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Meechy jokingly puts his phone down, in reach for anybody to snatch, saying that in this part of town he couldn’t have done that 10 years ago. “You don’t even get bootleggers out here no more selling CDs, shouting ‘I got that new Jay-Z’, but that’s the way it is,” Zombie says. It is now home of the Brooklyn Nets basketball team, but in order to clear the area for the massive development, local residents had to be relocated and hundreds of eviction notices served. They recall first hearing about plans for the development of the Barclays Center in the early 2000s. For the Zombies, community is an identity issue. These working-class millennials have seen Flatbush change, for better and worse, in recent years: most of its family shops no longer exist. Photograph: Rich Fury/Getty Images for Coachella Meechy Darko performing at the 2018 Coachella festival in April. Best American, the new album’s final track, closes with a monologue that says: “We are all the problem, when we don’t make sure our dollars stay in our communities for more than six hours.” “We started seeing the death of our neighbourhood when we were teens, but when you look closely, it goes beyond the buildings and stores to the way our people are living,” Meechy says. But, conversely, its natives, such as the Zombies, are fending off poverty, crime and, more recently, crystal meth. Attracted by its cheaper rents, middle-class people are flocking to Flatbush and thereby contributing to the area’s gentrification. The frequently ghoulish imagery tells another, equally stark story. “We still respect the lyricism behind the art form.”Įrick, meanwhile, is the glue that binds the trio together: you will occasionally hear him rapping, but his gift lies in creating the expansive, psychedelic Zombies soundscape. “The thing with us is that, behind all the imagery, we’re MCs, not rappers,” he says. “I’m livin’ how I wanna, no reasonable doubt / It’s clear to see, all eyez on me, 400 Degreez,” he raps on Headstone, dropping references to Jay-Z, 2Pac and Juvenile to underline his own credentials. Zombie Juice, the group’s other MC, exudes a colourful persona that extends beyond his extremely long beard and into his lyricism. It can be heard most clearly in Meechy’s cadence on a track such as Vacation. Each member is of Caribbean descent, even identifying as Caribbean-American due to the influence all around them in their homes and community. As young fans shout out to them in the street, I find out how their neighbourhood, Flatbush – renowned for canonised rap legends such as Busta Rhymes, Talib Kweli and Shyne – helped give birth to them. “The only way for me to face my demons is to go into my consciousness and search through all of those uncomfortable thoughts,” adds Meechy.įlatbush Zombies’ frank approach makes them a particularly intriguing act to come out of Brooklyn – post-Biggie, Jay-Z and boom-bap, the trio draw as much inspiration from Stanley Kubrick and the Grateful Dead as they do hip-hop. “When Steez passed, I realised that there’s a darkness that can follow any of us, and I’m never going to be the only one going through shit,” Erick says. In 2013, local MC Capital Steez killed himself, a death that left Brooklyn’s rap community devastated. Both he and Erick Arc Elliott write candidly about their experiences with suicidal thoughts, confronting the darkness that comes with being young, black and depressed. “I woke up this morning and I asked myself: Is life worth living, should I blast myself? / And when I’m gone, would they remember? Only son of Deborah, born in late December,” Meechy raps on Trapped. “What’s interesting is that people look at us funny for talking about death, but all the money, drugs and pussy talk in rap is accepted.”ĭeath is prominent throughout the group’s second album, Vacation in Hell, the follow-up to 2016’s debut 3001: A Laced Odyssey. “We have to get comfortable with talking about death when it happens to all of us,” he says. From the outset, Meechy Darko, one of the group’s MCs, states clearly that they are not just the phantasmagoric “horror rappers” they are often framed as, and people can miss the very real stories the group are telling. S at in Sweet Chick, a chicken and waffles joint on the corner of Flatbush Avenue in downtown Brooklyn, the rap trio Flatbush Zombies have arrived back home from a US tour to the New York City neighbourhood that inspires their ominous but vivid sound.