Every year I tell myself not to wait until December and piss blood writing up the year’s albums, so I’m getting a jump on it. Also, if I wait until the end of the year, everyone from Gore Vidal down to blue check bitcoin twitterati with eleven followers will have written their deep thoughts about Maps.
billy woods x Kenny Segal :: Maps
“For the world is movement, and you cannot be stationary in your attitude toward something that is moving.”
—Henri Cartier-Bresson
It was a lot easier to write about woods when I hadn’t already done it fifteen or whatever times. When I was able to listen to the full discography from start to finish without needing fourteen straight hours. And before everyone caught on to the genius and started trying to up their pen games to do justice. But, whatever. I’ll keep it brief since there’s no meal service on this flight.
Aethiopes was the gigantic, era-spanning opus, but also digging into woods’ early and wider origin stories. There’s a link between Maps and Hiding Places — both Kenny Segal produced, but also that Places was a dark bit of autobiography with a lot about childhood, and Maps delving into adulthood. A similar bridge spans Church and Maps: Church saw woods edging closer into autofiction and autobiography, covering as he said in an interview ’97-’04 — like Dubliners: the years just before he emerged as a writer/rapper. Maps cracks the mask even further and brings us to the present day.
It’s not a victory lap as some have said; every victory pyrrhic, every live show forget the lyric. woods has said the record is “the hero’s journey,” but the whole point of The Odyssey is that it the epic journey wasn’t worth it. You lose your wife, your home, your crew along the way, your dog dies. Some cyclops motherfucker almost eats you.
Maps is the story of a working rapper, a father, someone who’s not the greatest at relationships. And it is a progression in his writing as he continues to open the door further into his life — no longer tucking convoluted obscure snippets in here and there. I mean, how Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times Book Review is this?
Dinner party with the neighbors
Their apartment’s renovated
Skate wing, brown butter and capers, sprigs of thyme
Heavy pours of natural wine
I turn the music up incrementally and told mischievous lies
I whispered in the host’s ear all night
I hear they found him in the morning
Hose run from the exhaust pipe
…and then pair this moment to “Frankie” on Church: that moment of pre-gentrification youth, pre-fatherhood, Marinos on the windowsill.
Yeah, he’s still the cat who’ll stack the references, rhyming narrated by Attenborough + “Keep It Thoro” + Joe Burrow + brow furrowed + William Burroughs. You can go look those up or put it in your Don’t Know What He Said Book. He’s still dropping gems like caught ’em lacking on 9/11 / I lay down like V.I. Lenin. Still paranoid, political asides, I enjoyed the ride.
Yeah, we could kick it with some “the map is not the territory” on a Korzybski tip: the representation is not the thing, yadda yadda. I mean, woods says: Over time symbols eclipse the things they symbolize. We could get into some Borges “On Exactitude in Science” with the cartographers who make a map as big as the kingdom they’re mapping. I could tell my anecdote from 1993 about driving around Losaida with my man the seven-foot Chickenstein in a white Crown Victoria with a GPS-egg on top, a prototype of the first in-car navigation system, the heroin dealers all like what the entire fuck kinda narcs are y’all, and the thing didn’t work at all, went hysterical in the middle of Delancey Street, make a u-turn if possible! Make a u-turn if possible!
We could mappity map map but this isn’t what the rappity rap is about. It’s about how the touring rapper is a wanderer who loses all sense of place and time — and loses place and time; on the Rap Music Plug Podcast he talks about coming home and New York has changed, his children have changed. woods covers the small subtleties of this on “NYC Tapwater”: the panhandler who doesn’t recognize him, neighbourhood upscaling creeping in. I miss this place ’til I’m back, long face to match.
Maps is the story of how an exile/migrant has become an exile/migrant as an occupation. Real Joseph Conrad hours. Unmooredish science. I felt this. The longer you stray from home, it ceases to be home anymore. Then you have none, and you wonder: why am I here and not somewhere else? Where should I be and where do I belong? Nowhere and everywhere. Survivor’s guilt with a side of buyer’s remorse
There’s a departures lounge but no arrivals lounge, just get your bags and bounce, son. I took a cross-continental flight on Etihad once. The seatback display had an app that pointed to Mecca. It spun slowly around as we moved across continents, not even the Ka’aba truly fixed in place. The complimentary beverage service always tastes bitter. Jet lag, I can’t quite grab the new me. Old self dozing in an aisle seat.
