Vision Me
I have no problem with Ice Spice or whatever’s popping in the club these days. Rome Streetz is fine; I just don’t think there’s much to say except “he raps well about the drugs and the guns.” I’m more interested in rappers who pursue their own unique vision, sound and themes across multiple works and angles.
ELUCID :: I Told Bessie
Rakim said: Planet Earth. Was my place of birth.
ELUCID opens this joint with: They’ve made this star unsafe.
Mapping this record on ELUCID’s discography puts it at a point of full retrospect: a decade or so ago, you had the thousand-midnights-dark, Fela Kuti Brand Industrial Solvent type beats of Concrete Sound System, the birds eating snakes and super Black chocolates. As high as Wu-Tang gets, ELUCID was as low as the underground gets: making Cult Favorite records for madmen only.
Those records aimed to wound, shanks to the screws. Later joints like Save Yourself / Valley of Grace / SEERSHIP! / Every Egg were projects of healing, the process from sutures to scars to fading.
I Told Bessie is a synthesis of those sounds — the elegiac and the discordia; from the dark roast grind of “Ghoulie” (Jesus Christ, that Lasso beat always has me going ‘do I have something else playing in another tab?’) to the New Orleans jazz funeral of “Impasse.”
woods is a sax player and ELUCID is a bassist. woods is a reporter; ELUCID is a sorcerer (or a Sorcerer (1977) — driving a truck full of nitroglycerin into the mountains of madness), a preacher, a snake handler. He’s been…spellling. He’s said in various places his creative approach is intuitive, it’s feeling. Lee Scratch Perry was working as a day laborer when he had a vision:
By throwing stones to stones I start to hear sounds. When the stones clash, I hear like the thunder clash, I hear the lightning flash, and I hear words and I don’t know where the words are coming from.
I’m intrigued at the number of people saying this album is ‘inaccessible’ or ‘cryptic’ or whatever. Are ELUCID/woods’ larger profiles getting them audiences who need a late pass? Or is it an intentional coded language, excluding outsiders, as where hip hop began? ELUCID doesn’t do lyric books I think — the writer’s form of soaking the labels off your breakbeat records. Remember Skeme in Style Wars?
I don’t care about nobody else seeing it, or the fact if they can read it or not. It’s for me and other graffiti writers, that we can read it.
All these other people who don’t write, they’re excluded. I don’t care about them, you know? They don’t matter to me. It’s for us.
ELUCID says: Don’t ask me no questions, I believe in Black secrecy. He says: My fist refused to have its palm read. The origin of animals making sounds evolved 100–200 million years ago for nocturnal communication. Mad light inside the dark. Speech is for secrets, not the daylight robbery of the technoindustrial white supremacist complex.
Run the numbers not the jewels. We used to say ‘5,000’ meaning ‘I’m out.’ ELUCID says: 10,000 goodbyes, the hour’s fleeting. He says: voice like 10,000 windchimes. He says: 5K to put a body in the earth, twenty bucks to wear your face on a shirt. We live in the Land of 10,000 Things like Lao Tzu said: The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth. The named is the mother of 10,000 things. Keep ’em guessing. Keep it nameless.
Mr. Computer Inventor himself, Charles Babbage, said: The air itself is one vast library on whose pages are forever written all that man has ever said or woman whispered. But Jenny Holzer said: ELABORATION IS A FORM OF POLLUTION. And ELUCID says: Words mean things but don’t have to.
British campaigner Rosamund Adoo-Kissi-Debrah’s nine year old daughter died from the disparities of air pollution in deprived neighbourhoods — like those all over the world: predominately people of color, disproportionately polluted. She says: We definitely don’t all breathe the same air, it’s a myth. Lung disease is a poor person’s disease. So, Charles: whose air? Whose library?
Think about that though: all the words ever said, in the invisible air around us.
