Soylent Oceanofrap Survey Report 2022 (vol. 2) :: Vs. & Posses In Effect
Yeah I said I was out last year, but blah blah they pull me back in. When every single working rapper you like releases an album in a year, plus some really new and exciting shit drops, how’re you gonna stay silent like the last e in minestrone? (Seriously, every single working rapper I like, except…Danny Brown I think.)
There’s too many records in too many styles to pretend any list is empirical or definitive, or that anyone even has the right to the authority. These are more of my top because of feels, and not in a ranking either. Stop pretending to be CERN and do your Prousts.
Vs. & Posses In Effect
No matter how much rap adapts, changes and evolves, two of its original formats stay bedrock like Barney Rubble: the dualism of one MC and one DJ, and the crew mixtape. Like buttons, books and the measuring tape, there’s some inventions that just can’t be improved on. There’s no variation that does the job better.
Infinity Knives x Brian Ennals :: King Cobra
This one time I dropped acid at Graceland; afterwards I flipped around the car radio dial and everything sounded…very peculiar and noisy and off-kilter. This record is kinda like that. It’s a road trip all over the map, regionally, sonically, musically, lyrically — kicking off with a spaghetti Western type beat interlude, then into a spazzed-out El-P datatronica joint, moving across trap and gospel and blues…it really is “cruising up your block on DMT / we the post-apocalyptic Run-DMC.” Feeling cute, might kill my landlord later.
It’s Fear of a Black Mirror; it’s The Coup and Public Enemy for a more cynical time where change is probably impossible, but we gonna power the fight anyway. I mean, those records were from an age when Trump was just some rich asshole on the Post’s Page Six.
“Death of a Constable” is on some Ice Cube x Whodini collab; “Malt Freestyle” is “6 ‘N The Mornin” for the Adderall era. But there’s quietitudes mixed in there too; there’s Maggot Brain feels and Prefuse 73 feels. It opens and closes on states of grace, but in between it’s a hella sweaty summer record — definitely tapping into that Baltimore vibe of not quite East Coast, not quite South.
More than anything though, it has very big Amerikkka’s Least Wanted and Death Certificate Revisited energy: the same curdled anger, the fuck-you politics, the stylistic sonic range, the state-of-a-broken-nation address, and the ‘lemme show you what I can do’ hunger. I miss the old Ice Cube but I’m good with a few more Cobras. (Please, keep these guys away from acting unless it’s a Ghosts of Mars reboot. Wait: do that, I’d watch the shit out of that.)
Cobra is the sound of massive talents flexing their impossibly huge anime character type muscles, slicing open Amerikkka to let the anime character requisite 500 gallons of blood pour out.
SHIRT x Jack Splash :: I Turned Myself Into Myself
Man. How many times I gotta tell y’all about SHIRT? He stays hungry. He stays spitting. He doesn’t do art rap, he does art and rap. He’s a rap, artist. Gunn runs the Sotheby’s Warhol samples and spits the doot doots, turning himself into Rap Salt Bae…while SHIRT is doing an IG takeover of the New York Public Library’s picture collection. He does silent rap performances like “Hardest Verse You Ever Heard” (sic) and “I found this book inside that book.” Way, way back in 2011 he dropped “Art Bully” and has kept it real since — breaking the gates and doing it all on his own terms, on some Just Above Midtown collective philosophy. He made himself into himself. But! The rapping is still rapping, and here he spits over a wide old school vibe pallette from Jack Splash that ranges from ’80s funk sample to Liquid Sky type OST beats.
Look, peoples: I was telling you about Ka, Open Mike Eagle and billy woods ten fucking years ago. I been saying about SHIRT over and over. Catch the fuck up already.
Open Mike Eagle :: a tape called component system with the auto reverse
Back from Anime, Trauma & Divorce, Mr. Eagle made us a tape with some anime, trauma and divorced raps. It’s laced with an entire season’s worth of Rappers In Cars Getting Lit on a cross-country, cross-era trip. Structured like a pause tape from the radio days (note to self: digitize those old pause tapes), it’s deceptively light and funny until it slams up against joints like “Peak Lockdown Raps” (the best Covid joint I’ve heard) and “For DOOM” (the best metal fingered memento mori I’ve heard). It switches up between art rap type beats and could-be-a-Griselda type beat and DITC beats, if all of them were covered by KK Slider.
Just as De La never got their due because they were ‘the flower rappers,’ many of OME’s nerd rap references hold depths too:
My grandma was half asshole and half Choctaw
We connected like Black Bolt and Lockjaw
…it’s a great and funny line, but underneath that is he saying they loved each other without needing to speak? (Because…well, either you get that nerd reference or you don’t. Do your own googles fam.)