Kenny Segal comes through with a lighter, more careful palette than the heavy spackling of Messiah’s Church — a wide and confident range that’s cohesive but varied. “Kenwood Speakers” drops an old school beat, a boombox joint, to set the stage — this is Portrait of the Rapper as a Middle-Aged Man. Across the album, he’s laying down a jazz club house band in Dolphy Surround Sound, a sense of basement club monologue: this is Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, Krusty the Clown, one mic and a stool with a brick wall behind him — Richard Pryor’s comeback, dancing a lit match in his hand.
There’s two chapters in the middle showing the rapper at work. The Tigger vs. Eeyore “Year Zero” with Danny Brown, as blistering and skyscraper-crushing as Godzilla vs. Kong. And the double-barrelled Omar Little and crew of “Babylon By Bus.” There’s also the deep depression of “Hangman” — hotel room claustrophobia and madness, Captain Willard still only in Saigon. And the fantasy of “Agriculture,” an in-flight daydream of settling down on a farm. But then it’s back to Brussels, Amsterdam, Bratislava, Bruges, Utrecht, soundchecks, blowing weed smoke through Marriott vents, $300 Ubers. My room had a view, safe fulla Euros. I miss having nothing to lose.
It’s no accident we open with Yeah, I’m leaving tomorrow but I got time today and close with I watch him grow, wondering how long I got to live. Maps is about time more than it’s about space, because travel is about killing time between spaces, time lost when you’re here and not there: FaceTime with your kids closes the gap of miles, but it’s lost face time. Couple’s therapy on Zoom, but it’s a train wreck. And lost time is different when you’re a parent: you don’t ever get it back, whatever you miss. Just glad I kissed him, I knew the time was borrowed. It’s a unique form of grief, one for moments of absence — or absence of moments. There’s a certain gnawing, loving greed in wanting to be there always, and an ever-present guilt at that impossibility. I’m trying to live in the moment like death row. (It’s interesting that woods seems surprised on his KEXP podcast interview that he hasn’t rapped about fatherhood before, because he really hasn’t.)
Mo mento mo mori, as Biggie might’ve said if he’d had more life, and this Ghost of Dead Rappers Past hovers in the background. So too does Anthony Bourdain (“The Layover”) — mirroring woods’ impeccable recipes (I’m starting to wonder if the children’s book will be followed up with a cookbook). Also, reflecting that Bourdain’s shows are on in any hotel room in the world at any given time. Plus, Bourdain lost himself in nomadhood, in a toxic relationship, and killed himself. Maybe suicidal thoughts was the everyday struggle. Even the most supposedly light woods record is steeped in blood.
It’s also notable that the last, now famous verse is so unadorned. There’s no metaphor or namecheck or wordplay. It’s not condensed and threaded and layered and twisted into coded language. It’s simple and beautiful because the moment is simple and beautiful, and resonates because these are the moments we most remember and feel most truly alive, and present:
I’m in the park with the baby on the swing
When it hits me: Crazy, anything at all could happen to him
He been climbing higher and higher on the jungle gym, running faster, sometimes pushing other kids
Tear-streaked apologies, balled fists, it’s a trip
That this is something we did
I kiss her on the lips
I watch him grow, wondering how long I got to live —
— and that line stops just short of a splice, jump cut to black, roll credits. Real Sopranos finale vibes: is this the end? Or isn’t it? You know you could go at any moment and it might be now or later, but knowing that drop is out there hangs over it all.
The Americans are a people who will applaud like stupid children when the plane lands. (Seriously, no one else in the world does this.) Yay, we’re back on Earth having touched the clouds. Whoopee.
There’s a Don DeLillo quote I can’t find, but it’s something about how in air travel, you move from one waiting room to the next, each more liminal and airless than the last, until you get into the smallest waiting room of all: the plane. I don’t know about you, but flying makes me go entirely insane: too much time sitting and waiting and reflecting on all your bad choices and failings. Absent minded, break time like bricks, thoughts is cinder blocks. Too much time to wonder why we give up chunks of our lives to sit in a tube to get over there which is just another place. Waiting rooms are always bad for the soul, and that baggage carousel is just a great big roullette wheel.
Killah Priest :: Forest of the Happy Ever After
(I knew this was gonna be great once I saw the awful cover art.)
Nas: What if I rapped…from the perspective of a gun?
Killah Priest: Hold my organic manuka kombucha mead.
Heavy Mental was the B.I.B.L.E. Rocket to Nebula was God moving on the face of the waters. Forest of the Happy Ever After hones down to day 5 of creation. And God said: Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind. And it was so.
