It’s kinda slushy out there, fam. You had your Hip Hop At 50 all year. Except, maybe it isn’t really 50 years old. The whole thing felt like a juggernaut machine to generate articles and panels and commemorative whatevers, which is…better than 50 Years of The Brady Bunch? And creation myths are important.
But so, so much kvetching about hip hop is weak, it’s dying, it’s not saying anything anymore, blah blah blah. All of which was about the mainstream. You’re complaining about industry-driven popular music being — that.
Meanwhile, a lot of good and bad across the ecosystem. There were more great records than you could possibly listen to. BUT! Bandcamp got sold and might change for the worse. And they (plus Okayplayer, plus…I lost count) fired all their editorial staff — coverage and reviews and critical writing is imploding. BUT! Ka did a streetside popup sale and there was a line two blocks long. BUT! Spotify is going to stop paying artists who don’t rack 1,000 streams a month. BUT! There are many great podcasts spotlighting artists. BUT! Who the hell has time to listen to all these podcasts? I’m not made of clocks, playboy.
So. It’s slushy. It’s more varied and vibrant than rock or jazz were 50 years in. And rap is tardigrade music. It’ll survive anything, thrive anywhere.
But all the handwringing left out an existential threat: its history, its archives, are evaporating. Datpiff was wiped from the internet; Discogs is being smothered to death; Whosampled is now a datamine for DCMA lawsuits; all the songs/albums altered or not on streaming — yeah, it’s great that De La is finally out, but it took hundreds of hours and thousands of bucks for them to painstakingly re-record and get sample clearances. Youtube’s a vast and deep soup, but random and uncurated — and only a matter of time before a great takedown purge. Instead of worrying whether the new books in the Library of Alexandria are any good, we need to worry about who’s paying the sprinkler system bill.
Anyway, let’s do more science shit and talk about a final batch of albums.
Type G: Showcase/Ensemble Albums
Armand Hammer :: We Buy Diabetic Test Strips
woods said about the meaning of the name — the arm and the hammer:
I wanted two things that work together to do things neither can do alone. I wanted something that could be layered in its meaning/interpretations. Wrote it like a name cause that seemed interesting. Please note that the actor Armie
Hammer was not famous yet and I had never heard of him or his great-uncle.
Layers, layers, layers. It’s always about the layers, the hidden meanings.
If you’ve read any of the many writeups Test Strips received, you know that blah blah blah dystopian, yadda yadda Amerikkka, hootie hootie hoo gentrification. I mean we can’t all do a Caltrops 15,000 word phone fugue, but even the fifty outraged comments on the Washington Post article by Real Americans who hadn’t listened to the record, or any rap music ever, gave a fresher perspective. Sort of.
I was thinking about how Armand Hammer is like the Earth and the Moon: two celestial bodies spinning on their own trajectories, but also lockstepped together. Because woods’ and ELUCID’s discographies — their sound and themes and preoccupations — have progressed and deepened hugely since 2013’s Race Music. ELUCID has gone from Public Enemy x Bad Brains experimentalism to an expansive, spiritual search for healing; woods has gone deeper and deeper into the personal, the small human stories. But, when their orbits converge on Armand Hammer records, while they bring these changing perspectives and preoccupations, they also return to their ongoing themes of the state of Amerikkka, of New York, of what it means to be Black in those places.
If you read up on the formation of the Moon, one hypothesis is capture theory — that the Moon was floating by and the Earth pulled it in to a duo that would eventually do a record with Alchemist. Fission theory posits that the Earth was spinning so fast, some of it broke off into the Moon — i.e., ELUCID and woods have so many ideas, so much talent, that they need a side project to fit those into.
Test Strips fits with the prevailing Theia Impact Hypothesis: a Mars-sized object slammed into the proto-Earth and the exploded chunks became the Moon — it’s a mixture of different elements and bodies, and impossible to tell which bit came from where.
Armand Hammer’s in its tenth year and seventh album. They’ve been around for three New York mayors. This album is a victory lap, a block party. It’s Frog & Toad are Friends & Their Friends (How Many of Us Have Them?)
