Album Review: Made In Philly by Young Chris & MadeinTYO
Twenty years past Young Gunz, Chris raps a walked-out therapy session and a grandmother’s prayer onto the same record as the yachts.
Lead a verse spending money you say you hate needing, and a listener has every right to tune out. That complaint waits for this record before a word of it plays. Young Chris opens “Fine Wine & Steak” on a yacht, rosé toasting in the middle of the ocean, a diamond he’ll sell only if it brings commas, all the luxury padding that bloats a hundred rap records this decade. Taken alone, those bars do the job a thousand other rappers already did. Where the verse heads after them is the reason to stay.
A few bars on, the verse turns. “Catch him in the studio, booth while he recording/Glock 23, knock him out his Jordans,” Chris raps, and the road trip he’s been narrating quits being a vacation. A prayer is said in the passenger seat before anyone eats, grace before the meal, bread sent from commissary to dogs behind the gate. “Family and Benjamins only thing important,” he decides, the toast and the gun pointed at the same end. “Man of my word, niggas is dyin’ young/I’d rather be layin’ up old,” he says later on “Worldwide Hustlas,” a flex about gold and jewelers cut with the plain wish to make it to old age. He names his company in that same verse, “Creative, dedicated, relentless, bitch, I’m ‘bout my business.” The grieving and the flexing never get sorted into separate songs.
Saying the expense splits this Young Chris from the one who ran with Young Gunz two decades back. “How the fuck I come from nothing to a superstar?/Turned a Honda to a supercar,” goes the come-up chorus on “From Nothing,” loud and proud and almost too easy to take at face value. In the verse he takes it apart: “Too much overthinking, I’m thinking I need a session/Call the therapist, they tryna talk sense and I ain’t hearing it.” He raises the therapy and admits, one bar later, that he walked out on it. “Trauma from them gunshots pinging,” he says, naming the wound he has already decided to leave open.
Lloyd Banks shows up on that song, pitched nowhere near the host (“Half of my life I spent giving nothing”). He spits, “Panicking and we used to starve,” “Reputations are bulletproof, armored cars in a new garage,” then “Showing up for goods all that matters, helping them smile for days.” Each one of his lines has dealt with the past and the outcome being good. Chris’s part is just the current time, the act of overthinking and the therapist he won’t listen to, and the phrase of the come-up still remains a question he can’t respond to. Notably, the two rappers differ in their mental states, with Chris saying. “Niggas die from the shit I’m stressing, but I know my kids is the bigger blessing,” instead of going through the trouble alone.
Chris delivers a rap directly referring to “Alexis Skyy,” the track where he still talks his shit (“It’s 20 years later, dem haters is sick”). The assertiveness of Chris goes down by the next line. “Drowning in tequila, trying to find my peace,” he expresses, the win and the decay are stacked one after another. Surviving the backstabbers is a different adventure, and he does it his way, by showcasing the injuries he suffered. “They left me to rot, got left in the cold/Said fuck it, I’m dribbling back to the block,” he raps in “Cuban Cigar” towards the end, then follows with the promise “I’m coming back with a vendetta.” He also points out, “Nicetown is my area/Wanco is my street,” mentioning the blocks he has always been on, despite the fact that they have already written him off.
“Too Strong” features his former label mate, Freeway, and his part is where the flexing breaks. He is not the only one who has had his share of bragging here. He told of standing on the same block and selling rock bricks before rap and then the names that raised him called out one by one, and then the bravado drops entirely. “My kidneys failed, y’all thought that shit was over/Then I got the transplant.” he states, “Lost my kids, y’all thought it was over,” every phrase through which he purges, in return, he receives quotable, “All I see is miracles.” He is not pitching a victory but rather telling what he has been through. He moves on to the next line, and MadeinTYO’s diverse palette on Made In Philly allows him the space to do so.
It is the graphic sex that drags all the way. A cheesy like the one in “Let Me Cook” is going forward without aim, treading on the whole of the journey through to the sick parents and the dementia that they carry and is beautiful until the family part of it is about to rise. These can be easily skipped. “The Source” is the strongest of them all. A man stands beside the crib where he feeds his crying daughter “dreams” with no bottle in the house, his mother’s mind going only a few bars back and Chris slides in beside this picture with the closest the album comes to a creed, “No pointing fingers, let’s find a solution.” The yachts and the Glocks go quiet under a line like that.
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “From Nothing,” “Cuban Cigar,” “The Source”