Priest has always folded time and space, from the pyramids to Saturn; the rapper who lifted lyrics above and beyond, across millennia and light years. Here, he turns his gaze from macro to micro, from ancient astronauts and immortal gods to those creatures beneath the leaves whose lives are lived and snuffed out in short bursts — the souls of all the non-human creatures we ignore and cannot hear.
That is, the entire album is Priest RAPPING FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF BEES, BIRDS, FOXES, WHALES, SPIDERS, DRAGONFLIES, TIGERS, OWLS, AND ANTS.
EACH OF THESE IS A SEPARATE SONG.
THE SONG FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF BEES IS CALLED ‘BEE SONG.’ IT HAS A DISCUSSION BETWEEN BEES AND WASPS. HE ALSO DOES A CROAKY PARROT VOICE ON ‘BIRD SONG.’
There is also a song about WATER BEING FORMED AT A MOLECULAR LEVEL IN INTERSTELLAR SPACE AND COMING TO EARTH TO FORM THE SEAS FROM WHICH ALL LIFE SPRUNG.
(There is also a song about mushrooms, which really isn’t a surprise. He doesn’t rap from the perspective of a mushroom, disappointingly.)
I am always interested in albums that push the form, push its limits, carve new lanes. This is not Priest’s greatest album, but its sheer audacity and creativity, pouring it all out there, and doing something no one has ever done before deserves acclaim. Yes, it is 52 minutes of WHAT THE ENTIRE FUCK, but I don’t feel since Dr. Octagon a record has made my jaw drop like this. Yes, there is DOOM’s “Owl” song. There is a Kool Keith song about ants. This is on some other, other, other level.
Priest has invented an entirely new subgenre: xenorap. (Big ups to Conrad for coining that.) Having rapped beyond the known universe, here it’s what’s all around us but never rapped about.
As with most of Priest’s recent albums, there are no drums at all, just backing tracks ripped from royalty free bossa nova beats, meditation apps, an Edie Brickell type beat, and a couple of rollicking hillbilly beats for the two fox songs. This has worked better for him elsewhere, but it doesn’t matter as you’re more focused on reeling from the David Attenborough type lyrics. It’s shaman rapping. It’s unbelievably silly and absurd but it’s entirely, wholly sincere.
Just listen to the E.O. Wilson’s Full Metal Carapace of “China Ants”: the story of an old soldier ant who’s gone off to die, regrets all the horrors of insect-war he’s seen and perpetrated. Somehow — and this is the mastery to me, how does he do this? — its ending is moving and emotional:
“Though I had many blessings, only one I was denied”
The caterpillar asked, “What was that old ant?”
“Before I died, I wanted to stare eye to eye
And talk to a butterfly.”
IT’S A SONG ABOUT AN ANT WITH PTSD LIKE SOME VIETNAM VETERAN TYPE MOVIE.
Priest goes out of the city where rap is centered and into the forest, and finds strife there too. It’s just as ruthless, just as much a struggle for survival. We’ve heard a hundred rap metaphors about the laws of the jungle, but here life is just as nasty, brutish and short.
But…the fox being chased by cracker farmers songs are not metaphors about Jim Crow racism. They’re about an actual fox.
Listen to “Owl Interlude” and tell me you’re not filled with peace and gratitude, that it doesn’t transport you to the deep, still dark of the woods. Listen to “God Nature” and tell me you didn’t have a mystical, spiritual, soul-drenching epiphany.
On this record, Priest has attained Krishna consciousness. He’s revealing himself as Krishna does on the battlefield in the Bhagvad Gita — he has become one with all souls, all creatures.
You must learn to see with the same eye a mound of earth and a heap of gold, a cow and a sage, a dog and the man who eats the dog.
All beings fall into the night. And all beings are brought back to daylight. No weapon can pierce the light that informs you. No fire can burn it. No water can drench it. No wind can make it dry.
Everything hangs on me, like pearls on a thread.
On the next album, Priest is gonna rap from the perspective of the Big Bang and the earliest forming galaxies. Atoms to Adam.
The cover art will be terrible.
Skech 185 x Jeff Markey :: He Left Nothing for the Swim Back
I’ve clocked Skech as he’s orbited the underground like an uncharted comet gone dark — Uncommon joints, Armand Hammer and ShrapKnel features…he pops up everywhere like a great character actor, on some Keith David type beat. Having brought shock and awe on War Church’s Gunship Diplomacy, he’s dropped the diplomacy and hovers over Chicago blazing that minigun and rocket pods because he loves the smell of napalm in the morning.