There’s a handful of lyrical guests — Curly Castro looms up out of the depths like Moby Dick; Moor Mother makes a zen eye in the hurricane. (Henry Kissinger is not, in fact, the album’s only feature.) ELUCID stays gnomic/gnostic; woods keeps cracking the door to his life ever wider. There’s paranoia, hustles, everything’s on edge, constantly shifting, shaky ground, shakey dog. Certainty is a circle, I don’t believe you.
It’s the underlying tracks that make the album a salon, a jam session in an underground club — the key is under the mat? The club is under the sawblade and incense factory. Many hands make lightworks. About twenty different talented musicians from all parts of the Backwoodz web created and shaped the soundscape here. Starting with a couple of JPEGMAFIA beats, then a day-long jam of the WBDTS Players (Shabaka Hutchings, Child Actor and others) the Man Behind The Curtain, Willie Green, passed 24 tracks of this live session to be chopped and flipped and looped to eleven producers including the Preservation, El-P, Messiah Musik and Kenny Segal. Then, you also got a Scientist remix of two tracks. Textbook revolutionary cell structure. Connections deeper and murkier than fungal networks. It’s more accretion than orchestration. It’s a collab collage. An exquisite corpse, in all ways.
Layers layers layers. Wires wires wires. Suck my teeth, sour gold.
The guerilla marketing — We Buy Diabetic Test Strips posters, alongside We Buy Diabetic Test Strips posters: one is the medical grey-market economy, one is the medicinal grey marketed encomium. A face behind this mask behind this face.
Graffiti was always the faith in the name, but with the paradox of throwing it on a whole hundred foot subway car for all city to see it go by — but it’s not really your name. It’s a revolutionary nom de guerre, a criminal alias, throwing off your government name, self-styling. All of hip hop is coded language, secret messages, if you know you know.
New York’s posters, like tags pre-buff, are layered one on top of the other on top of another, thick and creased as rhino skin, rippled by rain and hastily slapped glue. Peel it back: underneath the WBDTS poster is a #BlackLivesMatter poster and underneath is a Trump They Live! poster, keep peeling, there’s album drop announcements from those dead or forgotten, XXXTentacion, Tekashi 6ix9ine, underneath that Troy Ave, underneath that Vado. Peel back: Vote Giuliani, Vote Dinkins, Vote Koch. Peel back: Cindy Campbell’s poster for the Back To School Jam at 1520 Sedgwick. Who knows what was first to be slapped on the wall? Coming soon to Radio City Music Hall: The Little Colonel, starring Shirley Temple & Bill ‘Bojangles’ Robinson?
I keep a Black Mirror in my pocket and I practice looking hard. Tick here to prove you’re not a robot. No Green Book for the internet. The wifi name is still Assata is safe here, but there’s fake trees in the Apple store. The wifi name is Mistah Kissinger, He Dead. The passwords get two factored, the gates to digital selves locked tighter — and digital selves increasingly proportions of our entire selves, progress bar running up.
How does woods use Face ID? Does he allow his phone to know what he looks like, but not all of us who absorb and resonate with his work? You can get AI software that will read any text you like in Snoop Dogg’s voice, but the genuine article only whispers sweet nothings in Martha Stewart’s greedy ear.
When did they get rid of white courtesy telephones at the airport? What were the first and last albums to have answering machine skits? Did your parents raise hell over the phone bill because you called 1–900-LL-COOL-J? What did Siri say when woods asked her how he’s gonna die? It’s some 2K Edgar Allan Poe shit.
Susan Bennett was a backup singer for Roy Orbison and Burt Bacharach, then got into doing voice work:
I got a gig to record for ScanSoft, an interactive voice response company, now called Nuance. I thought the script would consist of regular sayings, like “Thanks for calling,” or “Please dial one.” Instead, I had to read nonsensical sentences like “Cow hoist in the tug hut today” or “Say shift fresh issue today” — they were trying to get all of the sound combinations in the English language…I recorded from home four hours a day, five days a week for the entire month of July. The first hundred or so were fun and interesting, but it got pretty tiring after that.
Six years later, Apple bought this word bank and she was the first American voice of Siri. They didn’t tell her, they won’t acknowledge it’s her, and they didn’t pay her. Her voice was replaced numerous updates ago. When they push that button, yo ass gotta go. Whose voice it is now is a fat 404. All data lost, spirit roaming. All those thousands and thousands of hours of her answering every question — quotidian or cosmic — from all those hundreds of thousands of plaintive querents: gone like that puff of Datpiff mixtapes.
