REVELATOR is both a culmination of ELUCID’s musical journey starting with this insane backpack (full of Monopoly money?) cipher all the way back in 2000 and his mixtape era from 2008’s Police & Thieves…it’s the flipside/sequel to I Told Bessie, and punching a new way forwards, kicking a hole in the speaker and then jetting, to the next level — to whatever is next. And reflecting that whatever is next is full of confusion and uncertainty: apocalypse now, the age of apocalypse, the enemy strikes back. All of a sudden we’re in a vampire bar, and Blade isn’t answering his texts. FANG BITE! TRUST NONE! FEAR ALL!
Seeing ELUCID perform live, you’re reminded how much of a preacher vibe he has, plus a Run-DMC vibe (though more Deacon McDaniel than Reverend Run). The revelator is the one who reveals, who brings word of revelations. But it also infers revving up, revolutions, revelling, re-elevating, re-evaluating. God in the whirlwind through cities. From Ham to Cush to Nimrod. Revelator vs. Terminator: no matter who wins, we all get loose. This is a lifetime mission, aight listen: in this journey is he the revelation, or the revelationist?
The AI will tell you: There are multiple matches for Elucid, including a rapper and a mathematician. Zig-zag-zig: that’s today’s mathematics. But ELUCID is non-Euclidian: he doesn’t work on flat planes, his axioms expose inequalities, his lines don’t go from point to point. Why play if I can’t bend the rules? He’s flipping geometry for necromancy, neuromancy, geomancy. As on “Old Magic”: This side of the ancients, the revelator armed and dangerous, X mark the spot, everyday equations.
ELUCID is not working in equations or narratives, but what Deleuze and Guattari called rhizomes: non-linear associative networks of connections, multiplicities, connections between art, science, power structures, social struggles — that connect at any point. It’s a thousand plateaus, “a continuous, vibrating region of intensities.” But I think part of REVELATOR is that even the rhizomes aren’t connecting, things fall apart, the center cannot hold. It falls in the shadow of if, in the shadow of a doubt, just a dream, it was all a dream, I used to read Semiotext(e) magazine, kiss me in the shadow of a doubt.
Zig Zag Zig: knowledge, wisdom and understanding; man, woman and child; me, you and galaxies; the omega of consciousness — but also zig-zagging: serpentine, serpentine from The In-Laws, swerving and swirling, stepping and ducking. As Clean’s mother says on crackly cassette in Apocalypse Now: do the right thing, stay out of the way of the bullets, and bring your heinie home all in one piece. In “The Prison Slave as Hegemony’s (Silent) Scandal,” Frank B. Wilderson III defines whiteness as “a social formation of contemporaries who do not magnetize bullets.” There are many ideas hovering and macerating through this record, but one plumb line is state violence. I never let the mic magnetize me no more. ELUCID is not Ultramagnetic but Ultrakemetic.
MANY MOONS
I have a feeling there’s gonna be a riot. I forget who said that everyone who saw a Velvet Underground concert went and started a band. I was the guy at a Swans or a Sonic Youth concert back in the day thinking “damn, someone should sample this and rap over it.” ELUCID did that. A moment of clarity on the expressway to your skull.
Cats out here talking about REVELATOR is such a departure from I Told Bessie and so on. Are you a goldfish? The man has 20+ albums and collabs going back two decades plus. They’re mostly RIGHT THERE on his Bandcamp, fam. Anyway. Let’s not take it from the top but we’ll whistlestop it. Serpentine, serpentine.
ELUCID is the dude who was staying back after services to use the church soundsystem to record his tapes — starting with The Bible and the Gun (2002), kicking an unformed Def Jux flavor of the day. Someday I’d like to find out what happened between that and 2007’s Smash & Grab and 2008’s Police & Thieves: they’re Fishbone records, joyously punk rock, loud and funky.
2009–2012, from Sub Bass Diet / Super Black Chocolate Simian / Bird Eat Snake — here’s the experimental sounds, the dub/dubstep/illbient/glitch-hop/electronic/industrial, whatever you want to call it, the Mona Lisa Overdrive. In this era is also the lost Concréte Sound System jams (you’re welcome for the link), percussion laboratories: The Underbelly kicks off with the “Blow Your Head” break, as sampled on “Public Enemy No. 1,” the shows are all bumrushed, it’s all cascading style sheets. In this era too is the black site compound of Cult Favorite with A.M. Breakups, the deep paranoia work, the branched davidian sermons, mystery will observe me. ELUCID’s always been croaking out prophecy and anger, Stokely Carmichael in the Temple of DOOM, Tennessee Williams and the Crystal Meth Skull, Pigmeat Markham and the Dial Up Modem of Destiny.
Between that and here, you have the sometimes quieter, more personal, more contemplative period: Osage to I Told Bessie. Finding mad light inside the dark, the valleys of grace. (He’s also been in an ongoing minor side project called Almond Hamper or something like that. I don’t have all day here, playboy. That’s a whole other conversation.)