Skech mighta been “born in ’85 but I feel like ’97 Jus,” but his spitting scans like modern-day, grown-man Onyx. His pen though runs through his heart with ink bleeding out into the streets, inside jokes with sex workers, poker face fates in a joker face, dream catchers flash abortions, my radiators breathing meaning, whole novels of nothing.
Jeff Markey lays a soundscape around this that’s part evil circus, part midnight city playground where the crackheads are riding the swings. It’s the sound of someone trapped in a maze. It’s frenetic, paranoid, straining to escape. This record is the opposite of the Priest album: there is no solace, no sanctuary.
Put this one next to Curly Castro’s Little Robert Hutton and Brian Ennals x Infinity Knives’ King Cobra. There’s a triptych here of hard-edged voiced rappers taking the tradition of Ice Cube’s Amerikka’s Most/Death Certificate and bringing it up to date: autobiographical but with sweeping social scope, heartfelt and brutal, deeply personal and complexly political, hugely ambitious and punching way above their weight class to put their stamp on the genre.
It’s an urgent album, groaning under the weight of it all, with every drop of blood poured into it. There’s a message in the bottle necking, impaired by ornaments we mistake as street lights.
King Vision Ultra :: Shook World
I came up in the checker cab era, with the jump seats, through to those rounded-soap-bar Fords the cops also had, the 6Y undercover cop era, and on and on to the shark fin video ads and yammering touch screens. I expect some day they’ll have some hologram ad shit on top which will shower virtual Cheetos on you when you’re just trying to get in the damn taxi. Sometimes I think about that phrase, “you wasn’t outside then,” because in New York are you ever really outside? You’re either in a concrete box or you’re boxed in by concrete.
Geng aka King Vision Ultra has curated here something much larger than a mixtape or compilation. He doesn’t create beats, he makes soundscapes and whole-ass nebula-dark-and-deep moods. He’s a metropolitechnician.
It doesn’t have features, it’s an ensemble piece, a Greek chorus, an opera; not Shook Ones but a Shook World. Each track is like a different stop on a subway ride, a different flavor, a different neighbourhood, but all interlinked so it flows uninterrupted, watch the closing doors. Taking Algiers’ Shook at the stem-cell level, he’s grown another album from it, adding field recordings and voicemails and dubs of dubs from dirty-head tapes. It sounds like all the Tompkins Square Park riots happening at once, run backwards, run at quarter speed.
Geng is always about New York history, hip hop history — honoring and savoring and preserving it but also pushing it forward to the future. So here you get the Ghost of Tunnels Past with a Kid Capri snippet, keeping company flow with the legendary ghostly Kingspitter himself, Bigg Jus; bridging to the Himalayan shaman ELUCID and a grip of new mutants like Nakama, Lord Kayso, amani, maasai and others Professor Geng X hones at his Purple Tape Pedigree School for Gifted Youngsters.
Rome is the eternal city but New York is the infinite city; it spins on a dime and changes and evolves and gentrifies and collapses. On the daily. Living on borrowed time, the clock tick faster.
Kassa Overall :: ANIMALS
Overall, Overall brings a another type of showcase/compilation — this one more like Moor Mother’s Jazz Codes. It’s a smoothly orchestrated blend of his jazz drumming and spitting, moving across advanced and subtle fusions of jazz, jazz-hop, and R&B. The guest spots though! The Danny Brown and Wiki collab I didn’t know I always wanted until I heard it. Lil B and Shabazz Palaces collab. Plus Tomoki Sanders, Theo Croker, Vijay Iyer…great googly moogly, what the dim sum of modern Black cutting-edge musical arts is this.
Also highly recommend the third installment of Shades of Flu, Kassa’s blend/remix/mixtape series — an artist at play, with the pallette of Herbie Hancock, Pharoah Sanders, Coltrane, Shepp, some of his ANIMALS co-conspirators, and his own bad self.
Wiki :: Papiseed Street Vol. 1
Wiki ended up in a lane I didn’t expect (extremely New York-of-this-minute rapper), but this new one I dig more than most of his recents. His arc from Ratking, which flung all the energy and lust of youth into the far future as I said in 2019, wasn’t what could’ve been, but he’s found his lane and stuck to it. The Oscar the Grouch samples toss up the mind-reeling physical and vocal resemblance, and that yeah, Wiki is the Rapper Most Likely To Appear On, As Well As Channel The Spirit Of, Sesame Street.
