Retro but never dusty, the rapper’s brilliantly bugged-out new tape sounds like a New York that hardly exists anymore. Blame “Rap God”-era Eminem and suburban white boys whose party trick is spitting Busta’s “Look at Me Now” verse for the reputation “fast rap” has nowadays: an overly technical exercise for the swagless. I beg to differ, though. Variations on the flow can be such a stylish inroad to a rapper’s psyche, whether they’re as in-control and precise as the graceful lyrical bursts of Freestyle Fellowship’s P.E.A.C.E. or as drunk and cluttered as a Bronx drill diss. If you need more proof, there’s LIVING TYPE DANGEROUS Vol. 1, the new album from Starker, a bugged-out Nuyorican rhymer with a lethal voice that punctures soul loops and gutter East Coast beats like a rusty nail. Nearly every one of its unfiltered 19 tracks is a mad dash of stray thoughts, flashbacks, cartoonish villainy, and details so fragmented it’s like he’s trying to patchwork his own life together like the dude in Memento.
That chaos comes from the way it feels like Starker is stuck in limbo between two New York timelines at once. There’s his upbringing in the Cooper Houses in Williamsburg, during the shiesty Giuliani-Bloomberg age. Times when you might catch a buck 50 on the train or witness a dealer getting jacked on the regular, but also times when the neighborhoods were still flush with culture: Avirex jackets, ’97 Benzs with the “bugged” headlights, Rolexes on the wrist, Tony Touch cassettes, Jadakiss verses in the air. Remnants of those days hang around—on “Pignoli” he stuffs his face with cannolis and rainbow cookies from the Italian bakery up the street that survived—but they’ve mostly been pushed out of town or to the designated areas, fighting to not become the answer to a trivia question or a quote on a plaque. “I used to dream about getting out my neighborhood, now I’m never on the block enough,” he raps at one point, as nostalgic for the pain as the flyness, because at least it was real.
Starker is on his anti-“Empire State of Mind” shit; Aaron Judge won’t be saluting the flag to the family melodrama of “My brother attempted to rob our father for his precious timepiece,” or the loony meet-cute, “Up in the deli is how she met me, giving the custy a nose job.” Imagine if one of those belligerent late-’90s Wu affiliates who spent their downtime getting into brawls rather than writing raps were frozen like Encino Man, only to be awakened at an Australian café in the SoHo of 2026. They’d probably also bust out a frantic rampage of run-on sentences, jokes cut short for other jokes, and dated pop culture references that don’t hit until three thoughts later. The only breaks Starker ever gives you are when he takes a quick breath like a swimmer or passes the mic off to YL, the laid-back other half of their duo, RRR.
I’m fighting against the urge to turn this review into a bulleted list of “Shit Starker Says That Has Me Rolling.” If I did, I’d have to include “When I copped my first grip I looked in the mirror and told my reflection, ‘The city is ours’” on “Untitled,” because it sounds like the origin story of a Peter Parker nemesis, and when, over a grimy Lord Unknown beat, he gets on the ass of wack rappers with, “I’m tryna’ fuck the track you niggas was tryna’ give it a lecture (shut the fuck up!).” His hostile ad-libs (the videos of him laying them down are up there with the Lil Keed clips) could get a list of their own, because they feel like out-of-pocket wisecracks from the devil he’s got on both shoulders. Nuttiest of all might be when he drops his signature “She sucking dick!” ad-lib on the smooth, Laron-produced “W.K.I.R.G.W.,” after getting off a Jill Scott punchline that she would have every right to object to. In fact, there’s enough strays on the entire tape (record executive Jonny Shipes, Coney Island prodigal son Sebastian Telfair) that I wouldn’t be surprised if they all teamed up to serve him a Seinfeld series finale-like comeuppance.
But not everything on LIVING TYPE DANGEROUS Vol. 1 is meant to be taken literally—it’s a mean-spirited half-fantasy. In the mix: A little of Ghostface’s dusted stream of consciousness, like the incredible nonsense of Starker barking, “Y’all niggas is escovitch fish”; a little of Rio Da Yung OG’s unpredictability when it feels like Starker doesn’t even know what’s going to come out of his mouth next. The more you listen, the more surreally out of time everything seems. Subjxct 5’s chain-snatching theme on “Flipmode” makes me think I can walk over to my uncle’s house right now and the bootlegged Clue tapes that were sitting in his closet two decades ago will still be there. In the final seconds of “Civil War,” Starker’s motormouthed reflections vanish into Nicholas Craven’s crate-digging mist, like the verse is still going in a dungeon somewhere. “I been here my entire life, nigga,” shouts Starker on “Rondu,” one of the few lines you don’t have to run back to get ahold of. This is New York as a city of living memories, the kind that don’t fade as long as the people are still around who know where to look.
For Starker
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