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RAPS + CRAFTS #36: Bryson the Alien

1. Introduce yourself. Past projects? Current projects?

Peace y’all. It’s Bryson the Alien. I’m a rapper/producer based in Portland, Oregon since 2015. I was born and raised in Toledo, Ohio. Past projects to check out: Hail Mary [2016],  Juenethia [2019], BTA World 64 [2021], Casual Abductions (w/ U.A.P.) [2022], The Great Adventures Of… [2022], Pen, Wand, or Laser Gun? [2022] & Sun God [2023] (w/ Deep Thought), KUMA [2023] and Norman [2023]. I also have a slew of EP’s that dropped in between album cycles over the years so consider those side quests… I’m currently rolling out a tape that will be entirely produced by Blu called IN SPACE…

2. Where do you write? Do you have a routine time you write? Do you discipline yourself, or just let the words come when they will? Do you typically write on a daily basis?

Typically I prefer to write in my home/studio. If I’m on the road or out of town, and there’s records needing my pen, I’ll take time to piece together bars while in motion. No better inspiration than being out in the world observing and participating. My favorite time to write is when the Sun isn’t out — so either before dawn breaks or late in the thick of night. The beats/production is what inspires me to write the most. If there are no beats on the docket to write to and/or I’m not currently producing something to rap on, then I’m doing everything but writing. I find that my pen is the strongest when I’m able to step away for a bit and live life — then lock in heavy when a record presents itself to me.

3. What’s your medium—pen and paper, laptop, on your phone? Or do you compose a verse in your head and keep it there until it’s time to record?

I use the Notepad app to write now. My first tape Hail Mary [2016] was the last time I wrote the lyrics down on paper prior to laying the vocals. I go through too many songs and I'm always on-the-go, so it has been (way) easier to just keep it on a phone or device than carrying around paper or notebooks. In certain instances, I have (and will) compose lines in my head that eventually make their way to the record. It’s definitely a fun challenge to compose a verse strictly from memory and I’m not above doing that more in the future.

4. Do you write in bars, or is it more disorganized than that?

Nine times out of ten, my writing forms around the structure of the song already in place. However long that verse spot is — 8, 12, 16, 32 bars, etc. — that’s typically what I’ll bring to the table. A notable exception would be if the song is being produced/cooked up in real time, in the studio, and I’m able to alter or influence the structure. The production inspires the bars so much for me that it’s difficult to just write bars for the sake of writing because the lyrics (can) hit way differently depending on how they land on any given beat.

5. How long into writing a verse or a song do you know it’s not working out the way you had in mind? Do you trash the material forever, or do you keep the discarded material to be reworked later?

I can tell pretty immediately if a verse and/or song I’m working on is a dud. If I’m not progressively getting more excited and ultimately reaching that “flow state” where the creation feels organic and seamlessly comes together, then I’m definitely going the wrong way. It’s a difference between working on something that will clearly take more than a session to finish but you’re digging it rather than something you’re not feeling (at all) and are going through the motions to finish it just to finish it, for whatever reason. I’m really bad at reworking previous material and putting it elsewhere. To me, it feels like I’m wasting my time and could be putting fresh energy into making something new.

6. Have you engaged with any other type of writing, whether presently or in the past? Fiction? Poetry? Playwriting? If so, how has that mode influenced your songwriting?

I have certainly read my fair share of fiction, poetry and playwriting in life, but I haven’t spent any time writing in any of those mediums — especially not for the purpose of it being published and distributed. However, I would say that my music is inspired by those mediums and I would really love to dive into them more in the future. My songwriting would only benefit from engaging with other mediums of writing (more).

7. How much editing do you do after initially writing a verse/song? Do you labor over verses, working on them over a long period of time, or do you start and finish a piece in a quick burst?

I’ll edit a verse/song all the way up until recording it. I, for sure, will rehearse the verse for days/weeks leading up to actually tracking the vocals. For the most part, if I feel the verse/song has strong potential, then I’ll rap it for close friends/collaborators to make sure it’s not a fluke. Seeing someone react (or not) to the bars is all the confirmation I need.

8. Do you write to a beat, or do you adjust and tweak lyrics to fit a beat?

As previously stated, I prefer to write to a beat. Rarely will I tweak previously written material to fit some other beat — the verse would have to be crazy. I have constructed a beat around an already recorded verse and that song became “Shawn Michaels.”

9. What dictates the direction of your lyrics? Are you led by an idea or topic you have in mind beforehand? Is it stream-of-consciousness? Is what you come up with determined by the constraint of the rhymes?

I’d say it’s a mix of all of those things. Typically, I already come into the session with things on my mind (naturally) on account of what happened that day so far, or how my week/month/year has been playing out. I love using the production as a canvas to paint where I am at holistically at that moment, if possible. Other times, it’s more fitting to challenge myself and run with a concept or weave a narrative. If the song already has a title that sparks inspiration, I’ll definitely try and run with it, or if there’s a sample of some sort being used, I’ll attempt to match that energy. I’m big on concepts and direction when working on music because it helps me channel the creativity and not get lost in the sauce with a hundred different ideas which can slow (or even kill) the momentum when cooking up.

10. Do you like to experiment with different forms and rhyme schemes, or do you keep your bars free and flexible?

I’m a big advocate for developing forms and rhyme schemes when writing. I look at rapping like a jazz player playing their instrument… we’re all playing with the same notes (language, slang, references) but how we convey that in rap is (or should be) unique to the individual. I love just putting the instrumental on loop and seeing where things go initially and when the verse starts forming I can key in on how to expand on the initial schemes crafted.

11. What’s a verse you’re particularly proud of, one where you met the vision for what you desire to do with your lyrics?

I have a song called “New York” [2016] where I paint the picture of someone visiting New York on music business, falling for a girl they meet at an art gallery, and that blossoms into a relationship. The sample saying "New York," me describing the character’s day-to-day while there, and the interlacing of NY hip-hop references throughout the song makes this one of my proudest, most well executed verse(s), top-to-bottom.`

12. Can you pick a favorite bar of yours and describe the genesis of it?

“Late nite in the forest stirring the pot / No Martial (Marshall) Law, Forest Law / but shoutout my pops / Heavy in the rock scene but eye never went pop! / Eye see the shade as eye light up the spot”

— from “00VII” from SUPER SECRET (EP) [2018] When I initially heard the beat, the high-pitch strings and hard drums gave me a sinister (spooky) vibe off top. The idea immediately hit me to start that verse off with setting the scene (tone) by giving that visual of being in the forest late at night stirring a cauldron. I also love how I was able to throw in a Tekken reference, a De La Soul reference and that third eye scheme in there.

I feel like these first couple lines give the listener a profound view into who I am. It also serves as a temperature check to see if the listener is hip to the references I used.

13. Do you feel strongly one way or another about punch-ins? Will you whittle a bar down in order to account for breath control, or are you comfortable punching-in so you don’t have to sacrifice any words?

My intention when making songs is to only write and record songs that I am able to perform live (with NO backing vocal tracks), so whenever I punch in (which is super rare) it’s just to enunciate a bar better. Sometimes, when tracking vocals, the verse I laid sounds fire (to me), but there might be just one or two lines that I want to improve and not throw away an otherwise great take.

14. What non-hiphop material do you turn to for inspiration? What non-music has influenced your work recently?

VIDEO GAMES, COMIC BOOKS AND FOOD. The big three  for me.

15. Writers are often saddled with self-doubt. Do you struggle to like your own shit, or does it all sound dope to you?

Up until I dropped my first tape, Hail Mary [2016], there was a four-year period [2012-2016] leading up to that where I was still finding who I was as an artist and how I wanted to present myself to the world. That time period was filled with much self-doubt and confusion — it was my “dark night of the soul,” as some would say. Kanye, DOOM, Lupe, Blu, The Cool Kids, and Charles Hamilton were some of the contemporary acts at the time that gave me the confidence to just do me and know that a fanbase would develop and gravitate towards me just for being me, eventually.

Everything I (Bryson the Alien) have available for folks to listen to and purchase I stand on it being high-quality. 100% satisfaction - money back guaranteed.

16. Audiologists can explain why so many people cringe when they hear their recorded voice played back to them. For MCs, the voice is crucial to how the writing is communicated to the audience. Are you satisfied with your voice? Does your rapper-voice match your regular voice, or do you affect it on the mic? Do you routinely rely on any mixing techniques (pitch adjustments, reverb, double-tracking, echo, etc.) to affect how your voice sounds on record?

I haven’t met a person who does like hearing their own bare voice on a playback - haha. I’ve grown to accept my voice and even love it over time through making music, performing, and finding a tone palette that works for me. I, for sure, affect my voice hella on records too in all types of ways as well as when I perform live, so that helps me detach in a sense from having any expectations in that regard.

17. Who’s a rapper you listen to with such a distinguishable style that you need to resist the urge to imitate them?

No one now but every aspiring artist, whether they admit it or not, finds their style by imitating their favorite acts and as they grow they evolve into their own (hopefully).

18. Do you have an agenda as an artist? Are there overarching concerns you want to communicate to the listener?

When I first came onto the scene with my debut, I had all sorts of lofty aspirations and ideas I wanted to communicate in my music. As I’ve grown and navigated this industry the past few years, I’ve come to accept that folks will gravitate to you on their own time or never — there’s no way to speed up what’s meant for you, it’s only a matter of time.

If anything, I feel my responsibility now as an artist is to stay true to myself/my sound and continue to challenge myself and to make sure the music is available in whatever format it needs to be for the listener (tapes, CDs, vinyl, streaming, etc.).

I wish everyone peace, wisdom, and understanding on their artistic journey. Inshallah.

RAPS + CRAFTS is a series of questions posed to rappers about their craft and process. It is designed to give respect and credit to their engagement with the art of songwriting. The format is inspired, in part, by Rob McLennan’s 12 or 20 interview series.

Photo credit: Bryson the Alien

[caltropspress]

ISSUE 20 AVAILABLE NOW

Ostensibly an issue dedicated to the startling work of Wave Generators, this issue marks a milestone of sorts for the zine project. Four years in, and no end in sight.

Contents include interviews with Nosaj from New Kingdom and Height Keech, a show review of Wave Generators, Andrew, and Big Flowers, investigative journalism into the ialive abandonment scandal, an ad page featuring a variety of podcast recommendations, and the first and possibly last (but probably not) DEADITORIAL reflecting back on these last 4 years of writing, zine-ing, and hip-hop.

Cold urine yellow. Staple-bound. 24 pages.

Just in time for the hollow-days.

DM on IG or eX or Blusky or email [email protected] for a copy.

[caltropspress]

RAPS + CRAFTS #35: Hester Valentine

1. Introduce yourself. Past projects? Current projects?

I’m Hester Valentine and I’m a Bronx-based rapper. I just dropped a compilation called Valenta this year and I’ve got a record out with Karma Kids called I Can’t Cut Your Hair produced by Outside House. I’m coming different next year though, for sure.

2. Where do you write? Do you have a routine time you write? Do you discipline yourself, or just let the words come when they will? Do you typically write on a daily basis?

I write mostly in my room, but wherever I have an idea and can write it down I’ll write. I’ve written stuff at work, waiting for people, on my commute places, etc. I definitely let the words come to me when they will. I’ve been trying to get more structured in how I write and the amount of consistent time I give the craft, but I certainly fall a bit short in that regard. I guess the most daunting part of that process is the uncertainty of it. It’s a bit difficult not feeling nice every time you put pen to paper because there isn’t a specific direction you’re going in and that self-doubt breeds procrastination for me, I think. I gotta remind myself that for every dope DOOM verse, there’s probably five weak ones he scrapped getting there. 

