Album Review: What’s Bracken by Jeremy Ryan
The Jacksonville rapper’s concept album asks you not to trust him, then spends almost an hour trying to earn your trust anyway.
Jacksonville has spent the better part of this decade exporting rap that gets national attention mostly through drill, body counts, and Instagram beef. Nardo Wick, Yungeen Ace, Foolio, SpotemGottem the city’s rap identity has been almost entirely shaped by who shot whom and which songs went viral because of it. Jeremy Ryan, who raps as JBrack, has nothing to do with any of that. He has been running his own LLC out of Duval County since 2016, directing his own videos, and putting out music to an audience that could fit in a mid-sized barbershop. What’s Bracken is his concept album, entirely produced by Bluff Gawd. The opening skit has an attorney reading a legal disclaimer: Bracken is his last name, the stories might be true or might not be, and nobody should ask him which is which. He keeps interrupting the attorney to curse. The attorney also notes that Jeremy is not affiliated with any gangs, which, given the city he raps out of, is a sentence doing a lot of quiet work.
“Stick Up Kids!” is the best song on What’s Bracken and the only one with an original idea. The setup is a home invasion—a duffle bag, a mask, a voice barking “give me the loot.” Jeremy doesn’t want money or jewelry. He wants peoples’ hatred, their jealousy, the judgment they held from the start, the lies they tell their families, the fake personas they wear in public. He asks them to give up their guns and take the music instead. The second verse escalates. Bad vibes, bad tendencies, bad decisions, the ego telling you you’re the best every single night. It is a robbery cut where the stolen goods are moral failures, and Jeremy commits to the bit without winking at the audience. He stays in the conceit from beginning to end. On a record where several cuts blur into one another because they all assert the same thing (I’m the greatest, I’m underrated, they’ll see), this one has a different engine.
Three of the album’s features bring voices that cut through in ways Jeremy’s own verses sometimes don’t. FNF Juuk opens “You’re Not a Thug” and goes directly at someone who grew up with a silver spoon and a white picket fence, went to private school, pops Percs to seem tough, and gets mad at his girl for running with other men. It is blunt and specific and funny, and Juuk has the delivery of a cousin who will embarrass you in front of everyone and mean it as a favor. Mecca Tha Marvelous follows with a different angle: he knows people who overdosed on promethazine and kept sipping, real street guys who still snitch, and his own origin was his brother handing him Fruity Loops 7 and telling him to go record. That detail with FL Studio, not the current version, a specific old piece of software, grounds the verse in an actual memory. It’s the difference between saying “I came from nothing” and telling someone which program you opened on which afternoon.
On “Couples Therapy,” K.UTIE holds the hook while Jeremy writes both sides of a dissolving marriage, the woman in the first verse admitting she’s not mature and fights for the relationship badly, the woman in the second verse going through his phone, asking whether to keep fighting or ask for divorce. The marriage track doesn’t need the concept-album disclaimer. The heaviest gravity on the record is “I Won’t 4get U II,” where Jeremy names the people he lost. His granddad died from a needle. Someone named TJ was taken. He wishes he had called his uncle, who would have picked up the phone, and now his uncle will never know how much he meant to him. He looks at pictures and videos of a woman named Jackie to feel happy. “The Return” pushes into darker territory (suicide visions for those who doubt, jumping off a cliff that isn’t death but a sweet escape) and there’s a part where he admits to feeling alone and always being in the mood but never having much to say.
When these songs sit next to “Problem Child” and “Monstar” and “Sg$,” where Jeremy calls himself Oppenheimer, Master Windu, and the god of rap all within a few minutes of each other, the question is whether Jeremy intended that contrast or whether it just happened because he had a lot of material. Because the braggadocio tracks do pile up, with full of pop culture references to Rick and Morty, Senzu Beans, Mighty Morphin, Kabuki, Constantine, the Black Robert De Niro, SpongeBob and Patrick, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Ray Charles, Caesar from Planet of the Apes.
BigRayTheRapper matches and raises this density on “Geezy”—Winter Soldier, Marshawn Lynch, Cruella, 101 Dalmatians, then a sidebar about whether God was mad when he found out we still ate apples—and their chemistry together is real, two guys trying to out-reference each other with escalating absurdity. But the LP has too many tracks running that same play. As “What’s Bracken” arrives near the end and Jeremy is still announcing that he’s the god of rap, and this ain’t nothing new, the declaration has already been made eight or nine times. The cuts that stick all talk about something besides Jeremy Ryan’s own standing. The ones that don’t share the same voice, the same velocity, and the same destination, which is a statement of supremacy that thins out each time he makes it.
Above Average (★★★☆☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Stick Up Kids!,” “You’re Not a Thug,” “I Won’t 4get U II”