Torii MacAdams can get you a good bootleg Avirex.
It’s getting to be North Face time in New York. Loud, pizza-slinging motherfuckers in flour-covered pocket Ts are yelling about whoever’s under center for the Jets. ACG boots are coming out of hibernation. Catch wispy mustached teens headed to the last subway stops, earbuds tucked under a Polo beanie. Knicks fans think they’re gonna win 50 games minimum, ‘cuz Melo’s gonna pass and play D this year. Shorties wanna know: what was it like to grow up in the borough where all the kings kept it thorough? Remy Banks has an answer.
“7th Heaven,” Remy Banks’ newest single, is boom bap for people who like AZ, but whose world didn’t stop the second Biggie’s did. In just a minute and a half, Banks takes us from walking around the Lower East Side, to the back of a cab, to a TriBeCa loft, and back to 1990’s Jamaica, Queens when the chick he just smashed asks about his childhood. It’s a clever turn; Banks is a New Yorker of the present, but he was on the ave before Rudy Giuliani tried whitewashing a city of millions. Banks has a raspy voice, and his mellow, measured delivery is where Earl Sweatshirt meets Ka– he’s the type of rapper to satisfy both grumpy traditionalists in Rawkus t-shirts, and children of the internet for whom the Rawkus reference means nothing. The idea that New York needs to be “brought back” is a farce, and promising rappers like Remy Banks are part of the inevitable, necessary evolution of rap music in the Big Apple. The faces change. The Yankees fitted pulled low is the same.