REVELATOR’s sound is Bad Brains meets Maggot Brain; equal parts Miles Davis’ “Rated X” and Kool G. Rap’s Rated XXX. Miles said: Don’t play what’s there. Play what’s not there. See also: the spaces in the letters of E L U C I D. And G. Rap? He had the ill street blues. He said: I’ll explain the man sleeping in the rain, his whole life remains inside a bottle of Night Train. ELUCID said: Christmas morning, basehead ballet. He said: Illegal chokehold, yellow tape at the needle exchange.
REVELATOR mirrors, spans, bookends, refers and extends all the earlier stuff — it’s all one rhizome: Bird Eat Snake updated to X Eats United States; from “Nostrand” on Smash & Grab to “Nostrand” on I Told Bessie; “MBTTS” to “SKP.” Yes, it blasts loud and discordant in its first half — a sweaty stew of abrasive noise and rage, distortion and urgent density, it thrashes and spits, from this height, at this speed, downhill, careening. As he said to BK Mag:
To me it also has an industrial vibe. I like those sorts of sounds. I grew up in South Jamaica, you hear how many planes pass back and forth. The subways and elevated trains and shit. My music and my beats are composed from all these types of sounds.
And to Dad Bod Rap Pod:
We wanted a record that had some teeth. And I don’t think Bessie really had that. I think Bessie came from a place of like kind of maybe wounded sort of feelings, you know, wounded sort of emotion, like internal sort of wounding. And I think maybe like REVELATOR is, it’s more out in the world, outward facing. There’s an anger. There’s a frustration and I’m out of myself and I’m in the world, you know.
This record grows teeth. FANG BITE! Like all his records, it’s a machine that kills fascists. It works with the wires wet. How to fight the power? Cannot run and hide. It shouldn’t be suicide. Even rebels gotta pause when blood spilled so casually.
As REVELATOR goes on though, it moves through his more meditative, quieter era too: “Ikebana” sounds equal parts The Cure and RZA’s The Formula for the Cure; “RFID” slides through signal blasts; “14.4” has its distorted mbira metronome. “SKP” shimmers like Bessie and Osage; “Hushpuppies” has hints of his old dub roots. End of night drunken cheek-to-cheek slow dancing with ghosts, caressing her ass, she doesn’t mind.
So the sounds of this record pulls together all those years of collaborations and experiments and broad palette of styles, through the process from Test Strips and his recent collabos with Shabaka and other free jazz heads, distilling all of it into one Molotov cocktail. He’s pushed the envelope so far he broke the mailbox.
But the quantum leap is the further fragmentation of lyrics, Amiri Baraka’s economy of language but in one where the currency’s so devalued a loaf of bread costs a week’s pay. Comfort’s a condition, core rotted. The music is the message, the medium is the message, the message is the medium, the mess age in our muse sick. He takes a childhood memory of weekly dinners with his grandparents and chants it down into mantras: Must find fried fish, it’s Friday. Twelve lemons in the pitcher.
Every line here is compacted like the back of a garbage truck, fragmented, broken glass, everywhere — but not just abstracted, capturing our terrible present moments in feverish stream of subconsciousness: Sunshine and tear gas, flash bang, Kool-Aid Man bust through the walls. It’s memories and visions and thoughts: RUMINATOR. I asked the color of your soul, shortest verse, Jesus wept.
WORDS MEAN THINGS
…sorry big homie, but sometimes they do have to. Because somebody early on tagged this album as “psychedelic,” and it stuck — I guess because it’s hard to describe, because it’s so many different sounds and complexities, and it’s easier to just go with what vaguely sounds about right. But “psychedelic,” as Babel would say, is a rubbishy word that needs digging out. And this is important to pin down this bubbling gumbo of sounds and fractured lyricality. I live between two mirrors, wipe ’em clean.
“Psychedelic” means consciousness-expanding, bright neon colors, fucking hippies, trippy and hallucinatory. I feel like whoever said REVELATOR is psychedelic hasn’t dropped enough acid. I would not drop acid and listen to this record. It’s already overwhelming in input, data, emotions, impressions, chaos on the edge of spilling over, spilling out. You wanna Frank Olson yourself and jump out a window on a massive freakout? Because nah, I’m good.
So then the Dad Bod Rap Bod guys, I think, said they felt it was “impressionist.” Yes, the Impressionists were all about breaking with naturalistic realism (because photography had been invented). Smudges, smears, showing what things feel like rather than what they look like. But the Impressionists were also all about small light brushstrokes and getting out into nature: REVELATOR is definitely not that either. It smashes the child on the hard concrete. It’s heavy impasto, messy smears of layered paint.
