To break down some of what’s going on with the autumn/winter crop, I gotta get technical like a Nissan pickup with a machine gun mounted in the bed. Everyone has that dream book they’ll never write; mine is Towards A Complete Theory of Rap Music.
Assigning genres is a boring and increasingly meaningless social and marketing construct, but there’s not discussion or definition of a taxonomy of album forms — A) the traditional MC+DJ pairing; B) two MCs+1 producer…and so on.
Air and water are diametrically different, but one is two oxygen molecules and the other is two hydrogen and an oxygen — so looking at how rappers and producers combine, and in what quantities/mixtures, gives empirical evidence of the resulting compounds, combustibility, flow and solidity. Or something?
I was thinking about how music writing/judgement is so subjective and unreliable in trying to translate music/emotional response into words, and what makes these particular records interesting, important and accomplished is a direct result of how the elements combine. Maybe? Sometimes I just type words, man.
Lemme explain while also getting sidetracked talking about random shit. We will proceed scientificamally in album classification order, not ranking order from the feels —party people, let’s get epistemological.
Type A: 1 MC + 1 producer
Wiki x Tony Seltzer :: 14K Figaro // MIKE x Wiki x The Alchemist :: Faith Is A Rock
A hardcore comeback year for Yung Pedia, with three wildly varied and no-skips-given records (including Papiseed which I talked about in the summer edition). I had almost written the cat off — there’s been a clutch of MCs from the late aughts/early ’10s who just dribbled away into doing same schtick over and over: the inevitability of gradualness.
Wiki is so earthy and organic, you can feel his stubble rasping the mic, hear the rhymes coming through the gap in his teeth, but somehow he sounds best over the staunchly electronic, trap-adjacent type beats Hard Seltzer drops for him. 14K feels like flipping around a radio dial, hitting some cutscene raindrop joints, a bossa nova type beat, the tin pan alley piano of “Numb.” He raps his ass off, like the whole-meal banger of “Fried Ice Cream” with Zeelooperz, but still also dropping those Down These Mean Streets type autobiographical joints.
The classic combo of 2 MCs+1 producer (Type B) is that original Run-DMC flavor — a triangle is the strongest shape. MIKE and Wiki bring a good high/low tag team, and can you go wrong with Alchemist beats? You cannot. It’s lighter and dreamier than Figaro, but joints like “Mayors A Cop” have that French Connection OST type feel. Welcome back, Mr. Pedia, good to see you bodypopped, relocked and reloaded.
H31R :: HeadSpace
HeadSpace starts mid-beat, mid-glitch, like you’ve just joined a Twitch stream. It’s like walking into a not-quite-finished-rendering club, a silent disco with VR headsets, a couple blocks from the main drag in Overwatch. From the roof, when you go for a smoke, you can see the robot ninjas and mechagorillas and Samoan laser cowboys bopping around and flipping and zapping and whatever the hell happens in that game, it makes my eyes hurt.
This record glides and rolls, and like Wiki, the complement of maassai’s warm voice/Electrobug Mecca rhymes and J-Words’ beat mechanics play off each other, merge — like the sexy cyborg assassin from Ghost In The Shell, but not an opp, and with a flyer fit. I mean, H31R is definitely a screen name or robot callsign. It ends mid-ahhahaha, like the session expired, the wifi dropped.
Is it hip-tronica or some other godforsaken subgenre name? Experimental-electronic-trip-hop? Fusion? Maybe in the atomic power sense. Who cares? By definition, all hip hop is electronic music. The same warm organic voice/android beats vibe happens with all these great new trap rappers — Karrahbooo, BktheRula, ScarLip. You could throw on a playlist of H31R with any of those, plus the Moor Mother/The Bug collabs or 700 Bliss, and some early MC Lyte. It’s all one continuum.
What’s with this move taking it back to the Super Nintendo $40 Casio beats from 1985? Is it the same economics, bedroom producing (or on your phone on the subway now)? Is it sample clearances? People miss flip-phone ringtones? I don’t know. It’s the future I guess. We made it.
Defcee x Messiah Muzik :: The Golem of Brooklyn Original Soundtrack
Most definitely a welcome return of the Defcee x Messiah collab, but this joint also and more importantly pushes the form and function of a Type J — the concept record. And oy vey is meir, what a concept — it’s the soundtrack to Adam Mansbach’s novel of the same name, about a high school art teacher who makes a Golem while stoned. Mansbach has a long hip hop pedigree, and previously worked with J. Period on a mixtape to go with his 2013 graf novel, Rage Is Back. He worked closely with Defcee and Messiah on the record, to the point where it’s really a three-way collab.
