Dean: Flynn Johnson’s debut album basks in beautiful nostalgia

Rapper Flynn Johnson’s origin story is neither varnished nor venerated. Everyone knows that nostalgia colours everything beautiful, but The Green Box Theory is an album that snaps back to reality. The setting is the mid-to-late 2000s; a Blanchardstown housing estate. At the heart of the community is a green electricity box that serves as a kind of fulcrum of a young Johnson’s world – one of those seemingly nondescript settings where kids meet, fraternise, and generally allow life to happen.

This might be his first album, but Johnson (real name Evan Flynn) has been moving through the Dublin rap scene for long enough to qualify as a veteran. It’s already been a full decade since the release of his inaugural EP, In The Meantime. “A full-length debut is in the pipeline,” reported Hot Press upon the release of that project.

Time passed, ocean temperatures rose, the universe slowly expanded – but the album was nowhere to be seen. Meanwhile, the bar was pulled skyward as a number of excellent records capturing different corners of Dublin hit record store shelves: Nealo’s All The Leaves are Falling, Kojaque’s Town’s Dead, For Those I Love’s Carving the Stone. And still Johnson watched on, waiting for his crack at the crown.

His belated contribution to the city’s hip-hop canon is a piece that’s lovingly crafted, pure of intent, and with no wasted motions. The Green Box Theory rarely veers from its central concept – a day or two in the life (or a life or two in the day) of a young Flynn Johnson. After the pretty piano chords of “Children of the Hill”, the album’s opening track and overture, we get “D’Pressed Jewelz”, an update of Kanye West’s “Good Morning”, with the sounds of an alarm clock and promise of a Kellogg’s cereal breakfast rousing our humble protagonist into life.

The album tracks teen Flynn as he’s sweated by teachers, gets into mischief, and chases girls: “Now I have to change my status, rearrange Bebo,” he raps on “Blank’d”, because no depiction of noughties Ireland youth culture is complete without a nod to the antique social network. Songs are intercut with staged conversations to build the local backdrop: “Are you going to that yoke on Friday?... Just meet me at the green box.”

Doubling down on the nostalgia, The Green Box Theory leans on the timeless fundamentals of book-of-rhymes raps over easy-breezy keys/guitars and soul-bap drum programming. “Backerz”, an instant highlight produced by long-time Johnson collaborator ROC, is a sunny concoction of piano, brass instruments and light-touch backing vocals. These fresh rocks are ideal for Johnson’s primary aim: to pen a love letter to the streets and greens that birthed him.

Much of the album basks in such innocence. There are nods to BMX bikes, grandmother’s stew, games of heads and volleys – vivid memories of Johnson’s school daze are the album’s only true orthodoxy. He refuses to manufacture some central tension to make his narrative more explosive. The downside of unrestrained optimism is a lack of any real drama at the album’s core.

Johnson, of course, recognises he can’t simply list delightful things from his youth and expect to keep things interesting. Midway through The Green Box Theory, a character enters to rebuke the softness of the material. Johnson’s response is “Whitestown Ave Freestyle”, a more fire-breathing rap cut. And Johnson is a good rapper, fluid and multifaceted, “fresh like a two back and sides”, and sometimes bearing the loose earnestness of Mac Miller.

There are a couple of rougher edges. The left-right combo of “Nipper” and “Sketch” depict peer pressure, a mugging, and the tit-for-tat reprisals between two warring neighbourhood factions. But Johnson can’t help but punch out on a more joyous note. On closer “4eva”, the beat swells with the sound of a sped-up backing choir, with the rapper in the pulpit, once more declaring himself impossible to tether from his native soil: “Forever and ever, sincerely the kid, from number 27”.

Sincerity and idealism are potent drugs, and, for the most part, they cover the general sense that The Green Box Theory never pushes itself beyond previous Dublin rap records. But it’s highly listenable, admirably free of cynicism, and slides comfortably alongside other works of the genre that have been capturing the city as well as any other form. The day we can’t celebrate a positive expression of affinity for one’s hometown is the day of the tsunami, meteor, or your own alternative choice of Armageddon.