Bennett did use Siri herself, and it’s weird she didn’t find this hugely dissonant: her recreated self, speaking back. The Australian voice of Siri said, when her son would ask the iPhone a question:
When he was younger he seemed frustrated that “mommy in the phone” would not answer him as if she knew him.
Mommy in the phone don’t know you: that’s an Armand Hammer bar.
Shabazz Palaces :: Robed In Rareness
Stop saying “Ishmael Butler from Digable Planets and now Shabazz Palaces.” Digable Planets had two records in two years thirty years ago; Shabazz Palaces has had a seven album run (eight if you count Knife Knights) over fourteen years, and counting. It’s crazy that he came out before Nas or Wu-Tang, but is still making consistently vibrant and innovative work.
Shabazz Palaces has mapped its own galaxy, always orbiting Butler (aka…forty different aliases), the afrofuturist Black hole at its center.
But it’s the collaborators, the dark matter, the nebulas and quasars and red giants that have given each record a different vibe — the first three were flying car ghostriding down the Intergalactic Empire of Wakanda in the Dapper Dan MCM tracksuit, flinging rap Beyond the Black Rainbow; then the binary star of the Quazarz LPs tilted into an R&B orbit. 2020’s Don of Diamond Dreams and this year’s Illusions Ago made it seem like Ish was spiraling entirely down the R&B gravity well — and with Tendai Maraire’s departure, it’s been a different palace overall. Every Shabazz record has had live instrumentation, wide collaborations — across the electromagnetic spectrum from gamma bursts to (I can’t live without my) radio waves.
Rareness synthesizes those noble gases — keeping the softer, woozier melodics and Funkagalactics, but also reaching back into celestial MCing: “Gel Bait” with Geechi Suede burns through like ‘Oumuamua. The record’s not as wildly groundbreaking and experimental as original flavor SP — and it can’t be, because in 2009 they opened the stargates for all the wild stuff that’s come since. To quantum leap ahead of H3IR or Moor Mother or Priest’s xenorap record…how would you do that now? You can’t reach the speed of light because mass becomes infinite. Shabazz Palaces were already going 186,281 miles per second.
On his podcast, Cine Masai asked Butler: “Have you seen Saul Williams’ Neptune Frost?” Which made me think of when Rammellzee was asked if he’d seen Transformers: “See it? I am it. Why would I want to see me?”
(It’s wild to hear Ish talk about what he likes to watch on TV. He watches TV? He has…a couch? It’s like listening to Pharoah Sanders talk about what his favorite flavor of Cheetos is.)
Rareness also classifies as a showcase/ensemble album like Test Strips; same genus, different species — it’s giving spotlights to Northwest rappers as well as his son, Lil Tracy. It’s more an ‘Ishmael Butler presents’ joint than a bandleader/Sun Ra Arkestra jam like the earlier records…and no doubt, the next record will sound like something else entirely. “Fresh” was the original hip-hop superlative for a reason.
Type H: 1 Producer + (X) MCs
DJ Muggs :: Soul Assassins 3: Death Valley
Everyone knows Egyptian pyramids, mummies, some of the mythology…every kid translated their name into hieroglyphics at the museum and everyone knows hippie girls with ankh ankle tattoos. Egyptian art is delicate, airy; Mayan iconography is dense, heavy and humid, curled like jungle vines. And we know far less about the Mayans — their mythologies, the meaning of the Long Count Calendar, the names of all the gods. There’s a couple of reasons for this: the cheat code Rosetta Stone, which unlocked Egyptian hieroglyphs, colonial archeology, plus the European fad for Orientalism. On the flip side, the Spanish colonialists burned thousands of Mayan codices and exterminated the civilization because Jesus. So, two equally important, rich, ancient and extinct cultures have opposite legacies: one is deeply studied, widely known and embedded in our historical/cultural thinking, and the other is mostly lost, obscured, arcane.
From the jump, Muggs’ beats have had Mayan mystery to them: dark rituals of human sacrifice, lost temples of boom in the thick jungle, mysterious stelae of jaguar gods and ancient aliens, the coming of the 13th b’ak’tun of 12/21/2012. And their distinctive dark-robed ambient gloom make a Muggs compilation distinct from any other producer’s: this is a showcase of Muggs beats as much as the rappers he gives his imprimatur to.
