Thoughts on JC's “Chilltown Era” and new album “Surus” from rapper Constant Flow

“Surus” from Constant Flow is available to buy or stream on Bandcamp as of Dec. 6.

“Surus,” the new album from Jersey City rapper Constant Flow, aka Nelson Morales, is an attempt to craft an album with a very specific template: underground hip hop from the ’90s.

That hip hop, Morales says, played more with form in ways that were accepted, even encouraged at the time. The nature of the music itself traveling via mixtapes on cassette and the sound of recording via cassette added a certain texture to the form.

Underground hip hop also reflects the battle cypher culture Morales grew up in, which existed in a space between the commercial hip hop so influential on street culture and the actual streets – the stories of which in a less commercial lens could be a bit more grounded and conscious of the fact.

In this world, conceptions about life – from monolithic-visions of communities to the most divested ones somehow having some endless capability for resilience – came through media/society from the top-down, so often via messaging that Morales calls word salad, something to easily be swayed by via a lack of media literacy and the natural human tendency to lean toward escapism.

“They'll try to put a spin on things,” he said. “But that's what you got to watch out for – that word salad. Me as an artist, I know what word salad is about 'cause I'm in the industry of words – of making words sound nice. It's kind of put hard to pull the wool over my eyes when I'm the person that creates music, so that words can sound nice in a rhythmic form, like, you can't play those games with me. But I can see how other people can be manipulated by that.”

Many different versions of JC

There are many different version of Jersey City – but the one Morales grew up in, the one that used to much more obviously bleed throughout the city instead of mostly behind its redlined areas, is the height of what he refers to as the Chilltown era, which “Surus” tries to evoke in the mold of a demo tape.

“Chilltown isn't like the aggressive vibe,” Morales said. “That's not what Chilltown really was about, even though we can be aggressive. It's about that nostalgic kind of ’90s vibe. I don't think any of these rappers that come out really represent what Chilltown meant … Jersey City in the period between the late '70s to like the early 2000s – and all that encompassed all that those events, those histories were the first World Trade Center bombing, the second World Trade Center bombing, the Reagan era (which saw social programs gutted, helping cement the redlining of what is still the city’s most divested areas).

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“There's a lot of things that impact Jersey City in that time period … moments that people are forgetting about and how people are capitalizing on it in order for them to make themselves relevant in the new generation of the gentrification era.”

When it comes to what he sees as the sound of the Chilltown era, Morales point to “one distinct thing”: “… it was boom bap ish. And it was on these rugged beats and it was with ideas.”

The Wikipedia page for “Boom bap” describes it as a genre of rap where the beat is stripped down, and because of that, the heft of the song comes from the rapping and the storytelling and ideas the rapper is exploring. These are often of having to put up with the stuff of “the Jersey City Curse.”

“These scenarios have occurred in urban areas all over,” Morales said. “But in Jersey City I've experienced things similar to these stories … where they go by the wayside because it happens in urban areas where brown and Black folks live and nobody gives a s--t 'cause they're like, ‘Whatever, you guys can handle it. You tough, right?’ But that's why I got to put it on record.”

“Surus” takes its album name from the last battle elephant the Carthaginian general Hannibal marched over the Swiss Alps with on his way to try to conquer Rome. Surus died, and Morales sees the elephant as a metaphor for the kind of invaluable ally people so often lose in life.

Water world

“There's no escape. We can't even escape to anywhere else, 'cause we don't got any money.” - CF talking about song “Ghetto Mermaid”

In roughly 1989 to 1990, there was a crystal meth epidemic – something that occurred limited regionally. Morales, who’s in his mid-40s, recalls a spin-off called “the leak” or “wet” epidemic.

“It was people smoking embalming fluid and s---t like that. They used to call specifically the Hill and parts of downtown ‘water world,’” Morales said.

Explaining the track, “Ghetto Mermaid,” Morales went on: “Basically it was a play on Ocean Avenue. All those places on the Hill …. have you ever noticed they got names like Ocean Avenue, Neptune, Seaview? A lot of these references that are like kind of water-based.

“The song is about a girl that lives in the hood, and I'm trying to escape with her out of the hood so we could move into the water like in Atlantis, because we’re already drowning in debt in this city. There's no escape. We can't even escape to anywhere else, 'cause we don't got any money (Again see “the Jersey City Curse”). But let's jump in the water and let's become aquatic creatures and let's get away from this big world on the surface. Because it’s better to get out of this s--t than be stuck here and get swept in the tide that's coming. (The song) is also about trying to escape the wet epidemic that was prevalent for a time.

“A lot of people …. their minds were destroyed from smoking wet,” Morales said. “I know a lot of people that … they’re not coming back from that.

“‘Ghetto Mermaid’ also talks about the political situation,” Morales said. “Sometimes I'm a Bernie Sanders person. But some people may say I say conservative s---t that may make me fall along the lines of a libertarian. And before I get painted by all of this confusion, I want to get out and just start swimming because all of this s--t is fishy to me.”

On the next track, “Down,” Morales mentions Jersey City rappers who he respected that have passed away. “Rappers like Duttch Mastah and Riggamortis. These were like really great artists and people forgot about them,” Morales said. “There's no murals for them. There's nothing.”

“Surus,” in its own way, is an album about battling grief and trying to find renewed energy to go on in the face of losing the giant pillars of our lives … pillars that often went unacknowledged in a city/world that didn’t give people like them a whole lot, pillars who seem even more lost in a city/world ever-increasingly defined by how much money or resources from elsewhere someone can bring into it.

“Surus” is available to purchase or stream on Bandcamp now:

See Morales one-minute into a freestyle session in a video below.