ELUCID is coming here from later, more radical avant garde European/Russian movements, ones which encompassed art and writing and music: the Symbolists, Surrealists, Imaginists, Suprematists, Futurists, Ego-Futurists, Cubo-Futurists, Cubism, and stuff like that which sound like Divine Styler/Kool Keith/Mike Ladd supergroups. (We’ll skip the whole part where some of the Futurists ended up becoming enthusiastic Mussolini fascists.)
Surrealism wasn’t all flaming giraffes and lobsterphones: their delving into the subconscious of the dreaming world was to expose the absurdity and confines of industrial capitalism’s clockwork. The Suprematists understood art as a technology, of conservation and restoration, the museum as a factory of life-giving resurrection. And all of these were about the city, factories, the speed of industry and technology, the integration of the mechanical and human — and how these affect our perception, our consciousness, our ways of seeing. The street enters the house. The city rises. From the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting:
Space no longer exists: the street pavement, soaked by rain beneath the glare of electric lamps, becomes immensely deep and gapes to the very center of the earth. Thousands of miles divide us from the sun; yet the house in front of us fits into the solar disk. Who can still believe in the opacity of bodies, since our sharpened and multiplied sensitiveness has already penetrated the obscure manifestations of the medium? Why should we forget in our creations the doubled power of our sight, capable of giving results analogous to those of the X-rays?
It will be sufficient to cite a few examples, chosen amongst thousands, to prove the truth of our arguments. The sixteen people around you in a rolling motor bus are in turn and at the same time one, ten, four, three; they are motionless and they change places; they come and go, bound into the street, are suddenly swallowed up by the sunshine, then come back and sit before you, like persistent symbols of universal vibration.
ELUCID is not an Afrofuturist in the usual sense, nor an Afropessimist — there is always love, the small moments of family and tenderness in his work. I’m not pinning some new genre on it, we don’t need more genres, they just feed the algorithms, we must find fried fish, it’s Friday.
REVELATOR captures, like those artists attempted, how moving through the city is to be inundated in an endless torrent of fragments, of words: newspaper headlines, billboards, video ads, t-shirts, protest posters, graf tags, signs and warnings, riding between cars is prohibited, Ford To City: Drop Dead. Look through the train window, there’s another train, arms and legs and faces in fragments, all of it moving and the subway screeching and clatter. REVELATOR is capturing the inside of a mind in a chaotic city in a dangerous era, but also in our present moment: where half our consciousness is in the ether, in slabs of silicon in our pockets. New York was always the infinite city, but now there’s whole invisible cities we whirlwind through simultaneously, word to Afu-Ra and Italo Calvino.
TECHNOCCULT
I have observed a curious development which always seems to set in when we attempt to hold the phenomenon of realism firmly in our mind’s eye. It is as though the object of our meditation began to wobble, and the attention to it to slip insensibly away from it in two opposite directions, so that at length we find we are thinking, not about realism, but about its emergence; not about the thing itself, but about its dissolution.
— Frederic Jameson, The Antinomies of Realism
Shit don’t rhyme no more; consciousness isn’t even what we used to call consciousness — it’s split between the brainpan and our digital selves. Cattle prod, shock you back, some reality, thief of logic, reasons, constant tapestries, in my mind, out my body. The endless psychic pressures, rising and rising, of a frothing racist culture, carceral rapacious capitalist endgame race to the bottom, commodification of our attention and identities, eruptions of brutality and violence and genocide: all watched over by machines of a hateful race. No callback, abuse of power comes as no surprise.
Paul Klee said “art is a flaw in the system,” and ELUCID is the glitch in the Metaverse Marketplace. We went from bombs over Baghdad to drones over Jersey. Does “14.4” refer to dialup modem speeds, or the mosquitotone at 14.4kHz only people under twenty can hear, real Logan’s Run type beats? Or to the 144,000 in the Book of Revelation and the Nation of Islam, with the name of God on their foreheads, who will be saved, who will be resurrected after the Apocalypse? Dr. Yakub, who you might know, is on Instagram.
Show more. Show less. 666 vendors with legitimate interest request access. WeTransfer links have the lifespans of mayflies. I’m not a robot. Click all the images with a Zionist landlord. Click all the images with a Zionist landlord billy woods stan account. How are we supposed to process a world where the president peddles worthless meme coins and there’s CEO Assassin Lookalike Contests and the Israeli Defence Force posts its Genocide Wrapped? Where Palestinians say: “Now I am writing condolence messages just using autocomplete.”
I DIDN’T WATCH THE VIDEO. I REMEMBERED IN MY BODY.
I don’t remember where this quote is from, maybe Hunter Thompson writing about the riots at the Chicago ’68 convention, the cops as a mass, thirsty for blood: WE ARE REAL, AS REAL AS THIS NIGHTSTICK.
You can’t have realism when reality is sus, it’s fractured and subverted. Share this reality, risk when it drop there’s no get back. All that is real is the violence. All that we hold, we hold dear. We live to tell the story. We live to sing the song. He says: Being alive, I must look up. He says: I squeeze my children’s hand and walk hard against the wind.