The records The Black Goat’s been doing with select artists elevate MCs to lost gods: GZA, Spirit of Games and Comets; Roc Marciano, God of Pimpfire; Mach-Hommy, the Sin Eater. And the Soul Assassins series have each been a rap codex, pantheons, compiling myths of powerful deities.
1997’s Chapter I united the kingdoms, bridged the warring coasts and the Dirty South (plus introduced new demigods who unfortunately didn’t find congregations — Call O Da Wild and Infamous Mobb). It’s one of the best producer comps of all time. 2000’s II was more lackluster, but that reflects the uneasy, shifting sands hip hop was on then. Just like how we don’t know for sure how to align the Long Count Calendar with our own, 2009’s (pretty bad) Intermission isn’t III, and 2018’s Dia Del Asesinato isn’t IV — and that was a worthy update on Chapter I, spanning the twenty five years of rap with Raekwon, G Rap, DOOM, Mach-Hommy…bodies piled high on the temple mount.
It’s crazy to think that of the titan producers of the ’90s — RZA, Dre, Premier, Pete Rock, the Bomb Squad — Muggs is the only one still putting out consistent, excellent records and spotlighting new MCs (twenty Muggs vs. joints since 2005). He makes the grass grow.
Soul Assassins 3 (or 5 in the Palenque system) is a syncretic mythology, spanning eras and giving us wild pairings: Ghost x Westside Gunn, Scarface x Freddie Gibbs, Meth x Slick Rick. It leans too heavily on the new gods he’s trying to deify, and I’m sorry, but the B-Real/Ren/Ice Cube joint is just embarrassing. (Yeah, it’s great to hear them all together on a Muggs beat, except it really isn’t. It’s like watching digitally de-aged DeNiro’s face on top of his shuffling, aged body pretend to beat the shit out of people in The Irishman.) But there are some outrageous joints worthy of the Popul Vuh: that Cee Lo Green track alone is why we need the blood of a thousand virgins to ensure the corn harvest.
See also:
[1] There’s a movie that goes with this or something? I don’t know.
[2] Muggs vs. Dean Hurley did the soundtrack for Divinity, some kinda low-budget arty sci-fi film about an immortality drug or some shit. Unfortunately, he does the job too well and it just sounds like your basic low-budget arty sci-fi film score, rather than having Muggs flavor. But, you get to hear Kool Keith on a Muggs beat.
[3] That Notes & Tones thing where Muggs sampled a bunch of Sun Ra? And it sounded like…a Sun Ra beat tape. But there was an accompanying $50 wine for some reason? Because, Muggs + Sun Ra = wine? Or wine + Sun Ra = Muggs? Muggs x Ra = Sun ÷ wine? I got nothing to work with here. Nothing.
Blockhead :: The Aux
It’s crazy to think Blockhead’s production of Aesop Rock’s Float came out the same year as Soul Assassins II — it’s like how the Khmer Empire was crumbling into the Cambodian jungle simultaneously as the Renaissance was born in Italy. (Yes fam, IT IS EXACTLY LIKE THAT.) Evolutionary leaps in hip hop, major shifts — they don’t happen linearly or in correlation to real time. The jump from ’85 to ’87? From ’99 to ’00? Centuries, millennia, geologic eras.
The Aux is another phenotype of record: the flashmob compilation, the producer-led comp that’s a time-slice of who’s the hottest on a particular scene — like Lyricist Lounge or Soundbombing, but with one shaper of the sound, one hand picking the voices.
Just like Soul Assassins joints bridge eras, Blockhead’s spanning below-the-radar rap history right up to today — the Rawkus/Def Jux/blog era/indie explosion/Backwoodz eras. It’s a dream album with dream collabs — culminating with that ridiculous “Now That’s What I Call A Posse Cut Vol. 46.” The soundscape enhances each MC — Blockhead’s cooking on this: salt, fat, acid, beats. It’s a 15 course omakase at a three star/five mic restaurant.
Type M: Instrumental Albums
A.M. Breakups :: REDIVIDER
We also need to disambiguate rapless albums. You got beat tapes (Type K), which sometimes stand on their own and sometimes need some vocals to feel complete. You got your album instrumentals (Type L), which often stand on their own beauty (see also: RZA, Premier, Preservation). You got Andre Flutethousand’s Flutestravaganza (Type N), devoid of rapping about adult stuff or colonoscopies, despite the highly vocal and kinda gross numbers of people crying out to hear that.