3. What’s your medium—pen and paper, laptop, on your phone? Or do you compose a verse in your head and keep it there until it’s time to record?

I write on my phone almost exclusively. I haven’t written a full verse in a notebook since like ninth grade. I can hardly imagine it honestly, considering how messy my handwriting tends to be. Over the recent years, I’ve developed a bit of a rude habit of jotting notes mid-conversation out of fear of forgetting them. I try to keep the least amount of my information in my head as I can because I am bound to forget some aspect of the idea or line and that is really frustrating. I am not especially disciplined with my note taking though (especially when high), so I end up losing shit all the time. What’s that Kanye line, "Does he write his own rhymes? / Well, sort of, I think 'em, / That mean I forgot better shit than you ever thought of.”

4. Do you write in bars, or is it more disorganized than that?

I write in bars, absolutely. I put the dashes and all that shit. I’ve seen some people get real specific in notating their verses for inflections and stuff like that, but I’ve never gotten that specific. That’s mostly where the disorganization finds itself in my process. I usually rap the verse over and over to find my voice, but I usually have the bars written and structured before recording anything. I used to split three hour sessions with one of my mans and that kinda got me in the habit of just coming to any recording prepared because, if I didn’t, I’d leave with nothing done. So a lot of times, I’d come in knowing exactly which bars I’m using, how long I’m rapping, where I want breaks for adlibs, etc. 

5. How long into writing a verse or a song do you know it’s not working out the way you had in mind? Do you trash the material forever, or do you keep the discarded material to be reworked later?

Sometimes it’s within five minutes of writing a verse and sometimes it is after I hear a demo and I’m like, “This idea is completely lifeless.” There have been times where I’d go into sessions high on certain demos and unsure about others and once I hear them, be completely flipped on them. The stuff that doesn't make it past five minutes for me gets saved because I just don’t throw things away. They’re always in my notes on the cloud for however long because I’m a hoarder. That gives me the chance to be surprised by them in a different context later on down the road. I’ve definitely had lines that may have felt off to me while writing that I was able to rework and bring something out of when revisiting. Complete demos though, I rarely revisit. If it doesn’t work for me for a long enough period, I just stop listening altogether. I don’t delete them because again, I hoard shit, but I don’t try to get on some Stockholm syndrome shit with it and force myself to be into the song. 

6. Have you engaged with any other type of writing, whether presently or in the past? Fiction? Poetry? Playwriting? If so, how has that mode influenced your songwriting?

I’ve dabbled in other stuff, but it’d be disrespectful to say that I’ve engaged in any meaningful way. I’ve done a few standup sets when I was younger, tried writing a screenplay a few times, but I definitely think writing raps is the thing that I’ve gotten most of my confidence as a writer from. If I ever returned to those mediums, it’d be with a new confidence that committing to rapping has given me. 

7. How much editing do you do after initially writing a verse/song? Do you labor over verses, working on them over a long period of time, or do you start and finish a piece in a quick burst?

I tend to do quick bursts. I’m not a super confident writer honestly, so I don’t spend much time laboring over the stuff. I take my time while writing and I’ll go back and fix things that are obviously clunky. Maybe I reuse a word a few times or I’ve got too many syllables in a line, but, besides that, I go with what’s written mostly. I do a lot of considering and reworking lines as I’m doing them. I’ll think of a line on the train, write it down, and rephrase it a few times to get the funniest/most interesting bits of it out, so by time I’m done with the verse I’m just tidying it up. 

8. Do you write to a beat, or do you adjust and tweak lyrics to fit a beat?

I do a bit of both. I may start with an opening set of bars (about 2-4) and then finish the verse writing to the beat. I find that if I write something for a beat, I don’t like to repurpose it. It just throws me off too much because I've already gotten used to how I like it sounding on this particular beat. Even if I can find something with a similar BPM or whatever, I still feel like I’m missing cues or something. I’ve had some dope verses get scrapped and I’m like, “I really wanna reuse these bars, but shit ain’t gonna hit the same.” The pocket half the reason I fuck with the lines in the first place!

9. What dictates the direction of your lyrics? Are you led by an idea or topic you have in mind beforehand? Is it stream-of-consciousness? Is what you come up with determined by the constraint of the rhymes?

It’s mostly stream-of-consciousness. I think I often start with an idea, line, or phrase that I find striking or funny and build from there. The connection line-by-line is there for me, even if it reads a bit random from an outside POV. I’ve always appreciated that kind of specificity in rappers I love. There’s something assuring about hearing a nigga bug out with the rhymes and not getting every single word, reference, etc., but knowing that the rapper themselves is in complete awareness of what’s going on and are giving you something from a very particular lens. I write in this style because it’s the style that feels most personal to me. Finding the universality in that stream-of-consciousness is way more rewarding than being overly didactic, in my opinion. Sometimes, ideas have to be shaped and molded to fit a rhyme, but if too much of the idea is lost or the line just doesn't sound dope anymore, I’ll scrap the line and save it for something else. 

10. Do you like to experiment with different forms and rhyme schemes, or do you keep your bars free and flexible?

I like to think I’m fairly eclectic. I try to do whatever I think is dope for the song/verse. I gotta see myself fail at an idea that I like before I rule it out. 

11. What’s a verse you’re particularly proud of, one where you met the vision for what you desire to do with your lyrics?

I think my song, “Lebron Meme” is the verse/song I’m most proud of. I think a lot of my vision for my lyrics revolves around blends of moods and aesthetics. I like pairing really brash, direct lines with something a bit more vague and “poetic” sounding, for lack of a better term. In theory, my verses should work on multiple levels. It should be raw and in your face, but also meditative, and I think I really strike that balance on "Lebron Meme" well. 

I’ll blend goofy pop culture references (“Revenge, we outside the house like Julie Chen”)  with lines like, “My girl wanna know what the song mean, / I speak my truths how they were spoken to me, / Some nights, this feel like a gift, / Other nights, a disease.” I feel that the moody, introspective parts of my writing and the sillier, darkly funny parts are given equal importance on this record. I like writing stuff that you can’t just put into a box. I’m always trying to strike this tone of humor mixed with horror and sadness. I think my sensibilities worked really well on this one. 

I also say some slick shit in there, in my opinion. I think that’s always key for me beyond the other shit - just saying dope, clever shit. I was proud of the wordplay here, “Our ISBN conflicting digits, / Nonpareil, the style not enteric, / Bite at ya own risk, numbers shaved off the biscuits, / They butter me up, I get to slipping, / I can’t trust they intentions.” I think the blend of approaches helps create a really tense song that is equal parts hilarious as it is depressive and eerie. 

12. Can you pick a favorite bar of yours and describe the genesis of it?

One of my favorite bars is on a track called “god is not listening”:

Brag raps all I felt was the disconnect, Blood of the hunted slathered across the chest, Ovaries rattled around my neck like the most bulbous of chains, I betray my upbringing with every single breath.

This is an idea I had kicking around in my head for some time because I thought the imagery of a man literally wearing the ovaries of his female conquests was really striking and powerful. I initially thought of it when I was considering the difference in how losing your virginity is perceived for men and women. The song, from my view, is about me toggling between my desires in a music industry and a society where conquering is seen as success. I felt a disconnect between my feelings about my art and my place in the ecosystem and the confidence that I felt was necessary to project on record. I’ve been feeling a disconnect between the rap game I grew up idolizing as a child and my values as a grown adult. I often think, “Is this the shit I really wanted? Is everything I grew up idolizing as a kid a function of some darker system predicated on control of others? Is to succeed in these traditional ways of viewing success, whether it be having the most money, being the most esteemed, etc - is that all just systems of control? Am I fucked up for wanting it?" So, to me, I thought it was important to display the brag raps in a way that really highlighted the barbaric nature of it. Everything these rappers brag about having stems from a place of exploitation and wanting it for myself makes me no better than them, I believe. So, I really wanted to write a line that highlighted my disgust effectively and contextualized why my feelings towards these paths to “success” were so conflicted.  

13. Do you feel strongly one way or another about punch-ins? Will you whittle a bar down in order to account for breath control, or are you comfortable punching-in so you don’t have to sacrifice any words?

I love punch-ins. A lot of my favorite rappers right now punch-in damn near every bar. I love that you can do that and play with it and add another dimension to your schemes with that. I have songs where I will punch-in on certain bars and let the punch-in go over each other and mix that with more traditional sounding rhymes just to add some variance. "Cane, Dewey" off In All Its Messiness is the clearest example of that, I think. "Panic" and "Blood War" off I Can’t Cut Your Hair have opening bars that are punched in like that, but I think they got a little more nudged in place on the final mix though. I love it though and will intentionally write pockets of the verse like that. I also don’t get purists who want to record all in one take, either. Well, I get it in some respects, but also why not take advantage of technology? I want to give the best sounding performance I can. When I rap it live, that’s a different story, but I don’t think it matters if I am in the booth and losing breath on lines because I want to rap it straight on some ego shit. I’d rather punch in where it’s necessary and hit every line with conviction. 

14. What non-hiphop material do you turn to for inspiration? What non-music has influenced your work recently?

I love a lot of non-hip-hop music. I was just talking with my partner about how “Usher” off of I Can’t Cut Your Hair is kinda like my attempt to re-make "Mass Production" by Iggy Pop. I’m constantly finding inspiration in 70s no wave stuff and 80s post punk shit, too. Bands like Suicide, Neu!, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, and Talking Heads were huge for me. I also love pop music, dearly.  A Distant Shore by Tracey Thorn was my go-to record for a minute.

I’m also a big media consumer - I can’t lie. Nothing all that highbrow neither. I be watching cooking shows and wrestling stuff in my spare time. That stuff helps to give me words or ideas to play with and reference. I’m watching MasterChef and I’m like, “Damn, what rhymes with aioli?” My job works in that way too. I was working at a laundromat and suddenly I got all these flips about clothes and stuff because it’s on my mind! 

In terms of my sensibilities, I think a lot of what I find funny and interesting is informed by shows, movies, and books I’ve loved growing up. I was really into David Lynch, Charlie Kaufman, Franz Kafka, Kurt Vonnegut, etc. in school. Most recently I’ve been obsessed with Nathan Fielder and his stuff. A lot of stuff I like is really funny, but also a bit scary and sad. I like work that really challenges you to reflect on an experience in a way deeper than That was funny! or That was scary! The Sopranos is hilarious and sad and intense all in the same show, same season, even the same scene sometimes. I think that truth is found in that gray area because most of the events in our life that we can reflect on elicit more than one single emotion. I think memories tend to be pretty loaded in regard to emotions. I’m constantly living in that gray where what I know about a situation seems to contradict itself, and I like to capture that emotional uncertainty in my work.

15. Writers are often saddled with self-doubt. Do you struggle to like your own shit, or does it all sound dope to you?

I certainly struggle to like my own shit. I’m jealous of the New York MC that loves his own shit and thinks his area is the greatest area in the world and that everything with his name on it is a classic. Like maybe one day I’ll wake up with Troy Ave confidence, you know? I’m still young in this music thing, so I think I’m still looking externally for validation a lot of times. I’m still halfway wondering, Was that bar clever? I like my shit when I write it and I trust my taste more than I trust other people’s, but I’m always afraid of being delusional about my abilities and who I am as an artist. I guess that’s just the tension that comes with putting yourself out there for others. You’re constantly thinking, Does this shirt make me look fat? 

16. Who’s a rapper you listen to with such a distinguishable style that you need to resist the urge to imitate them?

I’d say DOOM and Pusha T are the main rappers where I noticed that my style was being drawn a lot from early on. Ab-Soul and Heems were also two of the first rappers I ever wanted to sound like, for real. As I got older, milo, woods, and Mach were the rappers I had to kind of chill out on because it was becoming too close. I was flipping niggas like Dutch traders and shit and doing adlibs like woods - I had to pull back. A lot of my favorite MCs are idiosyncratic in one way or another, so I often find myself having to go, Don’t say it exactly like Rory.   

