Chilltown rapper Constant Flow builds on actual "Pizza Warz" in latest album
Available on Bandcamp
By D Menzies
Chilltown rapper Constant Flow (CF) dropped his latest album, “Pizza Warz,” June 8, and it’s another well-crafted work that taps into a disappearing landscape as part of its foundation. This time, however, there’s a little more frustration for what helped make way for much of that landscape to be usurped.
“This album is a love letter to Monmouth Street in Downtown Jersey City and my old Italian neighborhood,” CF told Chilltown Blues earlier this week.
That street was the locale for the feud/price war between longtime city pizzeria Three Brothers from Italy, founded by Patsy, and Frank and his self-named spot that opened next door to Three Brother’s in the early ’90s.
As the album’s title track, “Pizza Warz” paints a portrait of this feud as struggle for some notion of the American dream.
“‘Pizza Warz’ is two homeys fighting over a block they don’t own,” CF said. “They were fighting among themselves not knowing someone would come along and buy the whole block and put everything but pizzerias there.”
The idea of the American dream as notion is something CF explores throughout the album.
It’s interwoven on the lyrical gymnastics of “Metal Flex feat Dontique Mangual,” which deftly shows Mangual and CF’s cadence and rhyme scheme skills in a pinball high-score fashion. The track is an obvious highlight.
“More of That,” track three, is like “Billy Joel ‘I want that old rock ‘n’ roll s—t,” CF said. “‘More of that’ is a saying that people used to say back in the day. When you’re doing the opposite (of what they want), it’s like ‘less of that.’”
Through a lens asking what people want more of from him as a rapper — ’90s Nel, as an example, who’s more along the lines of what have been the more extreme and commercial trappings of the genre — CF moves on to explore change in the city as a whole as anchored in his old neighborhood.
On “Icy’s,” CF raps: “Navigating this pool, I see the shark fins. Those who graduated from school now sleep on a park bench. So called affordable housing. S--t faker than folklore, we just orbit around it.”.
Ultimately the song is about the one person who makes the narrator feel like they’re not an alien. “Change is the only constant, right?” CF said. “But this person never changes; whether for good or bad, that person is always there. At the song’s end, (the narrator) keeps her around because he sees a reflection of the twin towers in her eyes (visible, during its day, from Chilltown’s waterfront). ‘We witnessed these events together, and we’re always going to come back because we experienced these things together.”
“Not everything that glitters was good just because we made a s--t nugget.” - CF.
Another highlight, “Icy’s” disparately covers a lot of territory — it sits among a string of songs that find the narrator reconciling, or trying to reconcile, with the way he used to see the world.
“Think of U,” another highlight, had CF reminiscing about the last time he saw a friend.
“Me and my friend would walk pass Lambiase Memorial plaza, we would separate because he would talk down Newark Avenue and I lived on Second Street,” he said. “We were split up, and we never saw each other again. You never know the last time you see your homey.”
While the world was better with that friend in it, “back then (per-gentrification) it was not all good,” CF mused. “Even now I’m telling people where (McNair Academic, the city’s most glorified school) is now located used to be part of the school to prison pipeline,” CF said. “The former P.S. # 32 there (also known as “Tre Deuce”) was notorious …” as the school where students who got expelled from their district school essentially got one last chance.
“Not everything that glitters was good just because we made a s--t nugget,” CF said. “It wasn’t as good as I thought it was. The lead paint chips. The toxic waste before they built on all the Superfund sites.”
From “Photosynthesis” through “Revenant” and “Coronation,” there’s a theme of being squeezed almost to the point of return … in “Photosynthesis” it’s trying to find sunlight through the crack of a cell the narrator is thrown into because he wouldn’t kill women and children. In “Revenant,” CF likens the bear attack in the 2015 movie “The Revenant” as Chilltown mauling the track’s narrator, but there’s a rebound, in part, it would seem, to acknowledge local giants who’ve passed away.
Produced by Soulful Soze and mixed by SpeedyBabyy, “Pizza Warz” ends fittingly with an ode to the loss of another such figure.
Final track “Term Illness” includes a message in which the late rapper Brav Divi (Marcus Waters) leaves CF a voice message expressing excitement on collaborating together on an album.
“The track he sent was a tough act to follow, can’t rush that,” CF raps, on a track where he yearns for more time and, intrinsically, a foothold in a city less heavy on things to struggle against, to have helped that happen.
Find CF on social media @cf201 and check out “Pizza Wars” here: https://cf201.bandcamp.com/album/pizza-warz.
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