In which the Jukebox declines to kill the hype…

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Patrick St. Michel: Gil Scott-Heron’s lonely beat from “New York Is Killing Me” gets repurposed as a minimal backdrop for Angel Haze to declare her rap-game supremacy while threatening to tie a bungee cord around your neck and kick you off a ledge. The sparseness makes her proclamations all that much more clear, while also giving her ample space to show off her flow.
[8]

Andy Hutchins: The thing that distinguishes tracks like “New York” from the covers of instrumentals she’s done for years is that she knows where she’s going and gets there now. Over this squiggly bit of nu-bap, you can hear it: “I killed this shit, this the motherfuckin’ requiem” is a tremendous dismount of a verse, and it’s the first one. After she double-times through the first bit of the third one, that “I run New Yawk” that echoes in the hook sounds like a statement of fact. But she could still work on the breath control.
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Alfred Soto: Confirmation that she’s not as dirty as she seems came around the two-minute mark when her voice asserted itself as the powdery bourgy Brooklyn thing it is. “I am whatever they say I am” is an empty threat, though.  
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Will Adams: Angel Haze rides the bare-bones production like she’s been doing this her whole life, but the music may be too spare to fully convince me that she runs New York.
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Brad Shoup: Has “I run New York” ever been stated so meekly? The 83rd hail from Chicago, so maybe things back home are done with a bit more insinuation. I’m sure it’d be hard to sound bad over the wet handclaps and sneaky-melodic bass, but did the same person who used the Crusades for shade settle for a stale Mortal Kombat reference? The triple-time verse is a decent parlor trick, but I was already interested.
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Iain Mew: I love her rapping style and lines about elliptical orbits and the stripped back beat with big thwacks of bass. The Mortal Kombat reference doesn’t hurt any, either. I also love that it’s a rap track with singing on where it doesn’t seem like a tacked-on extra but something that evolves dynamically out of the verses, as it’s just the better way to present what she wants to.
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Anthony Easton: Aggressive, with excellent finger snaps and some lines that are both interesting and almost genuinely shocking (especially the slave reference, which might cause more offense than the Down syndrome reference she doesn’t apologize for.) Better flow than Minaj, and she knows her heritage includes Kim. But we have heard this before. 
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Katherine St Asaph: She doesn’t run New York (if so, I’ve got a list of grievances, beginning with the weather and ending far later than it should.) She can run a handclap beat, though. That’s a start.
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Jonathan Bogart: A hip-hop claim to running New York has nothing to do with actual power, influence or even awareness, and everything to do with a “The Secret”-type visualization: say it enough times, and it’ll become true.
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