17. Do you have an agenda as an artist? Are there overarching concerns you want to communicate to the listener?

I’ll be honest: I don’t know yet. I make stuff because I like it and hope other people like it too. That’s all I really want. 

RAPS + CRAFTS is a series of questions posed to rappers about their craft and process. It is designed to give respect and credit to their engagement with the art of songwriting. The format is inspired, in part, by Rob McLennan’s 12 or 20 interview series.

Photo credit: FleeGriot

[caltropspress]

Down and Out at the Adair Rest Area in Casco, Michigan: A Tour Report from Wave Generators and ialive

The first shot in George Sluizer’s The Vanishing (1988) is a close-up of a stick bug clinging to a tree branch. Rex and Saskia are road-tripping through the French countryside. As they make their way through a long, dark tunnel, Saskia tells Rex of a dream—she’s trapped in a golden egg, floating alone through space. “The loneliness is unbearable,” she tells him. At that moment, the car runs out of gas. Rex leaves Saskia alone. She’s in a panic. The hazards on the Bois Vieux don’t work, and she’s worried about another vehicle colliding with theirs. Rex eventually returns, fuel can in hand, and they continue on to a rest area. Rex apologizes for abandoning Saskia in the tunnel, and the couple reconcile on a grassy knoll. They toss a frisbee, Saskia smokes, and together they bury two coins at the base of a tree. Saskia returns to the bustling rest area shop for a soda and a beer. Rex waits and waits for Saskia to arrive back at the car with the drinks. Now it’s his turn to become panicked, increasingly so with every passing second. He leaves her notes, searches the bathrooms, probes the cashier and rest area manager, but he never sees Saskia again.

Wave Generators—the duo of NOSAJ from New Kingdom and Height Keech—experienced their own version of The Vanishing in late October. Touring the Northeast and Midwest with Philadelphia rapper ialive, they cut across swaths of land playing pubs, taverns, and galleries. The vanishing—or spoorloos, the original Dutch title of the film, meaning “without a trace”—occurred while they were driving north on Interstate 94 from Detroit to Port Huron. In this instance, we witness the inverse occur—Height Keech and NOSAJ vanish without a trace, leaving ialive to make sense of his preternatural presence at a deserted rest stop.

Caltrops Press:  This “ialive abandonment scandal,” as the media has come to refer to it, needs some documentation. Thank you for your willingness to take part in this investigation. It’s imperative that we get to the truth of the matter. Maybe we should start with some basics. This took place at the Adair Rest Area in Casco, Michigan, correct? Where were you coming from and where were you headed after this pit stop?

ialive:  Yes, Casco, Michigan. We were staying with MISTER in Hazel Park, MI. We played Detroit the night prior and were headed to Port Huron to do a show at SchwonkSoundStead. Luckily, I had 60% battery on my phone so I could save my own life.

[NOSAJ from New Kingdom provides me with video footage of the fallout from the abandonment. From these shaky cell phone videos, we can piece together the narrative.

In the first video, Height Keech carries on a conversation with ialive—“Donovan” glows on the touchscreen head unit—negotiating the logistics of the pick-up, the recovery. Height appears pensive if not penitent, twirling a strand of his hair as he looks out upon the road. NOSAJ, one Jason Furlow, meanwhile, laughs and calls the situation “hilarious” and revels in remembrance of Height’s first words of recognition: “Where’s Donovan?”

In another clip, Height asks NOSAJ to text ialive to ensure he doesn’t cross the highway in a perilous attempt to shave seconds off the rescue.

In the final video, we see the tour van approaching the Adair Rest Area. The sun has set. Height Keech notifies Eddie Logix that they’ve been delayed by some “ridiculous issues.” As the van closes in on the ialive recovery effort, NOSAJ laughs from the bottom of his belly as he lays eyes on their stranded companion. ialive waves his arms desperately, jubilantly, as he rejoins his tourmates in the van.]

CP:  The story suddenly appears more nefarious than I originally thought. The video footage leads me to believe you were aware of Donovan’s absence when Height pulled away, NOSAJ. Would that be accurate?

NOSAJ:  Inaccurate, your majesty. Absurdity is the only collector of my laugh.

CP:  When did you and Height realize that your fellow traveler was missing from the vehicle?

NOSAJ:  When his name flashed across the GPS. We both looked back in horror.

ialive:  Jason was on earbuds connecting with family in the passenger seat when Height, who was driving, pulled into a rest stop. I decided maybe 30 seconds behind Height that I too should probably use the facilities. I passed him standing at a urinal—surely thinking he saw me—and stepped into a stall for a private moment. When I exited the building, the van was no longer where it was when I left. I thought to myself, I never took these two guys for practical jokesters.

NOSAJ:  We were approximately 25 miles away.

ialive:  So I walked around the rest area thinking maybe they had to move the van for whatever reason. I checked the trucker parking side, and then back to where we were while scratching my head. By that time, I felt defeated in whatever joke this was. I waved the white flag and called Height.

CP:  If NOSAJ estimates they were already 25 miles away, and you claim to have called Height right after scanning the parking lot, how long were you in the bathroom exactly? What was the nature of your visit to the stall, if you don’t mind me asking?

NOSAJ: Exactly!

CP:  I imagine you were on a tight itinerary, looking to make it to the next show. There probably wasn’t time enough to dally.

ialive: Tour constipation is a hell of a thing.

CP:  Fair enough, fair enough. Maybe some leafy greens next time?

ialive:  I blame Kozy Lounge in Hazel Park, Michigan, although they had the fire Reuben egg rolls.

[NOSAJ, seemingly in an attempt to rib ialive even further, sends an image of a milk carton.]

CP:  Donovan, tell me a bit about how you felt? I’m staring at the photos of you stranded at the rest area, and I can’t help but notice the despair in your eyes. What were you feeling as the sun gently set on that Michigan highway? You seem adrift—your hair tousled; your five o’clock shadow darkening your jawline. Gone is all rapper ego.

NOSAJ:  Heartbreaking…just heartbreaking.

ialive:  Honestly, when Height picked up the call, I started laughing immediately and couldn’t stop laughing the entire time they were coming to get me. I did wash my hair that morning and recall thinking I had a sunshine pop look going, unintentionally.

Height Keech:  Here it is from my perspective… I had time on the mind. We were running a little late and when I pulled over to hit the rest stop, Don had said, “You hearing those Kill Bill sirens?” (Tourspeak for “an unexpected urgent need to hit the bathroom.”) I ran out to the bathroom quickly, thinking perhaps the other guys were thinking, “Another bathroom break already, Height? What’s good?” In my mind’s eye, both dudes were waiting on me. I did, indeed, fail to see Don enter the bathroom. I try to maintain an “eyes on your own paper” posture at all public restrooms. Perhaps I minded my own business to a fault, in this instance. My actions from this point onward (suggesting Don “frogger” his way across the highway to meet us even though we would essentially have to drive half way back to Hazel Park to turn around either way) are indefensible and can only be chalked up to the panic of having left a man behind in battle.

CP:  Sounds credible, but the public will ultimately judge. Did you guys end up making it to the next gig in time?

Height Keech:  We did not, but as you might have guessed from these context clues, I’m a stickler for time. Our late is someone else’s right-on-time.

CP:  Does that mean you’re always the one behind the wheel, Height?

NOSAJ:  Metaphorically, literally, figuratively, all-day everyday, all-night every evening…

CP:  Don, have you ever been left behind by anyone prior to this?

ialive:  I’m a little offended to even have to answer that.

CP:  You don’t have to. I’m just looking for patterns in the entropy and randomness of this thing we call life. I’m sitting here thinking of the shuttle van scene at the beginning of Home Alone is all.

ialive: Eddie Logix made that same connection when we landed. I was doing the “Kevin face” a few times. I used to sweat being left by the school bus every class trip, but was extra sure about getting in line ahead of schedule.

CP:  Have apologies been made? Are you plotting any sort of revenge on Height and NOSAJ, Don?

ialive:  Of course [apologies have been made]! No love lost at all. I was playfully expressing a practical joke war was on, but truly, who has time for that?

CP:  Are the seating arrangements in the van permanent? Has anyone considered establishing a rotation so that someone else has the opportunity to be left behind? Or will Height not allow the steering wheel to be torn from his cold, dead hands?

NOSAJ:  The only seating assignment is I can’t drive.  

ialive:  I have been taking some shifts, but Height has done the lion’s share, no doubt. We definitely have rotated the seating arrangements with Jason requesting the back when in need of a catnap.

[Several days pass before we complete our conversation.]

NOSAJ:  New twist! Don has put in his paperwork for an early discharge. (Cue Law & Order bass stab.)

ialive:  The irony is not lost on me, but yes. I left myself behind in Philly. It was too difficult to leave my daughter once I was back in the family fold. Philly was a good show, and I felt the dudes would be fine without my services for the final three shows.

10/16 - Brooklyn, NY - Mama Tried 10/17 - Scranton, PA - Analog Culture 10/18 - Kingston, ON - The Toucan 10/19 - Detroit, MI - The Lexington  10/20 - Port Huron, MI - SchwonkSoundStead 10/21 - Youngstown, OH - Westside Bowl 10/22 - Asheville, NC - Sly Grog Lounge 10/23 - Winston-Salem, NC - Hoots Satellite 10/24 - Washington, DC - Quarry House Tavern  10/25 - Philadelphia, PA - J.J. Mallon’s 10/26 - Littleton, NH - The Loading Dock 10/27 - Manchester, NH - The Shaskeen Pub  10/28 - Saratoga Springs, NY - Desperate Annie’s

[caltropspress]

RAPS + CRAFTS #34: Snotnoze Saleem

1. Introduce yourself. Past projects? Current projects?

I go by the name Snotnoze Saleem. So far, all projects under this alias have been released on Illuminated Paths, including the mixtape Intifada, the sister EPs Shards I & II, and the most recent EP Samizdat, all self-produced. I don’t want to give too much away as of right now since I prefer to announce music when it is fully complete, but I got a collab tape with an amazing producer coming up, and I’m always working on my own stuff.

2. Where do you write? Do you have a routine time you write? Do you discipline yourself, or just let the words come when they will? Do you typically write on a daily basis?

Any and everywhere. I used to have a routine where I would write on my lunch break at work, and then afterwards after smoking. I don’t particularly like employment, so I always had a source of agitation to pull from, however that routine has recently been shattered due to a layoff. But I’ve been slowly finding a new groove until the next source of daily annoyance gives me more ammo, and even without a job, there’s always something. I discipline myself by sitting down and saying, “I’m going to come up with at least a few bars here,” or, “I will find a pocket in this weird ass beat,” but during that window of discipline I’ll let the words come as they may. I make an effort to jot down interesting thoughts or turn of phrases every day, even as little as just two words that I think sound interesting when put together. I tend to feel panicky if I feel I haven’t written anything for a few days straight, which can happen.

3. What’s your medium—pen and paper, laptop, on your phone? Or do you compose a verse in your head and keep it there until it’s time to record?

It used to be strictly pen and paper because I thought it was more “official,” but as time progressed I found myself thinking in bars all throughout the day, and I found it much more convenient to just pull my phone out and type whatever it is that came to me. I don’t think I’ve ever kept a whole verse strictly in my head; I’d be too afraid of forgetting it.

4. Do you write in bars, or is it more disorganized than that?

Usually disorganized, and then I find a satisfying order and rhythm for recitation. A few times a song will be more focused and will come off as what you could say are logical thoughts, like my one song “A Foreign Army Invaded My Funeral Procession” from Shards II, but that wasn’t even on purpose. It kinda just came out that way.

