Nucci Reyo and New Jerusalem’s Second Great Awakening

One night in maybe 2005 I piled into a colicky hooptie in search of a house party that was being held somewhere near the expired electric car line in Long Branch, NJ. Unlike my usual haunts, this shore city is not a felled industrial-commercial center but a faded resort wonderland for the monocled laudanum fiends of the Gilded Age. The broad shabby avenues stay freckled with harbingers of a sizzling new gentrification stirring in the uppermost part of the old South. Pipsqueak fences slung around peacetime craters bear fliers foretelling automated skypads and gleaming mausoleums for the delicate arts. Halogen coils framing eurotrash boutiques and the pastel sunbursts of restored hotels compete with neon signage toasting bulletproof partitioned takeout joints, conjoined pool hall-pawnshop predicaments, and restless Quisqueyana beauty salons.

The landscape hypnotizes fiercely. A half-dozen or so caliper-grinding k-turns quickly lulls this caravan into a clovered resignation. At midnight, however, we are found. A steely lucidity conquers the stock stereo's tidal static and a song from DJ Absolute's playlist featuring an unknown artist (that I now know to be Nucci Reyo) pours out of the speakers right into doubting eardrums. Over the tinny bucket acoustics the rapper's references to Jersey 'hoods as obscure as Lakewood (another declining fin de siecle resort town) subjugate our stingy attention. Our misfired trip to the briar patch is neatly redeemed. This is a voice that represents for the spaces and places we know, our dirty little half-abandoned cities punctuating miles of verdant sprawl along the crammed commuter arteries. Only one song deep into this catalog and we are perfectly aware that the rapper in question hails from Rahway, a minor post-industrial city with a noticeable rough edge once you find yourself east of Route 27 in spitting distance of the infamous state prison, another place positioned in the wobbly crosshairs of prognosticating urban renewal advocates.

There was one small complication: for the life of me I could not make out the artist's stage name. Jersey rap is so damned elusive. Back in the day it was sometimes difficult just to follow the genre from parts outside of the five boroughs. Without funds and a whip you couldn't trek to Ill Tracks, Vogel's, or the Princeton Record Exchange, forcing most to tape shit off Red Alert (or Crazy Sam if truly desperate) and buy mislabeled $3 bootlegs on Broad Street in Newark.  Jersey-based artists had a rough come-up. Local performance venues were small, far from luxurious, and were frequently closed only months after launching.  Any artist at least as famous as the O.G. Flavor Unit (no, not the second incarnation) was introduced to the world by a NYC-based DJ or promoter, which means that successful Jersey acts are typically perceived as belonging to a larger metropolitan area context. In the 21st century things were much the same and DJ Absolute's pronunciation of "Nucci Reyo" as falling somewhere in the ballpark of "New Jorel" sent me on a wild goose chase for years.

I wasn't about to start collecting mixtapes, so Nucci Reyo's music was doomed to evade my admittedly antiquated radar, barring some kind of lucky intervention. Eventually, at some point in late 2007, a chance google search yielded his correct moniker (or his name popped up on a blog post I was reading -- I can't recall for certain). One YouTube video at a time, I became acquainted with his evolving stage persona, which teetered convincingly between flashy Jersey pride arrogance and meditative penitence. His vague pitch for a unified revival of a distinctly Jersey sound and style and his tireless repping for overlooked 'hoods (he even shot a video in a public housing complex in Edison that is the last remnant of a thriving African-American community now ensconced in a mostly Asian, upper-middle class McMansion and strip mall tract) made me want to root for the kid, but his actual product seemed like a dim reflection of his true potential. His hustler come up tales didn't seem any less ephemeral than the works of forgotten Jersey rappers of yore like Mytee G. Poetic or Scott Lark Da Sensei.

Though disenchanted, I didn't give up entirely on Nucci Reyo. Earlier this year I was pleasantly surprised to come across (via YouTube of course) a nearly perfect concept-driven song titled "The City Soundtrack" that sees him rattling off  a litany of city sounds, emphasizing the constant war between temptation and piety waged every day by the normal folks who inhabit urban areas. He is not the first rapper to tackle such themes but his approach is humbly and sensitively attuned to the kind of mundane details (he locates his Any Ghetto, U.S.A. setting precisely with references to NJ Transit and landmarks within Rahway)  that complicate and deflate totalizing narratives of inner-city moral degradation. This new focus on the spiritual conflict, exemplified in the final couplet of "The City Soundtrack" where he observes "a five percenter trying to argue with a Christian" and implores the listener to "just listen" felt like a great complement to the incisive analysis of the localized triumphs and tragedies of the street life that had already permeated his music.

As it turns out, Nucci Reyo is in the process of deliberately reinventing his persona, message and his mission. His new YouTube channel features an EPK (electronic press kit) that reveals and clarifies plenty: we learn that he is from the Rahway neighborhood closest to the prison, that he has been making music since his youth, that he is struggling to establish himself as an independent artist after parting ways with major labels and former partners, and that his  transition towards pious lyrics (which we're told parallels a decision to eschew sinful habits) was inspired by acting in local gospel faith plays under his mother's tutelage. The EPK reminds me of the one De La Soul recorded to promote Three Feet High and Rising: one is inspired to side with the eccentric tri-state industry outsider putting in creative work in a makeshift studio in a relative's house (think also of  The Fugees recording The Score in Wyclef's uncle's basement, for a Jersey parallel).

His newer music videos are similarly characterized by a combination of ambitious bombast and earnest humility. "Music For The Listeners" sees the rapper donning nativity scene garb and flowing dead seriously about God's eternal grace and equating his attempt to forge a version of gospel rap still palatable to hardcore fans to the invention of hip hop itself, coming off like an evangelical Protestant version of X-Clan's Brother J. "Wherever You Go / Days Like This," is a three song, ten-minute music video and short film that deals with youth violence, grief, and the afterlife in an appropriately poignant and urgent manner. "Wages Of Sin" places Nucci Reyo squarely in a tradition of cautionary sermonizing rappers, and it should be noted that his insistence on dedicating the subject matter of all of his music to spiritual matters also places him (and most rappers, really) within a larger American tradition of medicine show and tent revival flim-flammers (the types that Charles Pierce calls "cranks") manufacturing bizarre counterfactual histories (the opening caption in "Music For The Listener" hilariously places the invention of hip hop in Rahway in 900 A.D.) to help sell their brands.

Those inclined to wince at Nucci Reyo's nods to evangelical literalism and its disregard for commonly accepted historical narratives and scientific theories (in "Wherever You Go" he urges a young friend to ignore school lessons on evolution and focus on realizing the truths contained in biblical texts) are reminded to recall that many of their favorite five percenter, Muslim, and afrocentrist/black nationalist rappers have made equally dubious and/or hypocritical pronouncements that happened to sound dope. His music remains raw, his skills have sharpened considerably, and although a few of his artistic decisions are a bit questionable ("Right Here Waiting" as the basis for a hook, for real?) his transformation into a faith-centered rapper has not turned his attention away from the streets of Jersey's forgotten places for one second - the characters in his narratives are not millionaire hustlers but the zip-up hoodie and dirty black denim rocking kids you might pass and write off on any given day. Their plight, as he frames it, is worsened not only by the coarseness of their surroundings but the paucity of adequate instruction on how to survive such an environment with one's human kindness intact.

Of course, none of this suggests that you should give Nucci Reyo a second of your time. It's the fact that the kid is nice with his that should compel you to follow his music. Trust me on this one - I've tried my hardest to be doubtful for years.

Bonus: Nucci Reyo's dedication to Guru of Gang Starr, in which he emphasizes Guru's humility and social consciousness.