A separate phylum altogether is the purely instrumental album, constructed of drums and samples and maybe some live instrumentation as on this joint. Like I said before, why the fuck don’t people listen to more instrumental hip hop, there’s a long and amazing history going back decades? They are aural abstract experiences that elicit emotional, ineffable responses, not intellectual or verbal ones as works with the rapping do.
REDIVIDER was worth the 2 1/2 years since Breakup’s last record. The drums are punchier and stabbier, with a Paid In Full Casio RZ-1 feel. The vibes are flickering neon, mistuned AM stations, break da fuc ups. Remember when Giorgio Moroder did his own synthy soundtrack for Fritz Lang’s Metropolis? This is that, except for Phase IV, the psychedelic psychic superintelligent ants taking over the world movie. It’s foreboding, unclassifiable, touching the edge of what’s real and what can be comprehended with its fingertips, just gently.
Quandary :: GHOST MINT TAPE
Quandary’s work is so organic, their tweaking of samples so dusty and lush, that when they make a fake 1970s giallo soundtrack, it gets sampled by Alchemist/Griselda acolytes as if it was a real one.
Back after a three year hiatus, MINT TAPE is classic good Doctor — sliding between the Sahara and Old Spaghetti West deserts and Eastern European prog rock experiments. It’s another complete soundscape to sink into, with grace notes of mysterious movie samples. It’s Lo-Fi Beats To Chill & Write An Out-of-Print Cult Novel From 1969 To.
I am so sick of hearing about AI. Really, give it a rest for one fucking day. But I got to thinking about why we’re a ways off from it creating anything that’s not plastic generic garbage — I mean who wants to listen to whatever the fuck this is? They are locked in their hard drives: they can make photorealistic pictures, but they don’t know what fingers are for; they can come up with totally poisonous recipes, but they don’t know what food is. They lie and make shit up because they don’t know what facts are. A learning model doesn’t really learn, it just models.
Some of the reactionary hysteria made me think though about how people originally (and still I guess) reacted to sampling—it’s not art, it’s robotizing creativity, it’s regurgitation not creation. AI is a new tool; are artists going to emerge who create really great, innovative work with it? Something entirely new that couldn’t be done any other way? The poet BJ Best fed twenty years of their work into a neural net and asked it to write its own poems — the results are odd, but great.
If you fed, say, all of Sun Ra into an AI would it spit out something better or worse than the Muggs tape? Worse. (And no wine.) It doesn’t know what music is. It doesn’t have ears. It’d be a discordant, jarring mess, like the turpentine French toast recipe the supermarket AI cheefully suggests.
Because creating music, and especially via sampling in the hands of someone like Quandary, is the active sifting and selecting, the arranging and breathing life into whatever shards they select. AI, on its own, is inert and lifeless. It can’t make a GHOST MINT TAPE. It can’t taste mint. It isn’t a ghost in the tape. It’s a dead thing on cold servers. This work is alive.
I won’t live to see hip hop’s 100th, but it’ll still be around. Maybe you’ll only be able to brainport it off the blockchain. Maybe a Chinese AI RXNephew will take control of the entire internet and you’ll only be able to listen to that. Nobody knows the future fam. Time is a flat Shirley Temple.
References: A Taxonomy of Rap Albums
A) One MC + one producer (cf Gangstarr)
B) Self-produced album (cf Fantastic Damage)
C) Two MCs + one producer (cf Run-DMC)
D) One MC + multiple producers (cf…this is most albums since It Was Written, c’mon)
E) Multiple MCs + one producer (cf Wu Tang)
F) Group album (multiple MCs/producers)
G) Showcase/ensemble album — led by title act, but heavily guest featured
H) One producer + multiple MCs (aka ‘producer-led compilation’)
I) Label, soundtrack or thematic compilation (cf Murder Was The Case, America Is Dying Slowly, the godforsaken Judgement Night OST)
J) Concept album
K) Beat tape
L) Album instrumentals
M) Instrumental album
N) All-flute no-rapping no-colonoscopy-raps album
O) Whatever the fuck it is Killah Priest is doing right now