5. How long into writing a verse or a song do you know it’s not working out the way you had in mind? Do you trash the material forever, or do you keep the discarded material to be reworked later?

Nah, I don’t trash anything - always keep it. I’ve used lines I’ve written years prior, or recycle entire verses on a new beat if I think it fits better. When I’m in that discipline window I mentioned earlier, I’ll just write whatever, doesn’t have to make sense (not like the finished version has to) or be on any type of beat or rhythm or cadence, just get the juices flowing. It’s usually pretty clunky at first, but once I’ve gotten used to the beat then I can make adjustments. If I’m working on a verse and I haven’t reached that breakthrough beyond, say, a week or two, then it may be time to move on to something else, but that doesn’t mean I’ll never go back to it again.

6. Have you engaged with any other type of writing, whether presently or in the past? Fiction? Poetry? Playwriting? If so, how has that mode influenced your songwriting?

I used to write screenplays when I was younger, and little short stories. I don’t know what happened as I aged, but I find it hard to write organized thoughts and sentences like that nowadays - you know, “proper” sentences. I think the biggest influence it has on me now is just the fact that I’m not a stranger to the act of writing my thoughts down since I’ve been doing it for a while in some shape or form. I would like to read more poetry as well.

7. How much editing do you do after initially writing a verse/song? Do you labor over verses, working on them over a long period of time, or do you start and finish a piece in a quick burst?

The production plays a big role in this. If I have a beat that really gets a strong reaction from me, like my blood starts boiling as soon as I hear it, I can knock out a big chunk of a verse quickly, or maybe even a whole verse. Other times, it’s just a matter of reciting it either out loud or in my head over and over and over and over and over again until I’m fully satisfied with every word and pocket.

8. Do you write to a beat, or do you adjust and tweak lyrics to fit a beat?

Always writing to a beat, though I may pull from the random thoughts and feelings I’ve jotted down during my day-to-day. But the beat is usually the biggest factor in helping with writing a verse as opposed to little blurbs. If it’s something crazy, like some clamorous buzzsaw synth with a vocal sample of an elderly woman gasping or something, then the words will match that atmosphere. If it’s something calmer, I will adjust accordingly.

9. What dictates the direction of your lyrics? Are you led by an idea or topic you have in mind beforehand? Is it stream-of-consciousness? Is what you come up with determined by the constraint of the rhymes?

Man, I will pull from anything. My immediate surroundings, maybe a sign I see on the street; or something someone said earlier that I thought was funny or strange; a memory; a feeling I had at a particular moment; a meme or tweet I saw online; the news; a sentence from a book; whatever. Despite the seeming randomness though, I think there are always a handful of topics in my mind that I tend to dwell on or go back to, and it seems like I attempt to compile those disparate sources to fit within those topics even if I didn’t really set out to do that when I started. 

10. Do you like to experiment with different forms and rhyme schemes, or do you keep your bars free and flexible?

Hmm, those seem like the same thing to me. I would say I do both. Lately I’ve been making a conscious effort of trying not to use “obvious” rhymes, so instead of rhyming, for example, “feature” with “creature,” maybe I’ll go with “people” or even “facetious” or something. See, it doesn’t really rhyme, but it kinda does and you can make it work. I think that makes it more interesting. Nothing wrong with “obvious” rhymes though - more of an exercise to keep my mind sharp. 

11. What’s a verse you’re particularly proud of, one where you met the vision for what you desire to do with your lyrics?

I mentioned a collab tape with a producer earlier. I got a song on there that I really think I left the planet on. I wrote it when I was bedridden with COVID, and I think the combination of my brain being in such a vulnerable state and the beat really speaking to me helped with my writing. Don’t get COVID, by the way. Of the stuff I have out at the time of this writing, I like the song “Embryonic” from Shards II. It’s a kind of spoken word thing over a noise sample. I like hearing what different people think I was going for on that one.

12. Can you pick a favorite bar of yours and describe the genesis of it?

That’s a really tough one. It might be recency bias because it just came out, but I like when I said, “Bantustan bandit back on that bolshevik bullshit.” I like the alliteration and I enjoy using political terms in a somewhat irreverent way. “Bantustan” is in reference to the areas in the West Bank that are designated for Palestinians, which have been compared to the Bantustans of Apartheid-era South Africa, which were designated for black Africans; “bandit” in reference to flippant use of samples; and “bolshevik bullshit” because I guess my raps tend to lean pretty left-wing.

13. Do you feel strongly one way or another about punch-ins? Will you whittle a bar down in order to account for breath control, or are you comfortable punching-in so you don’t have to sacrifice any words?

I don’t think I have any authority to tell people how they should or shouldn’t rap. 99.9% of the time I don’t use them because I just don’t need to, and it makes a song easier to perform. But on my song “Nymphs” off of Samizdat (where the line I highlighted in the last question is from), I actually punched-in most of the lines because I was inspired by people like RXKNephew who I feel do it in a unique way, and I just thought it fit the beat. Just seemed like a fun thing to try out. But I don’t really whittle anything down. I have good breath control and sometimes it could even give it more flavor when it sounds like your lungs are about to burst before you finish a line. 

14. What non-hiphop material do you turn to for inspiration? What non-music has influenced your work recently?

Novels of all types, although my favorite authors are ones who can be funny about very serious things - satirical, you know - or know how to play with the English language. The real world. History and politics. Jazz music helps me with finding flows because it is so free and organic. And I really love noise and punk music for the energy.

15. Writers are often saddled with self-doubt. Do you struggle to like your own shit, or does it all sound dope to you?

I like what I put out. It’s not lost on me that many people may find my style outlandish and maybe even unlistenable - that’s okay. It sounds like me and whoever it’s meant for will find it and enjoy it. 

16. Who’s a rapper you listen to with such a distinguishable style that you need to resist the urge to imitate them?

Well, the flow on “Nymphs” was done on purpose as a direct tribute, but otherwise I think I’m weird enough as a person (in a good way) that I can take influence from my favorites such as DOOM or ELUCID and it would still come out sounding like me, if that makes sense. 

17. Do you have an agenda as an artist? Are there overarching concerns you want to communicate to the listener?

I would like to show the listener that rap is a limitless genre and the best genre and the culmination of all genres, where you can say whatever you want, however you want, and that you can really make a beat out of anything. Real-world concerns would focus on eradicating oppression of all people on the basis of who they are (or any basis really) and the use of everyday language in creative and “foreign” ways. 

RAPS + CRAFTS is a series of questions posed to rappers about their craft and process. It is designed to give respect and credit to their engagement with the art of songwriting. The format is inspired, in part, by Rob McLennan’s 12 or 20 interview series.

Photo credit: Delaney Nash

[caltropspress]

RAPS + CRAFTS #33: Gabe 'Nandez

1. Introduce yourself. Past projects? Current projects?

Gabriel Matias Fernandez Traoré aka Gabe ‘Nandez. Past projects in chronological order - H.T., Sifu, Disconnected, Plaques (a compilation), Cliquetape, Diplomacy, Grove, Ox, Seven, Strife, Canis Cascus, Pangea, H.T. III, H.T. III (Deluxe), Object Permanence. Upcoming projects - False Profit produced by Thomas Maggart, a collaborative album with U.K. rapper Louis Jack, and more.

2. Where do you write? Do you have a routine time you write? Do you discipline yourself, or just let the words come when they will? Do you typically write on a daily basis?

My desk, at home. If I’m not at home, then any desk. Or something desk like, if available. I tend to write at night and during twilight, generally speaking.

And yeah I try to write every day, and usually do. That being said, I ultimately need a few days off after writing every day for an extended period of time. But that in itself is also part of my writing process, it’s holistic.

3. What’s your medium—pen and paper, laptop, on your phone? Or do you compose a verse in your head and keep it there until it’s time to record?

Pen and paper always. I’ll take walks and write bars in my head but it all comes together when I pull the pen and notebook out.

4. Do you write in bars, or is it more disorganized than that?

I write in bars, it’s all organized. Scientific. 

5. How long into writing a verse or a song do you know it’s not working out the way you had in mind? Do you trash the material forever, or do you keep the discarded material to be reworked later?

Depends. Sometimes I’ll write 32 bars and decide I don’t want to use them after all, but that doesn’t happen often. I haven’t trashed an entire verse in a minute, there’s usually always a few gems in there that I can re-purpose. If I do trash something forever, it’s usually like…four bars in. Might read it back later and go “What the fuck was I on here?”

The first two lines tend to dictate everything. The first two bars cannot be trash. That’s the headline, it has to be strong because it sets the tone for the entire verse. I make sure the first two work and then it usually stays good from there.

6. Have you engaged with any other type of writing, whether presently or in the past? Fiction? Poetry? Playwriting? If so, how has that mode influenced your songwriting?

Honestly, the text messages I’ve sent women read like straight poetry sometimes. Like I’ll structure them like a poem, stanzas and shit like that, with rhythm and shit. I’m not even trynna come off like Casanova right now, I’m just being honest. Those texts are romantic as fuck and I’m proud of them. 

I’ve had to mess around with other mediums during academia but haven’t done so since I left. 

And ultimately I consider what I do with this rap shit poetry. Not crazy about labels but I’d still classify my writing as that.

7. How much editing do you do after initially writing a verse/song? Do you labor over verses, working on them over a long period of time, or do you start and finish a piece in a quick burst?

There usually isn’t much editing involved and I rarely trip over finishing stuff once I start it. I might take a long time to actually start the verse though, the first two bars. So I’ll just listen to the music for as long as I need to until the first two bars come to me, and then it’s pretty much smooth sailing from there. Usually. Every song is different though.

8. Do you write to a beat, or do you adjust and tweak lyrics to fit a beat?

Ideally, I tailor the writing to a specific piece of music, but I’ve transplanted verses to other beats before, definitely.

9. What dictates the direction of your lyrics? Are you led by an idea or topic you have in mind beforehand? Is it stream-of-consciousness? Is what you come up with determined by the constraint of the rhymes?

It really depends. There are general themes in my life that dictate the themes in my art, and I can just go stream-of-consciousness while sounding topical in my creative universe on any song. Sometimes a specific thing will inspire me, like my song “Commerce God” for example, which was inspired by the god Hermes/Mercury, and riffs around the statue of Mercury on top of Grand Central Station.

10. Do you like to experiment with different forms and rhyme schemes, or do you keep your bars free and flexible?

I would say both.

11. What’s a verse you’re particularly proud of, one where you met the vision for what you desire to do with your lyrics?

Good question, and a hard one. I’ll say “Ox” 'cause it’s the song of mine that’s reached the most people so far. I think it’s cause it has a balanced amount of depth and flexing. That beat goes crazy too. Stars just aligned on that one.

12. Can you pick a favorite bar of yours and describe the genesis of it?

“Self emancipated from a place of permanent ruin” is one that comes to mind. It’s a comment on how I kicked narcotics and alcohol but also sounds real fly and rolls of the tongue well. 

It’s from a track called “Semtex.” Wrote that one in like half an hour off of no sleep at 5:00AM type shit . Always fond of those type of sessions.

13. Do you feel strongly one way or another about punch-ins? Will you whittle a bar down in order to account for breath control, or are you comfortable punching-in so you don’t have to sacrifice any words?

I’m cool with punching in 'cause I’m good at it and can make it seamless. Or at least seamless enough where I’m cool with it. But there are times where I know I can just one-take a section of a song, so I’ll do that.  I’m with whatever needs to get done to get the song recorded, and the procedure is never exactly the same. It’s all very instinctive when I’m in the booth.

