On his most personal project to date, the Buffalo rapper laces intimate narratives with battle-ready barbs over an ornate collage of haunting boom-bap.
When Conway the Machine opens a verse with his signature “look,” the Buffalo rapper known for his tough talk and impactful rhymes already has your attention. Blessed by his gruff, grim-reaper resonance, each line makes your fingers moonwalk across the progress bar to take in his lucid, precise imagery. But even after several collaborative releases and solo projects, we still don’t know his full story. Thankfully, the Buffalo rapper’s long-awaited Shady Records debut, God Don’t Make Mistakes, gives us an inner-glimpse at his inspiring come-up, plagued with twists and pitfalls.
This introspective mood is complemented by aggressive bars, a balance that makes this his most impressive project to date. Conway’s hard-hitting delivery is a throwback to the era of “106 & Park”’s Freestyle Fridays, when contestants would dazzle the audience for consecutive weeks, score big-budget record deals, then vanish into obscurity. “Piano Love,” with its wintry Alchemist beat, boasts breathtaking couplets: “We don’t play fair, drive-bys right in front of the daycare/We spray hairpin triggers, that FN on the waist here.” It would be satisfying to simply hear him spit hard-body lines like these (as he does on his mixtapes and countless freestyle videos), yet Conway goes even deeper here, providing an intimate look at his personal struggles.
These tales are backed up by a collage of boom-bap that is as haunting as it is ornate. Most of the beats on God Don’t Make Mistakes are provided by Daringer and Beat Butcha, with solid contributions from Bink!, J.U.S.T.I.C.E. League, and, of course, Alchemist. The broken piano of “Drumwork” sounds like it was played by some hardcore composer who sat down to tinker on it after it got hurled from a fire escape; Conway raps like he’s the one who did the hurling. His nimble bars give you goosebumps, and his heartfelt reflections make you feel like a fellow traveller on his journey.
There have been flashes of Conway’s meditative side on previous projects. “Front Lines,” from 2020’s From a King to a GOD, gave a personal account of how the corrupt system that forced him into dope-dealing is predicated on the murder of unarmed Blacks by the police. But God Don’t Make Mistakes marks the first time the forty-year-old rapper has been candid about how he dealt with the trauma resulting from his close call with death. He lays it all on the line on “Guilty,” speaking at length about being shot in 2012 (“No feeling in my legs, I took a bullet in the head, nigga”). You can hear a vulnerability in Conway’s voice when he describes how Bell’s Palsy crippled the right side of his face–his delivery is concrete, evoking a pain he lives with to this day.
In the autobiographical “Stressed,” Conway delves into the nature of addiction and abuse, digging through a lifetime of trauma hoping to find “a lesson in it all.” Conway can craft a gripping autobiographical account as deftly as he can a battle-ready barb; his depth brings to mind similarly skilled veterans like Beanie Sigel, who makes an appearance on opener “Lock Load,” a booth-annihilating screed. Yet Conway holds his own with the Philly vet, spitting, “I get to trippin’, get the blick and this AR in my hands/Every bullet in the cartridges land/The stick look like a guitar in my hands, drummin’ like I’m part of a band.” Lines like these are why Conway is known as an adroit lyricist, and what makes this album so compelling is that it allows us to have a look at the man behind the virtuosic wordplay. He won’t let anything stop him from what he does best.
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