Picasso ripped off African art because it was already understood that realistic representation is a myth of control, and control of consciousness and hidden realities is paramount. Hip hop is ways of seeing through speaking instead, sometimes, of telling. On records like Bessie, it carries the representation of consciousness and identity with all the distortions of modern art. ELUCID says: I be listening mostly, keep it close to me. Not what it is, but what it’s supposed to be.
But on the flip side, he’s pointed out that just got to heaven and I can’t sit down isn’t a crypticism if you grew up in a Black church. So there’s obfuscation, there’s artistic intuition, and there’s context.
“What’s the exit plan?” Joy James asks on the opening sample. “What’s next for the captive maternal?” It’s a speech about how Black women’s nurturing has been the stabilizing factor but, ironically, by doing so props up the carceral capitalist state. “But do you see the beauty in that? It’s an impossible task. But it’s one completely worthy of it.”
ELUCID has spoken on how the record is a memorial for his grandmother, her silver halo, for his childhood, and weaves in church mint choking and other oblique fragments of his past alongside his present neighbourhood. It wears its heart on its record sleeve.
In the Persianate mythology, the hatif is a djinn who calls out to you in the voice of a dead loved one. The qareen was the djinn everyone is born with, who follows you through life like a shadow. Djinn are formed from elemental fire, local spirits of the land. My shadow is as big as my light.
He’s also spoken on how growing up Pentecostal was like growing up in a death cult — always preparing for the End Times, yearning for the better life beyond death. The apocalypse was always there, behind the smile lines.
Insight meditation (vipassana) was originally only for monk adepts. It was spread to everyone by Burmese monk Ledi Sayadaw to undermine British colonialism’s erasure of Burmese culture: resistance through mindfulness. That’s what he’s doing here — it’s a personal record, it’s a representation of memory and consciousness, but there’s still a double portion of protection.
Teddy Faley :: Teddy Brown Brown
So when my dad died, I decided to stay in the room with him when the crematorium worker came for the body. Guy comes in with a stretcher, starts unfolding the body bag, his cell phone rings. He answers it and says, “I can’t talk right now.” You could hear this loud-ass woman on the other end going neh-neh-neh-neh, nagging him about some shit. He gets his gloves on, phone rings again. This repeats six or seven times. “We’ll talk about it when I get home! I can’t talk right now!” Finally he gets my dad loaded up, this inert waxy thing that used to be my dad, zipped into a plastic bag. Phone rings again. He turns to me and says, “You’d think she’d know not to call me at work!”
That’s some Teddy Faley type shit: it’s funny, it’s sad, it’s fucked up, and you never forget it.
He seems like the kinda guy it would be great to go drinking with, but also you would never go drinking with him again. You’d go to some shitty dive bar — not a hipster dive bar, an actual dive bar, like that one in San Francisco with all the clown clocks and the old bartender who takes a nap in a booth halfway through the night — and dance with old ladies in bright cracked lipstick, but then get your ass kicked by some guy with a big-ass ZZ Top beard for some reason you can’t remember. Real Steve Buscemi hours.
I mean, of course he’s from Baltimore, it tracks. You ever been to Baltimore? I’m sure “Paper Plates and Sodas” describes his kitchen cabinet, it’s not a metaphor. (Should flip the Clash sample for the remix though.) He pisses in the sink. He probably leaves long rambling voicemails to or from Providence on road trips that go wrong. I’m the target audience for this, as someone who thinks the four major food groups are nicotine, caffeine, sugar and alcohol.
There’s a reckless sincerity to this record, a brutal self-lacerating honesty and intensity I’ve never heard in a rapper before. There’s a crippling vulnerability, a desperation for redemption, an urgency of clutching the mic for dear life. It feels like Ratso Rizzo falling down the stairs in Midnight Cowboy. “Hey fella. You fell.”
He’s Fuckhead from Jesus’ Son: “And you, you ridiculous people, you expect me to help you.” Or even the old mom in Fiskadoro, being dragged out to escape the fall of Saigon; Communist troops are overrunning the city and the helicopter is crashing into the sea and she just keeps saying: “One cigarette. Give me one facking cigarette.”