I’ve one-taked an entire song before, my song “Up Top.” First take, one take. That was crazy. But I don’t go in there planning on doing that. That just happened organically.

14. What non-hiphop material do you turn to for inspiration? What non-music has influenced your work recently?

Old books and stories. Theology, mythology, some philosophy. From different cultures. 

Otherwise life. People, the interactions I have or have had with them. Dreams sometimes.

15. Writers are often saddled with self-doubt. Do you struggle to like your own shit, or does it all sound dope to you?

Self-doubt isn’t something I struggle with in general. All of my music is objectively great because it’s tediously well made. I might cringe at some of my old stuff, but I don’t at most of it.

16. Who’s a rapper you listen to with such a distinguishable style that you need to resist the urge to imitate them?

Off top, Prodigy. But, to be honest, I’m at the stage where I’ve found my voice, so I don’t really run into situations where I’m writing and go, “Nah, that’s his shit.” It does happen sometimes, but it’s rare. 

Sometimes I’ll throw a dart in someone else’s style on purpose as an homage.

17. Do you have an agenda as an artist? Are there overarching concerns you want to communicate to the listener?

I’m here to express myself through art. By doing so, my viewpoints are shared, my energy is felt. This action, in turn, communicates the essence of my being and my spirit, which does what it’s intended to do, according to or regardless of my intention. 

I can’t control how someone is going to react to an action I take, let alone how my art is going to make them feel. I’m confident that I can direct and influence accurately - I’m confident that we all can. But, ultimately, I don’t have a desire to sway people in a particular direction, through art or in everyday life. That’s up to people.

RAPS + CRAFTS is a series of questions posed to rappers about their craft and process. It is designed to give respect and credit to their engagement with the art of songwriting. The format is inspired, in part, by Rob McLennan’s 12 or 20 interview series.

Photo credit: Sebastian Thompson

[caltropspress]

ISSUE 19 available

Hellhounds on His Trail: E L U C I D's REVELATOR available now.

Email caltropspress[at]gmail[dot]com or DM on IG or Xitter [at]caltrops_press.

Issues will also be available at ELUCID's NYC tour stop on January 18, 2025.

[caltropspress]

Hellhounds on His Trail: E L U C I D's REVELATOR

I speak what I see.

—Saul Williams, “Elohim (1972)” (1998)

I say that one must be a seer, make oneself a seer. The poet makes himself a seer by a long, prodigious, and systematic derangement of all the senses.

—Arthur Rimbaud, “Letters of the Seer” (1871)

Every technological change begins with a spiritual revelation.

—Nathaniel Mackey (2016)

1.  LASCIATE OGNI SPERANZA, VOI CH’ENTRATE

The same motherfucker got us living in his hell. 

—Chuck D, Public Enemy’s “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos” (1988)

I must forewarn you even now: what I intend to speak about, and in which I shall get myself entangled for reasons more serious than my incompetence, they are, I believe, without solution or exit. Two years ago, ELUCID promised that I Told Bessie could be significantly darker: “Trust me, it could be way more apocalyptic.” REVELATOR fulfills that promise. I Told Bessie introduced ELUCID as an anti-mystic mystic; on REVELATOR, we find him between the forge and the flame. He speaks from filthy tongue of god and griot, offering a <brand> of spiritual healing in the same <vein> as Dälek’s “Spiritual Healing” [for brand read “fire,” “cauterize,” “marked ownership”; for vein read “cold,” “spike,” “artery”]. At turns, his speech sounds of languages diverse, horrible dialects, accents of anger, words of agony, and voices high and hoarse. On ITB, ELUCID had just arrived in Heaven, trespassed its gates, yet stubbornly refused to sit down, to repose. On REVELATOR, he’s at Hell’s wrought-iron threshold, absolutely ruptured.

ELUCID emerges as a transgressive and dark magus speaking the omniversal language of Sun Ra. The first words spoken on REVELATOR, evidently ad-libbed, recall both Fritz Lang’s expressionistic Tower of Babel and Mister X’s psychitecture: “Metropolis…inverse overlord skyscape…” Another filmic nod would be to PTA’s There Will Be Blood (2017), where the climactic and classical rage of Daniel Plainview is unleashed as he screams: I am the Third Revelation! Plainview is, as his name intimates, an unbeliever, and he masterfully coerces preacher Eli Sunday into stating he’s a false prophet and that God is a superstition. 

See, the First Revelation was in the Old Testament (Show me your commaaaandments, as ELUCID drones on “Barbarians”); the Second Revelation was Jesus sermonizing that new shit; why mightn’t it be that the Holy Spirit was preparing another? ELUCID delivers the Third Revelation; he is the Seer, the Revelator—entering through a hatch [re: portal] of Houston horrorcore and disharmonic hard bop. REVELATOR is his unexpurgated rendition of K-Rino’s Stories from the Black Book (1993). The mutant blues of ITB have turned to hypnotik hip-noize—serrated, jaggy, shrapKnel-shattered, caltrop-piercéd. We witness, firsthand, the doom gospel he has previously preached about in practice, in praxis, in the demoniac rhythms and the patterns. Ganksta N-I-P’s “Reporter From Hell” (1993) amalgamated with Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell (1873).

2.  NOISOME THE EARTH IS

“Here in this hymn-deaf hell,” Rimbaud reports back, but in ELUCID’s hell all we hear are hymns—shrieks, semiwept, semisung. “A black wail is a killer,” Tracie Morris, Harryette Mullen, Jo Stewart, and Yolanda Wisher write in “4 Telling” (2021), a posse-cut poem. Production of “a satanic symphony,” Rimbaud says. Sounding like EPMD in the pulpit, Rimbaud claims “[t]heology is serious business: hell is absolutely down below.” He describes moonlight when the clock strikes twelve, “the hour when the devil waits at the belfry.” Go get a late pass, in other words, as PE presses on “Countdown to Armageddon” (1988) and ELUCID reiterates on “MBTTS” (2016). “Watch me tear a few terrible leaves from my book of the damned,” Rimbaud writes, appealing to the Devil, “...I will unveil every mystery.” 

ELUCID unveils histories of mysteries during his descent. On record, he shares what he sees. He sees Rimbaud in Hell. He sees Kanye and JPEGMafia in hell, Ye with BURZUM in Gothic script emblazoned across his chest. He sees Rubble Kings with SS skulls and sigs sewn onto Flyin’ Cut Sleeves denim. He sees Black Benjie’s assassin in Hell. He sees Richard Hell in hell holding White Noise Supremacists to account for how they treated Ivan Julian (“Mutants can learn to hate each other and have prejudices too,” the latter told Lester Bangs). He says peace to SKECH185 and sees him “playing devil’s advocate with Steve Albini’s Black friend.” Finally, he sees the cerberus in hell—the “monster cruel and uncouth,” according to Dante (c. 1321)—the 3-headed anti-crowd dog. He sees its three gullets, red eyes, and unctuous beard and black and belly large. He sees the wretched reprobates. He sees muzzles filth-begrimed. He sees hellhounds here, there, and everywhere.

3.  ROUND US BARK THE MAD AND HUNGRY DOGS

From forth the kennel of thy womb hath crept A hellhound that doth hunt us all to death—

—Shakespeare, Richard III, 4.4.49-50 (c. 1592-1594)

“Hands off,” ELUCID commands on “THE WORLD IS DOG,” the opening salvo on REVELATOR [salvo, a discharge of weaponry; yet also salivate: dog’s drool, secretion, spittle, spit the verse]. “It’s just happening,” he shouts—it’s happening to us; we are subjects of history, its malevolent thrum. “I can feel it ’fore you say it,” and I’ve no reason to doubt him. But allow me to litanize anyway.

In Afro-Dog: Blackness and the Animal Question (2018), Bénédicte Boisseron writes that the dog, the canis familiaris, is “an unwilling participant in the history of social injustice,” a casualty to a depraved Pavlovian conditioning. She cites an “association between canine aggression and black civil disobedience,” reflecting a “prism in which race and dogs insidiously intersect in tales of violence.” She refers to these as cyno-racial (dog-black) representations.

Bloodhounds—aptly-named barking, beastly embodiments of biopower—were “imported from Cuba or Germany” during slavery and “trained to pursue escaping slaves in both the Caribbean and the American South,” Boisseron writes. Dogs were designed to “become ferocious only when in contact with blacks.” The Narrative of James Williams, an American Slave, Who Was for Several Years a Driver on a Cotton Plantation in Alabama (1838) provides insight into this odious operation:

A negro is directed to go into the woods and secure himself upon a tree. When sufficient time has elapsed for doing this, the hound is put upon his track. The blacks are compelled to worry them until they make them their implacable enemies; and it is common to meet with dogs which will take no notice of whites, though entire strangers, but will suffer no blacks.

The Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave, Written by Himself (1849), meanwhile, offers a suspenseful, first-person account:

We had been wandering about through the cane brakes, bushes, and briers, for several days, when we heard the yelping of blood hounds, a great way off, but they seemed to come nearer and nearer to us. We thought after awhile that they must be on our track; we listened attentively at the approach. We knew it was no use for us to undertake to escape from them, and as they drew nigh, we heard the voice of a man hissing on the dogs.… The shrill yelling of the savage blood hounds as they drew nigh made the woods echo.

The training, of course, isn’t only about ghoulish intimidation; the hunt would often climax with violence. “When the slave runs away,” Boisseron explains, “the master needs to symbolically reassert his domination through a ritualized act of flesh cutting.” [FANG BITE!] Frederick Douglass spoke of such savagery: “Sometimes in hunting negroes…the slaves are torn to pieces.” Mutilation of runaway slaves, Boisseron claims, enacted “a rhetoric of edibility.” Derrida called it carno-phallogocentrism, linking the slavehunter’s virility and carnivorism, savoring “deeper shades of carnage,” as ELUCID says on “ZIGZAGZIG.” It has never relented. In the wake of Michael Brown’s murder in 2014, the DOJ issued a report that detailed “puncture wounds” left in children by the Ferguson K-9 unit. The victims of these “bite incident[s]” were always Black. 

ELUCID also speaks of how victims “force-feed a war machine” on “ZIGZAGZIG”—regions and relics swallowed whole, irrevocably. In their plateau “Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible…” (1980), Deleuze and Guattari write: “You become animal only molecularly. You do not become a barking molar dog, but by barking, if it is done with enough feeling, with enough necessity and composition, you emit a molecular dog.” Somewhere on a desolate Yonkers street corner, DMX sleeps with a pack of strays, lying in wait.

4.

Police forces…have used dogs to break up rioting mobs…. The dogs’ snapping teeth, swift movements and indifference to the crowds’ menacing threats have made mob control a routine procedure for the forces which have the dogs.

—“A Progress Report of the Assembly Interim Committee on Governmental Efficiency and Economy on Using Dogs in Police Work, California” (1960)

If a dog is biting a black man, the black man should kill the dog, whether the dog is a police dog or a hound dog or any kind of dog… [T]hat black man should kill that dog or any two-legged dog who sicks the dog on him.

—Malcolm X (1963)

In a contemptible case of cultural exchange, two German shepherds trained by a Nazi stormtrooper were used by police in Jackson, Mississippi to attack crowds in support of the Tougaloo Nine—Black students attempting to access books from a whites-only public library. That was in 1961. [TRUST NONE!] Two years later, Bull Connor utilized dogs to disperse protestors in Birmingham, notoriously documented by Charles Moore and Bill Hudson. Hudson’s photograph of fifteen-year-old Walter Gadsden in the mongrel maw of law enforcement fills textbook pages to this day, while Moore’s photo would be aestheticized and reproduced in Andy Warhol’s Race Riots series in 1964. “Police dogs is one of the accepted practices in police riot work,” a swinish Alabama sheriff said in ’63. Not much has changed. When people demonstrated outside the White House gates after the death of George Floyd, an orange fascist—who ELUCID begrudgingly won two long-standing bets on—threatened them with “vicious dogs.”