More records based on books please. (We don’t talk about the Canterbury Tales rap album in this house.) Concept albums are pretty rare, and only a few really work as both rap albums and storytelling —A Prince Among Thieves, Deltron 3030 and…that’s about it. You’ve got your ‘music inspired by the motion picture’ tradition going back to the OG Batman movies right up to this year’s Spiderverse, but this hits way different. It’s a high bar to reach for, and these cats grabbed it and did 35 pullups on it. (Messiah Muzik once again proves he’s the go-to dude who lugs his suitcase of heat to the hotel, giving just the exact fit. He brings the boom bap kabbala.)
To flip it, despite the long and uneasy history of Jews in rap, there isn’t much (non-parody) rapping about Jewish identity, aside from Droog’s Jewelry (which was too Droog for me) and So Called Seder (which I rock every Passover). So while Mansbach’s novel has to go up against the long tradition of Jewish literature, Jewish New Yorker novels, and Golem tales, Defcee and Messiah have an open lane.
But there’s way too many aspects to get into in one record: Jews in rap vs. Jews in America; the on-and-off alliances and conflicts between Jews and people of color in America; assimilation and identity; thousands of years of tropes and conspiracy theories and violence…Judaism is an ethnicity, a religion, a culture, an identity, a nation in exile or actuality…and, of course: Israel and Palestine. Sticking to the novel, its plot and characters and themes, is more than enough, keeping it tighter, giving it shape.
Golem follows the plot and characters of the book loosely while giving Defcee his own chance to chew on some of these issues — white American Jewish identity, hatred, violence and retribution, how anti-semitism no longer has systemic consequences, and how some Jews actively or passively benefit from white supremacist power structures, despite that there’s increasingly loud and violent groups who want them exterminated.
This is not the best time in history to get into those topics. Or maybe it is.
I keep thinking, how would this record be different if it hadn’t come out eight days before October 7th? In the midst of the heavy hysteria, supercharged debate, weaponized media and information, extreme division on top of full-on genocidal violence, would the creators have paused the release? Done an entirely different record? The last two songs clearly touch on and get into disappointment and frustration with how some Jews leverage victimhood as an excuse for oppressing Palestinians.
It doesn’t matter; the record is what it is; it captures a point of time just prior to this one. It’s even more relevant as a counter to the present moment’s total lack of nuance, self-reflection and anyone’s seeming ability to hold two truths or facts simultaneously. And a key question in both the book and the record is how Jews should confront those who want to kill us—through violence, or through tikkun olam: taking action to heal the world?
The Golem comes from Jewish folklore; it’s the original Frankenstein, it’s the Grey Hulk — sculpted from clay, a magic word inscribed on its forehead brings it to life (the OG face tat). In many stories, it’s the protector of the Jewish people, but just as in this one, it gets out of control and wreaks havoc. This Golem goes ham at a far right rally; both book and record are responding to the rising and explicit antisemitism and violence of the past few years — the Unite the Right rally, the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre. The Golem is the same Golem Moses made — it’s all of Jewish history, all the violence, all the exoduses and exiles.
The war in Gaza and the worldwide ideological conflagorations have kicked those events into a Before Times. But listening to it post-October 7th, I kept thinking how the Golem is Zionism, it’s the IDF, it’s the apartheid state of Israel. Created to defend the Jews, it’s run amok: mindlessly, cruelly and inhumanly taking that programmed purpose as its sole function.
To stop the Golem, you change the word on its forehead from TRUTH to DEATH, or you erase the word entirely; the life breathed into it breathes out, and it returns to base clay. Zionism has lost its truths but the Golem rages on.
The Golem kept ya safe, Babylonia to Poland.
The Golem’s been the same since the moment it was molded.
The Golem smelled hate. The Golem left it broken.
World stays world. The Golem stays The Golem.
Fatboi Sharif x steel tipped dove :: Decay // Fatboi Sharif x Bigg Jus :: Insomniac Missile Launcher
Don’t say horrorcore. He doesn’t like that. This is Gravediggaz by way of Cronenberg’s The Fat Boys In…aLL YoU CaN eAt, it’s Ultramagnetics at 16rpm, it’s Anticon flavored Jersey Shore water. Dose One? Dose everyone.