So It Goes and 700 Fill slammed their quarter down on the Galaxian machine of New York defining-the-moment, hungry debuts; racked its numbers on the board next to Illmatic, The Infamous and Cold Vein, and bounced out the bodega with a boosted Three Musketeers bar and a couple Snapples. (Whither Sporting Life? (*extremely Eric B. at the end of “Paid In Full” voice*) Yo, what happened to Hak?)
2015’s Lil Me was half-in/half out of Ratking, but since 2017’s No Mountains I’ve felt he’s been putting out steady and consistent joints without any light year leaps — sticking closer to the sticky pavement of summer than the icy bounce of joints like “Steep Tech.” But this one goes hard in the Krylon and you should rock it.
Buck 65 :: Super Dope
Super duty tough work, beauty and the beat type energy. It’s Ultimate Breaks & Beats for undergrads — joyously bringing everything from the Golden Age back, with no fake nostalgia or updates, just a straight up celebration of the ’85–92 vibe. The age of phat, the bomb, Swayze, scratches getting busy, Troop jackets and four finger dookie rings. It’s one for those who were outside then and a comprehensive seminar on the sound for those who weren’t. Mostly though, it’s fun as hell and cruises like a Samurai Suzuki.
Kool Keith x Real Bad Man :: Serpent
There’s something like forty Kool Keith albums now, and they’re mostly worth a spin just to check — yes, weird sex shit, something that sounds like lyrics run through multiple iterations of Google Translate, something about cucumbers or alligators, etc. Sometimes he just sounds tired and going through the wacky motions.
Serpent though is my favorite he’s put out in years — Real Bad Man brings just the right combo of movie samples, breakdance bop, and swamp murk. Keith is the master of tossing the word salad — the difference between him and, say, Ghostface is that it’s not clear if there’s any meaning behind what he says…something about clear nail polish? Something about the digestive system? “Open the curtains so the monkeys can see in”? Something about Bo Derek? The uncle of RKX Nephew’s style — and every other absurdist rapper — is back, baby.
The Sound Conspirator :: A Slow Disintegration in a Polished Machine
Cats don’t fuck with instrumental hip-hop enough for the same reason they don’t fuck with abstract art: nothing to fix on, you have to just get lost in it. I mean, J.M.W. Turner just wanted to paint the light on the sea but he knew he had to throw a ship in there. Edward Hopper just wanted to paint the light coming down on New York buildings at exactly a 45° angle but he knew he had to pop a person in too. Instrumentalists don’t do that. They only might drop some strange and obscure vocal sample just to enhance the ill vibe.
Fka PSY/OPSogist returns after an eight year hiatus from his deep catalogue (and one of my all-time best collab mixes). Slow Disintegration is a new sound but with all the best elements of the old sound: instruments you can’t identify, movie samples pitched down to interdimensional portent transmissions, waterfall cascades of drums.
This is audio surrealism — it’s di Chirico, with his cleanly painted figurative landscapes in Mediterranean colors which are just not right at all. “Vexations of the Thinker” type beats. It’s Magritte’s “The Annunciation” — it looks real, it feels real, familiar; but it’s impossible places and figures we see in dreams and accept in that state of other consciousness. Who are these silver chess pillars, how are they alive somehow, what do they herald?
That’s the type of theta wave state you fall into on this record.
*sigh* OK, for you kids: you know how AI art always looks photographically real but slightly wrong — the eyes are too far apart, it doesn’t know how to do hands or how many fingers people are supposed to have? It’s like that, OK?
Tenshun :: Perception Part 1
Man, once again, I been talking about Tenshun for years and years and years. His drumwork is rusty steel sharpening rusty steel, and cuts across the asymmetrical glitch-murk of heavily manipulated sound. Tenshun is audio Rothko: huge slabs of dark sonic color, subtle layers reflecting and absorbing light, atavistic and reaching deep into our earliest 2001-style fears and incomprehension. It’s deep caveman religion, elder gods. You find your own meaning in it, in your gut. Abysses within abysses. Shoggoth type beats.
odd nosdam :: Skateloops
Twenty plus years into a long career of making out-there beats, nosdam can still bring that shit I really, really, really dig: that best balance of boom beats and shimmering of broken glass. Tony Hawk ate all the blue windowpane LSD joints.
See you in six months, you mickeyblickeys.