“Dogs were once perceived as dangerous due to rabies,” Boisseron writes, “but today the black man is the one responsible for making the big dog look ‘un-kind.’” A.G. rapped about the dogs with the rabies on 1992’s “Runaway Slave,” looking backward to understand his present, but by the ’90s, the ever-evil LAPD was calling Black people “dog biscuits.” An officer in a St. Louis suburb faced suspension after posting to Facebook that Ferguson protestors “should have been put down like a rabid dog the first night.” The aggression of the dogs, Boisseron points out, has “metonymically shifted from zoonotic to a racial context.” In essence, society shouldn’t fear the dogs—society should fear a Black planet populated by Black men. [FEAR ALL!]

The messaging has frequently been mixed—deliberately muddied (mutted, we might say) to defy understanding—racism skewing absurdist. In “A Dark Brown Dog” (1901), Stephen Crane used a “little dark-brown dog…an unimportant dog, with no value” with a “short rope…dragging from his neck” for allegorical purposes. [SHORT LEASH!] A child drags the dog “toward a grim unknown,” the child’s intolerant family. The dog is by its very nature powerless, “too much of a dog to try to look to be a martyr or to plot revenge.” Eventually, the drunk father beats the dog with a coffee pot and tosses him out of a fifth-floor window, falling dead in the alley below. Crane’s well-meaning story speaks to mystery writer Stanley Ellin’s comparison of the “solicitous white intellectual” and the “arrant racist,” the former of which “sentimentalized Black lives” and “patted them on the head as one would a pet spaniel.” To retreat to such romanticizing, Ellin says, fulfills the “function of the stereotype, and it matters very little whether the stereotype is that of vicious hound or pet poodle.”

As a child of the ’80s, ELUCID was exposed to the same surfeit of televised copaganda as the rest of us. McGruff the Crime Dog colonized our commercial breaks, asking us to join the feeding frenzy against drug dealers and burglars (Take a bite out of crime!). Meanwhile, Harlem World’s Herb McGruff provided counterprogramming and warned us of the real “Dangerzone.” “The idea of dogs attacking black people has become a haunting and unresolved image in the collective memory,” Boisseron writes, or, in ELUCID’s words: Eating everyone eventually. THE WORLD IS DOG!

5.

On SEERSHIP! (2020), a project ELUCID labeled a “work of spirit”—a work of glitch-hop and runt pulses and ill-bent illbient—we hear a blare of noise at roughly the one-minute mark. That calamitous blare is sublimated into the soundfury that sets off “THE WORLD IS DOG.” ELUCID’s bogeyman-down production, in collaboration with Jon Nellen’s urgent drumming and Luke Stewart’s grave-groove bass theories, provide for the sonics of a slave escape, equal parts panic and empowerment. “The dissonance is real,” ELUCID raps on “VOICE 2 SKULL,” “—I be feeling woozy,” and that’s the vibration here. In Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1865), Harriet Beecher Stowe describes how the vengeful and unforgiving escaped slave Dred defends a runaway from a hellhound:

…a party of negro-hunters, with dogs and guns, had chased this man, who, on this day, had unfortunately ventured out of his concealment. He succeeded in outrunning all but one dog, which sprang up, and, fastening his fangs in his throat, laid him prostrate within a few paces of his retreat. Dred came up in time to kill the dog…

“THE WORLD IS DOG” is pulsing and gnashing, a sequence of switchbacks and untoggled kill switches, a hyper-aural freak-out, to borrow some phrases from ELUCID’s New York Times blurb for Ornette Coleman’s “Science Fiction.” We should’ve anticipated the arrival of “THE WORLD IS DOG,” should’ve been listening to the panting precursor curses. Be it the gold chain punk asphyxiation of Soul Glo opening for ELUCID at the ITB release show at Mercury Lounge in 2022; the absurd matter we heard from his Shapednoise feature in 2023, wherein he “backhoed the graves”; or his appearance on Kofi Flexxx’s “Show Me” a few months later (I show you what it look like…)—the signs were all there. When word got out that ELUCID was spinning Miles Davis’s “Rated X” (1974), we should’ve known it was over, cataclysmically. 

If “Rated X” is the model, then ELUCID has set out to attain “music’s most elusive grail,” as Gary Giddins calls it in Visions of Jazz (1998): “the promise…of an open-ended form that defies harmonic conventions and regulation eight- and twelve-bar phrases in favor of a flexible but contained form.” An anonymous internet blogger called “Rated X” a “demented church service where the organist has become possessed by an evil spirit and worshippers have fallen into a trance.” ELUCID puts the incendiary fuse in fusion—dark energy acceleration | emergent fervor, fire & brimstone | Tony Williams Lifetime-type EMERGENCIES [ecphoneme—bang—ecphoneme—bang…]. This is rap-fusion—uncontrived, channel alive. 

6.

“Fire for fire, wade in the water,” ELUCID raps on “YOTTABYTE,” singing the same sorrow song of a century-plus before. “Wade in the Water” (Roud 5439) was a spiritual that reminded the runaway slaves to use streams and rivers to throw the hellhounds off the scent. “If you hear the dogs,” Harriet Tubman said, “keep going.” If “THE WORLD IS DOG” begins in a dreaded delirium, it ends [DEVOLVE!] in radical resistance.

The faded amateur photograph that graces the cover of I Told Bessie shows a man fending off a German shepherd; or, feasibly, the man is elevating the dog—healing it, calming it, exorcizing its engrained demons. Admittedly, it’s a crazy mixed-up world, a doggy dogg [dog-eat-dog] world, and the dog can occupy valences of both killer and companion. Everyone is dehumanized in the slave hunt, in the crowd dispersal. The hunters and the cops are the actual beasts (“That’s the sound of da beast,” KRS howls; “the murderous, cowardly pack,” Claude McKay snaps); the hunted resort to instinct, fearing for their lives, amygdala swelling with signals.  

In Martin Delaney’s serialized novel Blake; or, the Huts of America (1859-1862), protagonist Henry Holland, a.k.a. Blacus, a.k.a. Blake, wields a “well-aimed weapon” and “slew each ferocious beast as it approached him, leaving them weltering in their own blood instead of feasting on his.” Delaney doesn’t only draw scenes of retributive slaughter; his characters also speak of how “da black folks charm de dogs.” Threats neutralized. Power harnessed. The Yorkshire Terrier on the cover of Swans’ The Seer (2012) bares Michael Gira’s chompers—he’s merged with the pup. Hip-hop auto-interpellated dog into dawg (s/o to Althusser).

7.

As we learn from “Amager,” ØKSE’s song featuring billy woods, dogs only violate at the behest of men. woods relates a narrative of detainment at Trondheim Airport. The purportedly “colorblind drug dog” exudes innocence (“flopped on the floor, head on his paws”), though its mere presence smacks of discipline and punishment. As the Norwegian customs agent “palm[s] [woods’] clean drawers,” woods sardonically reflects, “I been a nigga too long.” He “know[s] the dance” and “know[s] the damn song,” resentful of this choreography of incurable racism that has been all too common and recurring throughout his life. He understands what’s happening epistemologically (“I know they hoping… I know I’m clean…”), but he also knows “those clammy hands going from the crack of [his] ass to the weight of [his] balls” are suggestive of castration, and when you’re crossing borders, what, what, say what, say what, anything can happen. As they go through the rigamarole of “mak[ing] calls, x-ray[ing] the empty suitcase, / [And] going back through [his] pockets,” woods stews with “impotent rage,” the aforementioned emasculation working its spell. He doesn’t begrudge the animal laboring under the aegis of the Tolletaten, though: I pet the dog as I leave. Scathed but saved. He charmed de dog.

8.

After dealing with so many strays I had learned one thing: be patient.  

—E.A.R.L.: The Autobiography of DMX (2003) 

Perhaps no figure better illustrates the subjugation and subversion of the hellhound than DMX. In the lead up to the millennium, Dark Man X embodied the dog of vengeance; he exemplified the undoing of the dog’s quasi-innate hatred of Blackness. In ELUCID’s words, he emerged as a “whole new nigga” with “skin [untorn], eyes [ungouged], hair [unshorn].” DMX’s arrival in 1998 felt like centuries in the making. He waged a vendetta in the name of every runaway slave and Civil Rights demonstrator. He’d slept on the streets and shared the concrete with his dogs, strays like himself:

Stray dogs are normally scared of people; they’re scarred by whatever neglect or abuse put them out on the street. Or if they’re lost, they’re depressed because they can’t find their way home. But that morning I decided that no matter how long it took, I was going to get that dog to come over to me. I was going to convince him to trust me and make him mine…. I started looking all over for strays that I could catch and train for myself…

DMX charmed de dogs and the rest of us in the process. He stayed shitty, cruddy, trading the cartoonish bow-wows we’d become accustomed to (via Snoop) for fierce grrrs and arfs, elevating rap’s onomatopoeics. With “Get At Me Dog,” he turned a familiar B.T. Express funk sample feral. In the video, the most achromatic Hype Williams ever managed, X holds possession of the Tunnel crowd, on a stage but of the people. His only bling: a stainless steel choke chain that collars his neck. The black-and-white video disorients with strobe effect and negative exposure—pitch blacks suddenly transform into flashing whites. Russell Simmons and Lyor Cohen look on from the periphery of the crowd like, well, out-of-place bitches. The video captures the raw power of DMX, his stygian intensity, reminiscent of Tadayuki Naitoh’s 1971 photograph of Miles Davis. Like X, Davis harnesses his rancor and exhibits his self-possession.

The success of DMX’s subversion of the dog trope likely apexed with his Woodstock ’99 performance. Before a majority white crowd of hyperthermic slavehunter descendants, DMX rocked what Thomas Hobbs calls “blood-red dungarees.” X “growls viscerally” and “convulses” across the stage in a manner “akin to a Bad Brains gig in a sweaty punk basement.” DMX—like Dred and Blacus before him, like ELUCID to come—subdues the monstrous, cowardly pack, and has them eating Milkbones out of his hand by the end of the 45-minute set. 

9.

The first thing we feel on REVELATOR is a snarling, ravenous “fang bite” and the exhale of “dog breath.” We search for alternatives: the RZArector’s fangs on 6 Feet Deep (1994) maybe, a presence that Kodwo Eshun argues is akin to a head “filled with revelations that impeach the daylight.” We might think of the parallel universe of “The Big Rock Candy Mountains” (1928) where “dogs all have rubber teeth,” but REVELATOR doesn’t offer up that heavenscape—only a hellscape where teeth tear rabidly, rapidly. The “dog fangs [which dig] into black flesh,” Boisseron writes, are “deeply ingrained in popular culture.” We’d prefer the hip-hop context for “biting,” like when Rakim invokes “biting and borrowing” on “Follow the Leader,” where “brothers tried and others died to get the formula.” We’re on a “short leash” here, but Chuck D speaks of how he “cut the leash” on “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos” and how prison bars “got [him] thinking like an animal,” and so I think we should act accordingly, tactfully, and lick our wounds.

ELUCID strafes us with 2-syllable units, iambs or IEDs, right from the start: 

Fang bite Dog breath Short leash Pit fight

We’ve not felt shelling like this since the opening words of DMX’s It’s Dark and Hell Is Hot (1998): 

One-two One-two Come through Run through Gun who? Oh, you don’t know what the gun do?