It’s The Basketball Diaries, but the real one, no Leonardo, and “An Incomplete List” is a more than worthy 2022 update of “People Who Died.” He’s clocking real Steven Jesse Bernstein hours: the scabrous sarcasm, the self-loathing that’s not self-pity, doesn’t ask for sympathy, that’s down there in the alleys and the porno shops and the garbage cans. The pinnacle of post-punk for me was The Crucifucks’ “Wisconsin,” and you could have this LP and that one on the two turntables and they’d track together nice. (Not much dancefloor action though.)
There’s always been a strong line in rap autobiography, but before maybe Danny Brown’s XXX there wasn’t the level of real confessional that admits to fears and flaws in, say, Illmatic. (Unless you go back to Basehead’s Play With Toys in 1992, but no one was ready for that.) And for white rappers, there’s always been linguistic obfuscation for a few reasons: music for the advancement of hip hop b/w everyone wanting to be Aesop Rock, but also maybe sidestepping their origins — something so central to rap’s themes. In a pretty old interview, Faley says:
There is a safety net [in metaphors]. You don’t have to answer for certain things when you say certain things…There’s safety in the abstract, if that makes sense.
Look at how El-P slowly started to reveal himself starting in the Fantastic Damage era, dig into his traumas, and then…yeah. Run The Jewels. It takes a lot of heart and courage to put it all out there like this. To say shit like “My friend’s dead and I’m wearing his Timbs.” (Chris Orrick was doing it, until he couldn’t.)
While my dad was dying, every time I went out for a cigarette I’d worry he’d die while I was smoking, but I’d go out every hour or so anyway. That mix of panic, despair and compulsion? That’s some Teddy Faley shit.
RIYLICMI:
Are we in some kinda Emo Rap Renaissance? Could be. I’m here for it.
KILLVONGARD :: I Think I’ve Lost It.
Miles Cooke :: I Used To Feel Things
Ka :: Languish Arts / Woeful Studies
“More shaman than showman,” Ka again brings his tightly controlled, ascetic compression to this double shot of ten songs, neat, poured over ice. (Is it a coincidence, cosmic confluence or just a blessing for exactly me that Ka, billy woods and Cormac McCarthy all released two entire projects this year?)
He’s put aside the self-imposed constraints of the conceptual themed albums (I’d still rock a Ka x Tarot album SO HEAVY though). He’s gone back towards Grief Pedigree — but his craft is so refined, all the small variations are heightened…the faster flow on “We Hurting,” “Obstacles” and “Building.” The looser beats, and flutes threaded throughout; the bold Kronos Quartet type discordance on “Ascension.” The lightly inferred sermon on “Eat.” He actually lets the beat ride on “If Not True” for 30 entire seconds, the biggest fermata in his entire discography.
Ka doesn’t write bars, but series of linked couplets that are more haikus or tankas:
I live in these bars
Might be hard to find
a better prisoner
The aphoristic flips scroll by, embedded and etched on the city, like Jenny Holzer’s Times Square installations, reflected in a rain-wet Cadillac’s windshield, a thousand angels dancing on the head of a pimp.
Moor Mother :: Jazz Codes / 700 Bliss :: Nothing To Declare / Irreversible Entanglements :: Down To Earth
At the jump, Moor Mother put out these very discordant, metal-crash-fire-breathing-art-punk-drum-artillery records — on some What If Swans, But Angela Davis — but since then she’s broadened out. The messages stay the same: time and history, uplift and struggle and trauma, healing and poetry. Survivors of trauma and violence have been treated like objects, lose faith in their agency, and reside in an emotional/mental quantum state: between being and nothingness, between self and no self. She’s said her work is all about “closing the timeline” — reclaiming history as well as imagined futures. As her partner Rasheedah Phillips notes:
“Rarely do we think of where the future is; who has access to it; and whether we are all accelerating at the same rate and pace.”
