Happy 10th Anniversary to Masta Ace’s The Falling Season, originally released May 13, 2016.
Hip-Hop may be a youth-driven genre, but there’s precious little music about being young. Even when they’re 16 or 17, rappers like to give off “grown-up” energy, acting as if they’re beyond their teenage struggles, and exist only as full-grown adults. Artists like Leaders of the New School and Saba are among the few who have created great albums about being teenagers while they were teenagers.
Duval “Masta Ace” Clear’s The Falling Season is one of the few hip-hop albums that looks back at the high school experience. Released 10 years ago, it’s either the Brooklyn rapper’s fifth or seventh solo album, depending on whether you include the two LPS recorded under the Masta Ace Incorporated moniker. The album combines Ace’s strengths of creating great conceptual music and providing powerful, clarifying introspection.
Masta Ace has created or been involved with “concept” albums the vast majority of his career. The Falling Season is his second autographically based project. His first was MA DOOM: Son of Yvonne (2012), where Ace chronicled some of his pre-teen life in Brooklyn during the late 1970s. It also paid tribute to his deceased mother, who he credits for introducing him to music. The Falling Season is the next “logical” step in the story, starting in September of 1980 and moving relatively briskly through all four years of his life attending Sheepshead Bay high school. Ace recounts these formative years, from his efforts to get good grades in class, to his experience playing high school football, to his increasing obsession with the still relatively young hip-hop artform.
The Falling Season is the first real album that Ace recorded working exclusively with one producer (It feels weird to include Son of Yvonne, as he was recording his raps to the then over a decade old Special Herbs series by MF DOOM). Los Angeles-based KIC Beats produces The Falling Season in its entirety. Beats had some established history with Ace, as he’d produced a pair of tracks on Ace’s eMC group project’s sophomore album The Tonite Show (2015). Here he provides a steady hand. Beats isn’t exactly flashy behind the boards, but he’s solid, mixing samples with live instrumentation to provide a sturdy backdrop for Ace’s storytelling.
Ace does some of his most descriptive and cinematic storytelling on Falling Season. He portrays his life as a fish out of water at the now defunct Sheepshead Bay High School, an hour-and-a-half bus ride from his Brownsville Neighborhood. He effectively balances two “storylines”: adjusting to his new environment while seeking ways to make it through life at home in Brownsville without falling victim to street violence.
Ace begins The Falling Season with “3000 Avenue X” (Sheepshead Bay High’s address), where he sets the scene, explaining how he ended up going to a high school that’s an hour-and-a-half away by bus “at the last minute.” He balances being open to getting to know kids of different ethnicities than himself with knowing that if he acts up, they “gonna chase y'all cats all the way back to the hood with baseball bats.” The song also features an excellent opening verse by a then-young Your Old Droog, who demonstrates an encyclopedic knowledge of Brooklyn’s high schools.
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“Young Black Intelligent (Y.B.I.)” serves as the album’s centerpiece and thesis statement, as Ace narrates his struggles as a young man in Brownsville. He expresses the difficulties of trying to fit in with kids who “got jokes but very little hopes,” aware that he’s an outsider, “stranded on this island, feel like I’m Gilligan.” He tries to balance staying above ground with the “normal” concerns of every high school student ever: “All I wanna do is get a B in geometry / Lose my virginity and live my life drama free.”
Some of the more entertaining tracks on The Falling Season are connected to the project’s concept of exploring the dynamics of day-to-day life while attending high school. Ace delivers a single verse laden with math-related references on the suitably titled “Mathematics.” He later teams with Stricklin on “Juanita Estefan,” where they chronicle dealing with high school crushes. It isn’t quite a tale of guile-less puppy-love, as Ace speaks from the perspective of a hormone-addled teenager (“She got me walking 'round the school with the unicorn”), while Stricklin pines for a girl who’s rough around the edges.
Ace relives some of his early rap-related glory years on “High School Shit,” as he re-enacts a battle with a kid from a rival school. Coney Island Torae plays the role of the hostile invader, as the two trade verses, each displaying their complete disdain for the other’s school, students, and employees. Honestly, aside from a couple of Ace’s choice digs towards the end of the song, I gotta say Torae comes out on top.
