath’s melancholic saxophone winds underneath the thumping drum arrangement. The day-job and the bars stop being separate concerns. Past the closing bars the boy is already dead at twelve, and Kastaway prays around the body: “Pray for the shorty who just got his first Glock/Pray for the day that nobody getting shot/And still we pray.”
Although faith songs in rap usually collapse into either piety or worry, “God Is Love” sits in neither lane. Kastaway routes the worry through a therapy session: “After church, I go to therapy/Anxious about the hell being prepared for me/Christians got me feeling like it’s already there for me.” His questions get sharper from there: “Does God hate me for not hating who you hate?/Does God hate me for not dissing other faiths?” But the resolution arrives through a named third party, never through a sermon. He shouts out his Puerto Rican godfather “who taught me God is love and still somebody not to play with,” then ends up “calling Pastor Derrick to cosign on my prayers.”
Halfway through “Grateful,” after Jeremy Claybourn and Jocelyn Hart take the high register, Kastaway slips his medical history into a verse the way a parent might mention a sibling in passing. “When I got the brain surgery, I cut off my hair,” he raps (the line arrives between thanks and prayer, never set up). What follows stays subordinate to gratitude: “Spittin’ blood and soul suds, upper stomach had a bleed/Thought it’d only be for weeks, shit extended for some years.” Eye pain enters the same way, as another clause in another list. Backpack Beatz opens the song with a spoken intro thanking anyone who made it this far, and calls the whole album “Circle One.”
On the title track, a Busta Rhymes spoken sample about flow precedes a verse that locates this whole thing on a Chicago porch. “My rhyme recital remind you of circa ’01/Playing Beans vs Jada on the porch where I am from,” Kastaway raps, then puts down his signature couplet: “Rappers want their flowers from rhymes, I flora the flow/That’s from the concrete where we see no roses’ll grow.” Two kids on a stoop, arguing Beans against Jada while the radio caught up to them, and the dirt those roses came from still under their sneakers.
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Piece of My Heart,” “Still We Pray,” “Grateful”