Or as William Gibson put it: “The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.” That’s not just the digital divide; it’s also about whose future is coming, who imagines it and who has a place in it. If your history’s been erased, do you get to write your future? There’s a time war going on outside no one is safe from. Time zones are centered on the zero point at Greenwich — the now-fallen English colonialist empire, still clutching its control over history and the future. (There was a conference in 1984 proposing to de-center nations by moving the prime meridian into the middle of the Pacific Ocean.)
Moor Mother can do it all, any style; she rips up any genre and then kisses the shards. No doubt she’s flexing her talent across these records; trying out every form (and excelling at them all), but I wonder if she’s broadening range to get the message across to a wider bandwidth of listeners. It’s a subversive subliminal widecast to bring everyone the secrets of quantum escape — just as the Bomb Squad constructed the PE sound to get those Nation Time lyrics into the jeeps and your radio. Free your ass and your mind will follow. On the other hand, maybe she’s just so musically hungry and talented she’s just taking them all on. At the same time though, she’s tracing the connections and overlaps to demonstrate Black music is one entire continuum, that genres are a construct dividing and conquering.
So, 700 Bliss reunites her with DJ Haram for hyperclubtechnotronica distorted matriarchalblackdancehousechillstep, the soundtrack to the inevitable space station zero gravity dance club scene in the inevitable Barbarella reboot; Down To Earth is a very, very fine mini-two-track with her spoken word jazz ensemble; and elsewhere she hops on this The Bug joint to spit fire dancehall rhymes.
Jazz Codes is an extension of last year’s Black Encyclopedia: that record brought together collaborators as a family to process loss and initiate healing. It’s more an experience than a collection of songs; a mood mother. This one similarly assembles a crew on a voyage across the whole spectrum of Black music, stars of the maps’ homes, moving across time instead of space — and fracturing these, taking the purified pieces and building something new with them, which is what music always has to do to stay alive. Thelonious Monk says:
Where’s jazz going? I don’t know. Maybe it’s going to hell. You can’t make anything go anywhere. It just happens.
Tonally, it’s an antipodal point from early work like Fetish Bones — warm where that was cold; healing where that was wounding. As Khalil Gibran wrote: “Your joy is your sorrow unmasked.” The record maps out the lineages and traces the connections between jazz, blues, R&B, hip hop and soul — and all their variants and begats and mutations and derivations — while using these to fuel engines for sailing towards a new future for sound: Forever? Forever-ever? Motherfucker, you know the song.
Quelle Chris :: DEATHFAME
In the non-profit sector, we’re always being asked by funders: What does success look like to you? And you’re not allowed to answer: You giving us a giant bag of money, dumbass.
As Quelle says in interviews, if you’re a surgeon who can replace kneecaps, or a librarian who can shelve books, professionally you’re a success. But in music, skill isn’t the measure of success, fame is. If you’re a musician, you can put out Innocent Country 2 and cats are still like: “But Malibu Drake has a new hat!”
But in hip hop specifically, there’s this endless sackcloth-and-ashes Quelle calls ‘showmanship of sorrow’: the rending of garments and Rest In Power commemorations every time a rapper dies. Which is way, way too often. It’s a never-ending wake, it’s always mo mento mo mori. Is Dilla the greatest beatmaker of all time? No, he’s the greatest dead beatmaker of all time. Admit it, fam: there’s rappers you never listened to until they died. At least we celebrate DOOM on his birthday and not his death day, like the annual and relentless March 9th social media Biggie cenotaphs.
Quelle Chris has always been one of those rappers’ rappers, producers’ producers, if-you-know-then-you know type cats. DEATHFAME has a similar vibe to the interior brainscape of Lullabies for the Broken Brain, which was…well, it was the title exactly. There’s always been the angel of death moving on the face of his waters, as warm and organic the feels of the music. Here, it’s Get Dead or Rich Trying. At the same time though, restless dissatisfaction is the human condition for any artist. Power. Respect. Juice. How far will you go to get it?
Sonically, it’s listening to a broken radio — stations fading in and out, lost signals. It sounds like a used record store on fire. He keeps a steady but invisible hand over fractured, woozy kaleidoscopic soundscapes, rapping in different registers and pitches and filters so it sounds like a cast of dozens.
I’m really into watching TV shows that were cancelled after one season. I love the cliffhangers because we’ll never know what happened. Who was in the submarine? Why was he floating upside down? Did the robots ever fuck? Because this is exactly like death. You won’t know how your kids’ lives and your grandkids’ lives turn out. Does civilization collapse behind a climate apocalypse? Who knows! Imagine you died in, say, November 1943 — did we win World War II? You’ll never know! No matter what, you’ll never tie up all the subplots before the credits roll for good. You’ll never be satisfied with the ending.
In conclusion, while rap is a land of contrasts, stop saying ‘give Quelle Chris his flowers!’ and just give him the damn flowers already. Give him all the tulips in Amsterdam. (Or wherever tulips come from, I’m not a…flowerologist or whatever the fuck.)
Killah Priest :: Horrahscope
RING RING [ringtone that can only be heard by third eye open ancient astronauts]
[Killah Priest’s agent — extremely Elliott Gould Wu-affiliate voice]: Priest, bubi, how about bringing back horrorcore? The streets are nostalgic for Gravediggaz!
The Priest They Called Him: Aight.
• speedruns Elden Ring
• speedreads ten Dungeons & Dragons manuals, Interview With A Vampire series
• buys ten more crates of albums from the 1920s-1950s
• loads up random samples that are TWO ENTIRE MINUTES long from whatever spooky movie is on AMC right then
• forgets to plug in any drum machines or add any form of percussion whatsoever
ALBUM DONE.
It’s 6 Feet Deep by way of Rocket to Nebula — in this third phase of his career, he’s re-energized and rewriting, revisiting and remixing his old records. He’s developed his own weird, unique genre, with lofi drumless beats to chill and study the Vedas to. (The fact that the one feature is a dude named Lil Da Vinci is either laser-point appropriate or close to parody.)
I liked it. Some of it’s corny. What is the entire fuck with the whole song in the voice of the Rasta vampire or whatever is happening there? No one is making records like this.
Rating: 4/5 spaceship pyramids that transform into Nicodemus Tiamat
There was also Mr. Universe, where Priest got another pack from Jordan River Banks, who produced many of his recent resurgence albums before the Nebula phase. In between the standard cosmic Israelite Atlantis bars he raps a lot about…tea? There’s a lot of tea rhymes. I don’t know, man. All oolong aside, it’s not as vital as the other, weirder recent stuff.
Priest also put out Mother, a short memento mori for a lost one, which is very heartfelt. There was also a six-track EP which is basically: Priest gets high and reads a bunch of 1950s comics, and does that very ’80s old school thing about ‘what if superheroes…but ghetto?!?’, riding the bus and smoking weed etc. It’s…silly.
What is the deal with all these very old records and movies he’s sampling, and now old comics? Is he time traveling and bringing back all this stuff? Does he live in a junk shop? Spends all day trying on the millions of hats? (I think sometimes about how, until about 1970, no man left the house without a hat. Then it went out of style. Where did all those hats go? Think about it. Millions of hats. I guess Priest has them, maybe.)
Serengeti : we saw mad turtles / kaleidoscope III
Man, Serengeti aka Kenny Dennis aka Ajai keeps steady putting out records and y’all don’t see the turtles. WHY AREN’T YOU HELPING, LEON? If you like: ambient hush of dandelion fluff, feeling woozy in the 7–11, private jokes between loved ones murmured in quiet voices, turtles.
Sometimes I love an album but I don’t have a thousand words to say about it. Doesn’t mean it’s not as good as the ones where I do. Sometimes the turtles speak for themselves.