Ace engages in a much friendlier emcee exhibition on “Me & AG,” his team-up with D.I.T.C.’s A.G. It’s the sole song that doesn’t fit into the overall theme of the album. Each emcee drops a rugged verse (or, in Ace’s case, two) to a smooth keyboard and string heavy track. “A bad twister, we touch down and destroy your town,” Ace raps. “Me and AG, yeah we tore it down.”
As mentioned earlier, The Falling Season follows a parallel path, as Ace contrasts the goofy high school experiences with stark portrayals of life in Brownsville. Ace likens his life to traversing a maze in “Labyrinth (Frankie Beverly),” trying to enjoy his life and rock fly gear, but acutely aware “one false move and moms have to bury me.” “Mr. Bus Driver” is the type of track that Ace has always excelled at recording, as he illustrates the minute details of lives he observes while taking the bus back to his neighborhood.
“A Mother’s Regret” effectively mixes the two worlds, as Ace recounts his crush on the single mother of one of his friends, only to watch her wither and decay as she succumbs to the ravages of drug addiction. Queen Herawin is evocative as she rhymes from the mother’s perspective, demonstrating how the pressures of her job and the stresses of raising a child on her own help drive her to crack. Later, Cormega joins Ace on “Bang Bang,” rapping as a ruthless stick-up kid, operating with “a distinguished group of schemers,” ready to rob as soon as the opportunity presents itself.
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Ace ends The Falling Season with a positive stretch. “Nana” is a dedication to his grandmother, who played an integral role in raising him. He describes her warmth and generosity towards Ace and his friends, and her efforts to use her home as a safe place in a cold and unforgiving world.
“Total Recall” is a dedication to the genesis of Ace’s love of hip-hop, particularly the World Famous Supreme Team Show. The World Famous Supreme Team (Sedivine the Mastermind and Just Allah the Superstar) had a radio show on WHBI in New Jersey from the late 1970s until the early 1990s, often starting at 2 a.m. They’re best known for their appearances on the songs “Buffalo Gals” and “Hey DJ.” For “Total Recall,” KIC Beats crafts an old school, almost electro sounding track, as Ace reminisces about the power of the radio and life in the 1980s. The Supreme Team appear on the track as well, recreating the broadcast’s popular routines and shout outs.
“Coronation” wraps Ace’s high school journey, with him feeling triumphant while on stage at his graduation. He perfectly articulates that sense of excitement that many feel on their graduation day, happy with all that he has accomplished and eager to discover what the future holds. He addresses his complicated feelings for some members of his family, knowing that while some didn’t show support during his teenage years, he’s ready to move past it and use their indifference as motivation.
Falling Season closes with “Story of Me,” where Ace chronicles his post-high school journey, catching the listener up to the “present” as he has gone “from Brownsville kid, gone to King's County / To Queenstown sitting in a sauna in a robe.” He reflects on his three-decades-long career and where his decisions have taken him, acknowledging that while he’s occasionally made mistakes, ultimately, he’s free of regrets. He seemingly concedes that this album was a potential career-ending work, but instead adds, “I knew they wanted me gone and singing a swan song, but I decided to let ’em wait.”
Ace has continued working post-Falling Season and has since recorded two of the best late-career albums of time, A Breukelen Story (2018) and Richmond Hill (2024). Both albums were produced in full by Marco Polo, and the narrative on each centers on the producer’s life, rather than Ace’s.
What has taken up much of Ace’s life in the last decade is his effort to turn The Falling Season into a stage play. Or, rather, what started as a stage play and eventually became a full-fledged musical. In an appearance on Donwill’s The Almanac of Rap podcast, he explained after attending an event with the Rhymes Over Beats theater company in 2016, he began writing a play that took elements (and the title) from Falling Season, and integrated other ideas and characters from his Disposable Arts (2001) and A Long Hot Summer (2004) projects.
The stage version centers on a kid growing up in Brownville, trying to navigate the realities of the streets during the summer before his senior year of high school. After doing a full stage reading in 2023, he said his next goal is to secure $6.5 million in investments so he can take the play to London’s West End theater district, knowing that he has a following in England and Europe.
If Ace is even partially as good of a playwright as he is an emcee, The Falling Season musical should be an enjoyable experience. That said, the album itself succeeds on its own merits. He captures the nostalgia and excitement of being young and ready to conquer the world, while being aware of the experiences, both good and bad, that have shaped him. That has the makings of a really good stage performance.
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