I gotta give it up for “CD Only Bonus Track” for two reasons. First, the number of fans who didn’t realize this was the title and were hounding him to order the CD, that was hilarious. Second, because the features are…Aesop Rock and Diamond D?! What the whole foods fuck? It sounds great but what a pairing.
We’re down from Six Degrees of Separation to Two Degrees of (featuring Akon). Any combo is possible now. Orko Elohim and Benny the Butcher? Fat Joe and Qwel? Queen Latifah and Doseone? Kool G. Rap and Rob Sonic? Sure WHY THE FUCK NOT. All of these sound awesome. I mean, that Westside Gunn [REDACTED BECAUSE YE] Wears Hermes 10 had features from…Black Star and Run The Jewels?! I blame Marvel, all this She-Hulk fucks Daredevil etc. The toybox has been spilled. It’s great, but it’s breaking my brain.
Actually, wait: this started with 1981’s made-for-TV movie Harlem Globetrotters On Gilligan’s Island, which is a very Open Mike Eagle type beat: goofy, nostalgic, random as hell team up, but with an underlying plot about neo-colonialist corporate resource mineral exploitation. (Seriously, look it up.)
ShrapKnel :: Metal Lung / Wrecking Crew :: Sedale Threat / Ockham’s Blazer :: s/t
The great thing about the Wrecking Crew is they run the gamut of—gamut is a cool word. Gamut. Gamut. Wait, it sounds weird.
Anyway, the third baseline element of hip hop is: two equally matched MCs who work perfectly together—Run-DMC, OutKast, EPMD, UGK, Ghost & Rae, original flavor Jedi Mind Tricks. ShrapKnel carries that forward into the MMXXII — they’re Lethal Weapon for quiet wars, John Travolta & Forest Whitaker in Battlefield Earth if it’d been directed by Abel Ferrara. With their Backwoodz connect, Steel Tipped Dove, Child Actor and Olof Melander beats up in here, they’re the New Mutants Armand Hammer.
In the first two tracks they namecheck DOOM, Anton LaVey, Camu Tao, Vordul Mega, Aleister Crowley, “Simian Drugs” and the Annunaki—up front declaration they’re equal parts Def Jux and Semiotext(e). Def Jux(e)? (I don’t know man, my notes just say “make a Def Jux joke.”) Little Johnny Needs to Schedule An Outpatient Appointment are where the beats are at for real.
After the first four joints though, it comes down from the boiling point without losing bite, like cold sake and a chilled shiitake/wasabi broth. On the closer “Gravity Falls” though, it loops back to Terminator hours like a backpack kamikaze exploding switchblade drone. Loitering munitions drinking from a brown paper bag.
Sedale Threat is the epitome of what I was on about with these posse album mixtape type joints: everyone jumps in, everyone flexes, it’s the full range all you can eat buffet. A crew tape means all lean, no bad verses, no lazy shit, no introspect, everyone going all in, no skips and no time outs. It’s a team sport, here to win, not get all John McEnroe or whatever.
Only from the mind of Zilla Rocca (*extremely Minolta voice*) does something this tight come together. A lot of the references are lost on me because the only sport I follow is rollerball, and Rest In Power James Caan. But you should fuck with this; I do.
Meanwhile, PremRock gets his European on with Fresh Kils and a quintet of other musicians for Ockham’s Blazer, which is on some Wim Wenders’ Jazzmatazz type shit. Would love to see this live for real.
Tokyo Cigar x August Fanon :: Lexus Money & Every Friday EP / Tokyo Cigar x Iceberg Theory :: Who Is Marcella?
So I know this cat who’s the world authority on ancient Lao Buddhist scrolls and speaks twelve languages, and went out to see him in Philly last year. He has a whole-ass bar in his house and had me try some of his elite Japanese Scotch. Now, I’d had that before and thought it tasted like that seaweed they wrap sushi in, but this was smooth and fiery and fine. (At one point in the weekend though, I started wondering: wait, maybe a dude with a whole bar in his house is an alcoholic?! I would like to stop drinking now and lie down.)
Anyway, where was I going with this. Oh yeah, Japan = Tokyo because cigars are for assholes. So, you might be a Scottish single-malt type, but that’s because you haven’t tried this slept-on quality. That’s Tokyo Cigar. I just can’t get over his flows and how he changes them up like a jazz drummer.
Who Is Marcella? dropped the last day of 2021, but it’s a 2022 joint if your time zone is…uhh let’s say…Guam. It’s a joyful reunion of 2008’s Black Tobacco with Iceberg Theory, and they just play off each other like the best rap tag teams, link up and dovetail.
Lexus Money hooks the man up with August Fanon on the decks and they make it rain in…the Lexus showroom I guess. I’m telling you, if you’re a rapper, get some of Fanon’s beats before people recognize and they’re out of your price range. There’s this billy woods interview where he talks about getting so much heat from Fanon that eventually he has to tell ELUCID “Don’t open the folders, man. Just don’t open them.”