We’re propelled and pummeled by a Dark Enlightenment acceleration; unquestionably, we’re on our heels. ELUCID activates a sequence of 3-syllable units—anapests—as we descend into Hell:

From this height At this speed Downhill Careening

Later, the 2- and 3-syllable units alternate: “Shit that binds, / Spit out, / Ribs came spared.” Such blunt syllabics occur elsewhere on the album as well. “YOTTABYTE,” for instance, introduces a more dactylic, grounded pattern: “Hard science, / Scum gutter.” These are billboard throw-ups in Mister X’s Radiant City. They’re terse skull snaps like when Michael Gira sings, “Space cunt, / Brainwash” on “The Apostate.”

“I’m not psychic, but I’m reading,” ELUCID clamor-raps. The rapper has repeatedly denied the spiritual and supernatural in favor of tangible work, learning, reading. He much rather attend a demo or browse a bookstore than show his face at a séance or a church service. “The more I thought, the less I prayed,” he raps on “BAD POLLEN.” In this regard, he’s a dialectical materialist, much to the dismay of so many nimrod New Age seekers. ELUCID is not your self-help savior. Appropriating occult symbology in song is not inscribing sigils on the navel of a newborn. More likely he’s standing in solidarity with the child laborers pulling opal from the ochre mines of Madagascar. “Black Jesus hated bill collectors—I do the same,” he raps on “IN THE SHADOW OF IF.” 

In The Conjure-Man Dies (1932), Rudolph Fisher’s Harlem murder mystery, the titular conjure-man, one N’Gana Frimbo, is the closest forebear to ELUCID, a practitioner of the aesthetics of alchemy but one who knifes through the nonsense:

There are those that claim the power to read men’s lives in crystal spheres. That is utter nonsense. I claim the power to read men’s lives in their faces…. Every experience, every thought, leaves its mark. Past and present are written there clearly…. My crystal sphere, therefore, is your face.

“I receive it, then I weigh it,” ELUCID explains. He’s no Knownot but he also knows that he knows nothing, in a Socratic sense (one day it’ll all make sense, trust me [TRUST NONE, FEAR ALL]). He’s a member of a tribe on a quest, receptive of vibes and stuff, asking questions like: What? Can I kick it? Does it live or die? Who gon’ tell me why? Who goes there? Who dare disturb the hive? He remains unflappable, constant, “still inside,” channeling his “honey child” while killa bees are on the swarm angling for the fatal sting.

Our “small world” is razed; it “devolve[s]” as hell is raised—it’s not that tricky. The dog’s got “jaws that grind” and “teeth that tear”; Dante tells us Cerberus “displayed his tusks” and “rends the spirits, flays, and quarters” his enemies. “Where’s a pit, there’s a plague,” ELUCID says, demonstrating syntactically that life is parallelism to Hell but we must maintain. Boisseron discusses the “hysteria around pit bulls” rooted in an “overblown fear of rabies,” and we watched a “plague” of reckless media representation caricature Michael Vick as the very animals he electrocuted. “Pit bulls have been historically used in America as a weapon of stigmatization against blacks,” Boisseron explains, and so every Black man takes up residence in the Bad Newz Kennel when the public deems it convenient, whether they would ever dare to hold the jumper cables or not. If the stigma doesn’t catch up to you, the sickness will. ELUCID’s “pit” evokes morgue trucks reversing up to the trenches in the potter’s field. Careful where you step, or else risk experiencing “a quick trip to glory if you slip.” Pitfalls on every corner, beneath the buildings of every block. Like DMX said on “Get At Me Dog,” If you don’t know by now, then you slippin’.

“Be not afraid,” ELUCID advises, bending Biblical. It is I. It is I. It is I. If we can keep up, he’ll usher us out of the ravaged world. If not, “don’t know, don’t care—get out my way!” ELUCID’s “in the garden,” his own private Gethsemane, agonizing and “pouring for everyone whole came before [him]” and didn’t survive the onslaught. He pours out a little liquor, and like Pac who had his “back against the brick wall, trapped in a circle, / Boxing with them suckers till [his] knuckles turn[ed] purple,” ELUCID is intoxicated by his own dogged determination. Pac was simply rewriting McKay, who likewise found himself “pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!” Glorious as it sounds, ELUCID’s exhausted—as we all are—by song’s end: voided. All he can put together are fragmented, clipped, incomplete idiomatic and figurative expressions: “razor walking”; “bridge to nowhere fast.” Still, he bites back. Like DMX, he’s “eating everyone eventually,” indiscriminately, re-establishing the order of “the world [that] is dog.” He, too, is dog. Sic ’em, and get sick wid’ it.

10.  TEKNOHELL

Today the plagues of Revelation are…the disastrous results of…the irrational use of technology.

—Pablo Richard, Apocalypse: A People’s Commentary on The Book of Revelation (1995)

“Police dogs were often framed as technology,” writes Tyler Wall, a scholar of racialized state violence. He cites a Baltimore K-9 officer who claimed “[t]he dog is the most potent, versatile weapon ever invented…. You can’t shoot around corners, but dogs can go anywhere you direct them—like guided missiles.” These comments anticipated the NYPD’s rollout of actual automated, data-gathering robot dogs, of course. But “CCTV” and “YOTTABYTE” escort us into an arena of Ballardian extreme metaphors and emergent technologies—a teknohell—where “Spot bots” prowl every city block.

“CCTV,” co-produced by ELUCID and August Fanon, screeches like a dial-up modem gone diabolical—a discordant din of panic chords. They’ve programmed drum patterns around the sound of the CCTV shorting out—the dread comes in sine waves: megahertz hurts | multiplexing and motion-detecting | low-frame rate. The cameras are everywhere we look, but ELUCID splits the veil and the surveillance. The mandala is a panopticon, a C-band satellite dish for bodies to rot upon. Impaled by feedhorns. Parabolically resting in peace. In “a moment of clarity,” ELUCID fucks the noise and begs, “Don’t be mad at me.” I ain’t mad at cha. Who could begrudge the corner boy who cracks the lens of a varifocal security camera with a rock in the courtyard of the low-rises (they call it “the Pit” on The Wire)?

The ill communications that ELUCID was channeling on Armand Hammer’s We Buy Diabetic Test Strips continue to nauseate him. A year prior to that release, ELUCID told Gary Suarez that he was working to “dismantle what isn’t serving and then download and update with what does now.” For the man who “feel[s] a way about proving [his] identity to robots,” he can also acknowledge damage has already been done, which is evident in his diction. On SEERSHIP!, he despaired: “Every device I own knows my latitude.” On “NY Blanks,” he warned: “computers are listening.” In Jacques Derrida’s “Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy” (1983), he describes a Tetsuo-like man/machine [MAchiNe] who loses clarity between the sender and the receiver of electronic messaging:

And there is no certainty that man is the exchange [le central] of these telephone lines or the terminal of this endless computer. No longer is one very sure who loans his voice and his tone to the other in the Apocalypse; no longer is one very sure who addresses what to whom. But by a catastrophic overturning here more necessary than ever, one can just as well think this: as soon as one no longer knows who speaks or who writes, the text becomes apocalyptic.

In this sense, REVELATOR is, at turns, an apocalyptic text. Much of ELUCID’s work has been. The cover of SEERSHIP! features a P1 phosphor font choice, as if it’s destined for a monochrome monitor. One might come to believe ELUCID writes in matrices of terminal green.

11.

In Fisher’s The Conjure-Man Dies, N’Gana Frimbo is questioned by Dr. Archer:

“You actually are something of a seer, aren’t you?” “Not at all…. I filled in the gaps, that is all. I have done more with less. It is my livelihood.” “But—how? The accuracy of detail—”

“Even if it were as curious as you suggest, it should occasion no great wonder. It would be a simple matter of transforming energy, nothing more. So-called mental telepathy, even, is no mystery, so considered. Surely the human organism cannot create anything more than itself; but it has created the radio-broadcasting set and receiving set. Must there not be within the organism, then, some counterpart of these? I assure you, doctor, that this complex mechanism which we call the living body contains its broadcasting set and its receiving set, and signals sent out in the form of invisible, inaudible, radiant energy may be picked up and converted into sight and sound by a human receiving set properly tuned in.”

ELUCID showcases his broadcasting set and his receiving set, but his carries the outlaw spirit of an illegal cable box or the pirate radio signal from the short-lived Dread Broadcasting Corporation out of West London in the 1980s. ELUCID as DJ Lepke in limbo.

12.

The title “VOICE 2 SKULL” evokes a note to self, a Nextel push-to-talk, or a voice-to-text: ELUCID as fully automated, as a cybernetic MC. But the human essence—the flesh, blood, and bone—is still there: “I get up before everyone and lose my mind first— / For even just an hour, I work in sound and feeling—sometimes fury, / Asking the whys and hows when lies turn to vows.” That is, he grinds; his work ethic, the grating of gears. He starts his day, travels where he will, but always “free roaming” and “pinging stupid” as a “transcontinental satellite receiver freaking forth.” On “XOLO,” as tek, he “reach[es] inside—only to [his] elbow, / [And] pull[s] it back out like [he] was rewound.” Like a VHS tape, or Betamax. Functioning as some new plastic idea. We’re all wired and wasting away with “mirror[s] in pockets” as we busy ourselves “looking hard in the camera.” Not squinting to make sense, merely modeling a manufactured exterior. 

13.

Digital overlords don’t need free promo…

—ELUCID, ØKSE’s “Skopje”

The teknohell is ever-present on REVELATOR—you can’t escape its server rack bracket clutches. “Defrag the files,” ELUCID raps on “BAD POLLEN,” attempting to counter what Nathaniel Mackey calls a technology of decay. RFIDs, modems, CCTVs, pagers—all this tech isn’t anachronistic; it’s timeless—e-waste salvaged or scavenged—but ELUCID evolves, keeps it moving [...like a moving target], even if that means “bloody fingers on the keypad,” which we heard of on Valley of Grace. His own magnetic fields fuck up electronics; he lives in the “chaos hour shadow play” mentioned on “THE WORLD IS DOG.” “The situation’s unreal,” as Chuck D says on “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos.” “There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal,” Harold Pinter responds. Ultimately, ELUCID is “wholly unimpressed by your social media metrics,” at least according to “MBTTS.” He offers up “brick and mortar rhyme for distorted time” and “offline [is where] [his] core thrives.” He knows what’s what: these gadgets and gizmos are “soon to be rendered useless: and then what?,” as he inquired on Small Bills’ “Even Without You.” Merchandise is Brand New Second Hand as you sit in an ergonomic swivel chair before Roots Manuva’s radiation-emitting dusty microwave. ELUCID searches for a truth beyond the motherboard.

14.

I tell you this in truth; this is not only the end of this here but also and first of that there…the end of history…the death of God, the end of religions…the end of the subject, the end of man, the end of the West…the end of the end, the end of ends, that the end has always already begun, that we must still distinguish between closure and end…. it is also the end of metalanguage on the subject of eschatological language…

—Derrida

…so let me shut the fuck up.

—Editor’s note [me]

Tell me a lie, tell me a truth becomes ELUCID’s Max Headroom mantra for “CCTV,” minus the sputtering, the glitching. We like to think that the “truth [will] find you where you at—it’s fine, it’s fair,” he raps on “RFID,” but, more often than not, revealing the truth requires trying. Your responsibility, Toni Cade Bambara insists, is to “try to tell the truth,” and “[t]hat ain’t easy.” It’s tough to summon the strength when we “have rarely been encouraged and equipped to appreciate the fact that the truth works.” The machinery of lies and disinformation come fine-tuned with a gleaming chrome finish. As for truth, we’re numb to its virtue; neutered by negative thoughts and clouded past experiences. But if we can pursue truth, prove it, and impress it upon our enemies, according to Bambara, “it releases the Spirit.”