Sharif is the dancing chicken in Lynch’s Eraserhead, he’s what if Drax the Destroyer was a sex worker, he’s the 5%er Lautréamont, he’s the R-rated A24 horror reboot of Tom & Jerry. He’s GZA smoking sherm, too much sherm.
Both Sharif and Dove have had steadily great runs lately, with Dove producing some of the best but little-known underground artists one after another. Sharif was 2023’s ubiquitous feature guy — popping up everywhere, including “The 364 Train to Babylon is Running Late,” which wouldn’t be out of place on a John Giorno Dial-A-Poet album.
Decay pairs well with Burroughs’ Spare Ass Annie, especially if you have some expired medication lying around—“Measuring Spoon Techniques” is straight-up Naked Lunch type shit. And Sharif’s rhymes are like cut-ups using H.P. Lovecraft and the New York Post. The Last Words of Dutch Master. The kind of sound you can smell.
Like Blockhead, Steel Tipped Dove is a meticulous craftsman, tailoring his sound exactly for each MC he works with, on some Daniel Day Lewis Phantasm Thread type shit. He’s carefully stitched sludge for a dripping, oozing album.
Meanwhile, alongside giving props to his forebears by doing joints with Kool Keith and Beans, Sharif somehow tracked down Bigg Jus using orgone box/cloudbusting necrotechnology to his secret Unabigger bunker. He pulled the Justoleum Kingspitter out of retirement for a four-track blast of industrial punk grindcore rap that’s far more Filth Deluxe than it is Funcrusher MKUltra.
The Rahway Nyarlathotep has risen. Long may he reign, have mercy on our soiled souls.
Zilla Rocca x Jason Griff :: Stacking Chips
Hot damn. This joint simply GOES. It starts off the blocks at a sprint and Usain Bolts that shit all the way through to the last second. It’s gym shit and I can’t even pronounce gym correctly. Actually, don’t put this on at the gym, you’ll tear a fucking hamstring or something. It’s Crank 3: Jason Statham Is Still Running Around Like A Goddamn Maniac On Drugs, Punching Everyone Right In The Cock. Cats talk about ‘rapping like the rent is due’…this is rapping like the rent, the car payment, the alimony, the palimony, the child support, the insurance co-pay, the library books, the homework, the light bill, the student loan, the credit card bill for that wild weekend in…what’s that shit that’s Chinese Las Vegas? Macau. The bill for Macau is due. And you bought a LOT of drinks and went crazy at the pai gow table. Damn, son.
Type C: 1 MC + 2+ producers
Danny Brown :: Quaranta
My mental shortcut for when something makes me feel old is that bit in All the Pretty Horses where Cole’s father is reading the newspaper and goes: “How can Shirley Temple be getting divorced?” And that has another layer, because y’all aren’t old enough to know who Shirley Temple is.
Because on the one hand, how can it be sixteen years since Detroit State of Mind? But on the other hand, unexpectedly, Danny Brown’s discography has been an ongoing deep-dive autobiography we’ve never really seen before, that no other rapper has done so consistently and in so much detail. He’s always poured his heart out about his ups and downs, trials and tribulations, memories and recaps (that first verse on “Y.B.P.” is as vibrantly written childhood recollection as he’s ever aced). His discography has been a drug-fueled, crack-ho-populated version of Karl Ol Dirty Knifeguard with better beats, a biopic unfolding in real time. Like a moth in a flame, when you burn, you learn.
Is forty year old Brown older and wiser? Has he matured from Rap Tigger to Rap Eeyore? Paid for a therapist but I still ain’t change. Are the last three songs kinda slow and syrupy and skippable? Yeah, but the rest — he’s still sharp as a razor and this record bops. Time is a flat Shirley Temple.
See also: I’m a ho, aight? The JPEG joint scared me. OK, not so much scared me as exhausted me. I don’t have the strength for that glitchy mayhem.
Meyhem Lauren x Madlib x DJ Muggs :: Champagne For Breakfast
Always dig Meyhem’s big man bellow, the Timberland and tilapia entrees, amuse bouche rhyming, sous vide shooters in coupes, et al. Madlib x Muggs hook the boy up, but it doesn’t sound very Muggsian or Madlibish particularly. Maybe the combo of two distinct flavors cancel each other out, like bacon and ice cream? It goes dummy though, it does indeed go all the dummy.
Tune in tomorrow, or next week, or February, for the third installment and further dive into Rap Taxonomy. I’m stuck with this thing now I guess.