Defcee x Boathouse :: For All Debts Public and Private / Controller 7 x Defcee :: absent-minded EP
Defcee’s been on my radar since at least 2015’s Damn Near Grown, and I definitely shoulda put on my 2021 list the one-two of We Dressed the City (with the mighty August Fanon) and Trapdoor (with the equally mighty Messiah Musik). That’s been referred to the Congressional oversight committee for review.
That pedigree of Peter Piper producer picking, while run rocking rhymes, really gels on these two joints. As a teacher, Defcee knows you never know it all, and he’s a student of craft, making “Möbius strips of lyrics honed to precision.” Just as Defcee’s been one of those under-the-radar, if-you-know-you-know MCs, Controller 7’s been in the tower for decades. Something about these Boathouse beats dovetails perfectly on Debts, more than any other of Defcee’s records; he comes into his own in a way I can’t really put my finger on…look, I’m not always able to articulate every fucking thing, OK? I’m sure it will come out in my testimony to Congress, check your C-SPAN for that.
Pink Siifu x Real Bad Man :: Real Bad Flights
Like Eagle’s joint, this is a mixtape-with-the-homies with an overarching theme: I shouldn’t have hit the weed pen so hard in the airport bathroom. Same as auto reverse as well, the cat who made GUMBO’!, takes it down a notch to something more like a rapping-ass album, roping in Boldy James, Armand Hammer, Amani and Chuck Strangers — again with the peerless feature choices.
It’s sludgy and paranoid, but the tag-teaming lightens it up. It’s like those weird European things you randomly watch on Netflix: the one where the vampire mom has had it with the motherfucking vampires on this motherfucking plane who’re trying to eat her kid, and that other one where the sun has killed everyone for some reason and a plane full of people have to keep flying west against the sunrise to not die. While arguing and fucking and fighting and being European. You know the one.
Fatboi Sharif x noface :: Preaching in Havana
The Francis E. Dec of rap gets his gangster Frankenstein worldwide deadly Communist computer god constant threshold brainwash radio secret containment policy on. Noface brings the beats that are like Scooby Doo Shrinky Dinks left too long in the oven. How many times this year did I see random shit that was *extremely Fatboi Sharif voice*?:
- The Taliban banned Bitcoin
- Nude Madonna NFTs giving birth to centipedes
- The CIA is investing in the guy who’s trying to clone woolly mammoths on some Snuffleupagus Park type shit
- After the US bombed the shit out of Qasem Soleimani, a leading cleric said Iran can’t hit back properly because “America only has fictional heroes like SpongeBob SquarePants.”
- Some Facebook paranoia that said “NASA is Satan without the T, that’s why they say T-minus before liftoff.”
This is Cthlulu Wears Fubu (word to Son Raw for that one).
Daniel Son :: The Bush Doctor / x Futurewave :: Sun Tzu & The Wav.God / x MichaelAngelo :: 26th & Ocean EP
Most transmissible and highly infectious of the Griselda variants, I always love his hoarse hoarse, Norf Norf, bop flow Canadian G shit. He’s always great at picking those glaciers of Yukon ice beats. These joints killed.
DJ Muggs x Crimeapple :: Sin Cortar
Gotta give Muggs props for keeping on with these Vs. records — seven in the past two years alone — particularly how he gives shine to on-the-come-up rappers. They don’t always hit: sometimes he seems to run out of steam on bringing the heat, and/or the rappers just aren’t that interesting to me. But this joint is on point start to end.
To drop another one with Crimea Ppple is also very topical — Slava Ukraini! The whole record is in Ukrainian (which sounds like Spanish, weirdly — I guess it’s Crimea’s North Sea accent? It’s Tatar maybe? Idk.), but it goes it goes it goes.
Bring me that Soul Assassins III joint though! Or if Dia del Asesinato was III than bring on IV: The Quest for Peace or whatever, just bring that shit.
Pan Amsterdam x Damu the Fudgemunk :: EAT
A warm-but-dim-lit jazz club album. Rocking the sharp Italian moleskin blazer and you’re sipping on a Negroni type joint. Pan Am raps about duck sauce and Total Recall, jenga-stream-of-consciousness, and sometimes he plays the trumpet. Damu F. Udgemunk hooks up that b-bop for b-boys I always vibe with. Sometimes rap can just be fun. Eet is, how you say in English, le bop.
There’s other kinds of music apparently?
The Body & OAA :: Enemy of Love
Really great if you like a bunch of screaming and droning guitars and shit. I do.
Bobbi Humphrey :: Blacks & Blues
August Fanon recommended this on the twitter, and it’s just superb, that ’70s funk/jazz/soul type beat. Get with it.
For the permanent record, my aunt on Facebook asked me: