New Jersey Drive

As metaphors go, there couldn’t have been a more fitting one for the collapse of the New York hip-hop scene than the sad, drug-fueled fall of Public Enemy jokester Flavor Flav. His arrest for weapons possession only served to emphasize how this once-golden community — which gave us everyone from Grandmaster Flash through Run-D.M.C., L.L. Cool J, and Public Enemy — had run aground in the ’90s. During the dawn of the decade, attention (and sales figures) had shifted to the West Coast, where a new generation made music that was edgier and more violent. In contrast, New York hip-hop jazz pioneers such as A Tribe Called Quest and Digable Planets seemed stalled; old-school stars L.L. and Run-D.M.C. weren’t going platinum anymore.

Dr. Dre and his West Coast G-funk posse still dominate the rap charts, but lately they’ve encountered some competition — from, yes, the East Coast. A new generation is picking up the beats where their predecessors left off, and a slew of them are served up on the two separate soundtrack discs of NEW JERSEY DRIVE (Tommy Boy), a film by Laws of Gravity director Nick Gomez. (Volume one, with 17 songs, is in stores now; a follow-up, eight-song EP is out April 11.) Don’t call it a comeback, but combined with recent debuts from Nas and Jeru the Damaja, the albums are evidence that East Coast rap may be on the mend.

In retrospect, it’s easy to see why Dre’s sound took over. His hits, and those of his platinum compadres Snoop Doggy Dogg and Warren G, are layered with electric pianos, flutes, and, most important, beefy hooks. The rapping styles are looser and more laid-back, and the bass-heavy Jeep beats suggest that a quick drive (and a few bars of ”Nuthin’ But a ‘G’ Thang”) will solve any problem, at least for the time being.

If West Coast hip-hop is the life of the party, then the new East Coast school is walking home past burnt-out buildings after the bash. Many of New Jersey Drive’s best tracks are relatively underproduced — rapping, beats, bits of piano or classic turntable scratching, and little else. Others are based on jazz piano samples, the most distinctive musical contribution of recent East Coast rap. Either way, the jackhammer slam of the beat matters most. A few cuts — like Poets of Darkness’ urgent ”21 in the Ghetto,” which skillfully blends R&B crooning and blunt rapping — bounce with a jacked-up-car pulse. But they’re the exception. The music is for the most part joyless, as on Blak Panta’s infectious dancehall track ”Do What You Want” or Queen Latifah’s atypically spartan ”Jersey.” (Naughty by Nature, also veterans of the scene, contribute the routine ”Connections.”)

The stripped-car nature of much of the music isn’t a matter of studio budgets. More so than in Compton, East Coast rappers still live or die by the inventiveness of their language. No disrespect to the West, but the best moments on New Jersey Drive are forceful reminders that clever, fluid wordplay got this whole thing going in the first place. The raps are full of zingy old-style brags: ”I come from less than zero/With more compelling drama than Robert De Niro,” singsongs whacked-out newcomer Keith Murray on the frisky ”East Left.” Generally, though, the messages are as stark as the beats. Lords of the Underground’s ”Burn Rubber” puts you inside the mind of a carjacker, while Jeru’s ”Invasion” is the East Coast’s belated answer to N.W.A.’s ”F — – tha Police.” New York-area hip-hop has always had its despairing side, but the primarily no-way-out credo of the new rappers (and the movie itself, which follows the hardened lives of teenage car thieves in Newark) make those earlier classics sound like The Sound of Music.

New Jersey Drive isn’t as definitive as it could have been, since some leading East Coast newcomers, like Nas and Wu-Tang Clan, aren’t included, and the booming, drooling growl of the Notorious B.I.G. is heard only as a guest on Total’s innocuous ”Can’t You See.” And many of the new East Coast schoolers represented here don’t measure up to the hip-hop giants who preceded them. But that’s a ridiculously high standard against which to measure any music. New Jersey Drive makes a case that the New York area’s rap heyday isn’t over; it’s the rappers’ dreams of creating a better world from the music that may be. B+