The “cattle prod [will] shock you back some reality,” ELUCID raps. But truth can seem a hackneyed notion in the wrong hands. In Baldwin’s “Going to Meet the Man” (1965), Jesse, an abusive cop who takes sadistic pleasure in cattle prodding Civil Rights protestors, is charged with bringing the singing of jailed demonstrators to an end. He targets the “ringleader” of the group: “I put the prod to him and he jerked some more and he kind of screamed—but he didn’t have much voice left.” The protestor refuses to call for the others to stop singing, either out of defiance or debilitation from the beating he’s suffered, so Jesse’s frustration grows: “...the prod hit his testicles, but the scream did not come, only a kind of rattle and a moan.” Revisionist history can’t absolve the truth of that barbarity.

In one final [ex]plosive shout before “CCTV” transitions, ELUCID says, “Steal me your blues.” A call for reappropriation of what has already been plundered on a mass scale. The blues are never blameless. ELUCID collects blues and deranges ’em—traditional | twelve-bar | crowbarred | prison blues—deep cobalt with sapphiric crazing. REVELATOR most obviously invokes Blind Willie Johnson’s version of “John the Revelator” (1930), what with his scum gutter growl of Who’s that writin’? Jeff Place called Johnson a “guitar evangelist,” a man who was blinded by lye in his eyes at seven [the means of his marring and age should not go unnoticed], a reenactment, perhaps, of John the Revelator’s being dunked into the boiling oil cauldron—not nearly the “musky oils” ELUCID spoke of on “Obama Incense.” The teknohell is home to a Victor Talking Machine, no doubt, and the 78 RPM shellac record of Robert Johnson’s “Hellhound on My Trail” (1937) spins centripetal. RJ’s bottleneck slide screams phoenix as he sings, I got to keep movin’. For protection from the dogs—zig, zag, zig.

August Fanon and ELUCID sacrifice the frenetic for a straightforward refrain to conclude “CCTV,” something to mesmerize with layered vocals, subliminal messages not so sub- that they’re unmanageable. Take freedom: ELUCID wants you to hear the message, the charge. “All power to oppressed people” isn’t just a slogan for him; for others, as we know, it undeniably is. He asks for a “red light on the virtue signal for the come-latelys”; or, as PremRock says on ShrapKnel’s “Human Form”: “Closeted moderates post black squares then act scared of actual progress.” On “NY Blanks,” ELUCID “refuse[d] to kneel and pray for hashtag another slain name, / On the dashcam frame of sight.” Technology pervades every moment of life and language—from sonogram to dashcam and the SMS notifications of each and all else in-between.

15.

Child Actor’s production on “YOTTABYTE” traps us inside the machine with hex bolts knocked loose and rattling around. Again, technology works its way into everything. “Stints and priors, / Sweat labor, / August sun,” ELUCID raps, seemingly on a chain gang—the teknohell is a maximum security prison: biometrics | video analytics | signal-jamming | duress alarms. Data storage facilities bursting at the seams. 

“Terabyte, gigabyte, niggas bite,” ELUCID spit on “Bitter Cassava,” adding with a whiff of cybersexuality, “I heard ass taste better in the summertime.” Do androids dream of having a romp with the provocatively named Deckard? Do Nexus-6 replicants have rape fantasies? “Came out the pussy and wrote a classic,” ELUCID says on “YOTTABYTE,” and I’m left wondering what Jodorowsky’s love machine from Holy Mountain (1973) might have to do with this. Cold and sterile tech-infused corporeality | conjugal visits with slinky cyborgs | proto-pornbots.

“SKP” presents as more sound poem than song—its patterns erratic, and therefore erotic—unpredictable with vocals pitched down and up arbitrarily. Andrew Broder provides a mellowed pulse backdrop, tunneling toward something visceral, and not the gear boxes and springs, the sensors and metal tubes, that make up a robot’s innards. ELUCID has previously proclaimed he was “a dyke in a past life,” a Sister Outsider standing alongside Audre Lorde: “Images of women flaming like torches adorn and define the borders of my journey, stand like dykes between me and the chaos.” “SKP”—Some Kind of Power—draws inspiration from Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” (1984), which reframes eroticism, removes it from the teknohell. 

I know you know the codes, ELUCID says. His lover has the key—they each possess a copy. And the key is crucial, at the crux of the relation; listen to what woods says on “INSTANT TRANSFER”: “It’s all skeleton keys on the keyring I keep, / Keys I never seen before for places I never even been, / Luxury cars—I key ’em and go to sleep.” Keys, keys, keys, as Angela Carter writes in “The Bloody Chamber” (1979)—to china cabinets and safes and every other secret place. The narrator’s husband, though, forbids his young wife from using one key in particular. Not the key to his heart, as she presumes (“skeleton key to ya heart,” ELUCID echoes on “CCTV”), but “the key to [his] enfer.” He teases and tantalizes her and throws all the keys into her lap as “the cold metal chill[s] [her] thighs through [her] thin muslin frock.” Something’s not quite right; “we was down singing off-key: how?” ELUCID says on “XOLO.” The key might crack the code | stroking and fondling | heavy petting | as artificial intelligence records the taps and timbre of your keystrokes, stealing sensitive passwords—a sensate focus therapy for anonymous internet users. Probably best to keep the key under the mat.

“The erotic is a considered source of power and information within our lives,” Lorde writes. ELUCID answers: “Knowing is enough—deepest core informing all.” The erotic, Lorde notes, “offers a well of replenishing and provocative force to the woman who does not fear its revelation.” “From here forth,” ELUCID says, “you spit, you scream, you burn my tongue too raw—be soft.” Erotic, Lorde explains, is from the Greek eros, “born of Chaos, and personifying power and harmony.” Harm may precede harmony; pain prior to reaching “beyond the posture and the program.”

“Call me out my name,” ELUCID commands, “I’ll be the one you cum for.” Even if he brushes against the sophomoric at times (“Baby, please pop that pussy for breakfast” would be one such example from the archives), ELUCID’s sex raps swerve sophisticated. Lorde says the erotic is often “confused with its opposite, the pornographic,” which would demonstrate sensation without feeling. When ELUCID says “call me out my name” to his lover, he’s exploring “how acutely and fully [they] can feel in the doing.” Lorde explains, “[A]s we begin to recognize our deepest feelings, we begin to give up…being satisfied with suffering and self-negation…with the numbness.”

The technological bent to “SKP” climaxes with connectivity (¿Tu Tienes WiFi?)—a mutual dependance—“power which comes from sharing deeply any pursuit with another person.” In 2020, ELUCID told Tim Fish about how a trip to South Africa inspired Valley of Grace (2017): “...my wife was there, she was still my girlfriend then, and she was working at a law center, working towards protecting sex workers…. So being there, she’s at work for at least 8 hours a day, and I’m in the flat just hanging out….” At the end of “SKP,” ELUCID declares “in a union made now, tomorrow anything…,” and we feel the phantom phrase “…is possible” in the absence that follows.

“There are many kinds of power,” Audre Lorde tells us, “used and unused, acknowledged or otherwise.” 2Pac, for instance, never achieved ELUCID’s level of erotic power in song. On “How Do U Want It?” (1996), Pac was forward with his proposal, seeking consent (“Tell me is it cool to fuck? / Did you think I come to talk? / Am I fool or what?”), but copped to his preference for pornographic perversions, the “positions on the floor” he invokes: “Ironic, ’cause I’m somewhat psychotic.” Lick before you bite, ELUCID raps on “BAD POLLEN,” his own nod to the erotic/psychotic dichotomy. But it’s more tempered than Pac’s imprudence. He seems to taunt Pac’s shortcomings on “YOTTABYTE”:

Wiggle with the lights on, Ripple off thrust, Ooh, it’s just us, Yes, I need it how I want it, Feel like Southern California with my belly full…

Not to say ELUCID’s erotic power is purely PG-13; it’s not. On “BAD POLLEN,” he “wake[s] up and thrust[s] inside [his] missus, / Two fistfuls of hair, [his] face buried.” Flashes of a possessive desire, an “I Wanna Be Your Dog” energy: So messed up—I want you here…in my room…I want you here. But even when ELUCID goes raunchy, it’s organic matter, raw materials—mud and bone and verdant muck—not nuts and bolts and a nexus of cables. His trysts always involve talking out the mud, crashing through the walls…, scorch, [and] stimuli response.

16.

I might work with the wires wet if we talking ’bout power…

—“INSTANT TRANSFER”

With SKECH185’s analog(ue) tape dispenser on loan (also note the Basinskian “disintegration tapes” mentioned on “IKEBANA”), ELUCID patches and splices the first bars of “INSTANT TRANSFER” in a terse trimeter:

Five side, keep the tape warm, Wrapped rays weighing way more, Racks raid how we wage war, Slack walk to a main course.

The alliterative and consonantal groupings (“wrapped rays”; “racks raid”; “weighing way”; “we wage war”; “slack walk”; “keep the tape”) and slant rhymes present an inconsistency that models a human touch—the warmth of the analog tape undermining digital media and the instantaneous [gratification and otherwise] operations of an ATM withdrawal, just as we see the plastic bank card repeatedly guided into the multi-function maw by a human hand in the “INSTANT TRANSFER” video.

Nostalgia is no retreat from the teknohell. Even on a memory song like “HUSHPUPPIES,” the hum of Integrated Tech Solutions interferes when ELUCID recalls the “static sizzle with the grease in stereo”—frying fish and the kitchen TV set in concert with one another. “HUSHPUPPIES” feels like a loose adaptation of Henry Thomas’s “Fishing Blues” (1928), a fond recollection of fish as sustenance. Both ELUCID and Thomas begin with an urgency; Thomas “went up on the hill about twelve o’clock,” and ELUCID speaks in a tongue-twisted, nursery rhyme: “Must find fried fish—it’s Friday.”

REVELATOR has us fearing for the worst: fish fried in sulfuric waters, gilled vertebrates pulled from the River Styx—but it’s not that. “HUSHPUPPIES” feels down-home, a brief view of before, of Bessie-time, of salve and saviors and stove-top safe haven. “Put on your skillet,” Henry Thomas sings, “Mama gonna cook ’em with the shortenin’ bread.” “HUSHPUPPIES” works as a child-vision folk song, much like the “choking on a church mint” episode of “Guy R. Brewer.” ELUCID is an artist composing twenty-first century folk ditties, intent on inclusion in the Roud Index. I’m wary of the “sugar water, lemon sugar, water lemon” lyric sequence, though—the words transmit, mutate, like a gain-of-function in the kitchen sink. I feel he’s trapped speaking with “the language of the on-again/off-again future, and it is digital,” as Laurie Anderson once said.

17.  PEOPLE TEND TO THINK THAT A PAGER’S FOUL

In 1991, Q-Tip asked us if we knew the importance of a skypager. The responsibility fell to Phife Dawg to explain it in full:

The “S” in skypage really stands for sex, ………………………………………………….. At times I miss the pager so you don’t get vex, Having bad days like a voodoo hex, Conceptually, a pager is so complex that I be standing on the verge, ready to flex.

ELUCID portals us to that very ’90s dimension to pick up on Phife’s “-ex” rhyme scheme.

Skypage text, alphanumeric, Blind days—rain taste metallic, Dark roads lined with tall pine, Fire tongue in the annex.

Where Phife’s explication was elementary with its backronyming and monosyllabic rhymes, its simile and succinct storytelling, ELUCID’s post-millennial penchant for broken language and Holocene imagery elevates the archaic device of the skypager to the status of fetish item. One can see the huddled assemblage of survivors circled around the faint LCD glow on the annex floor, the acid rain falling through the collapsed roof.

18.

“14.4” drags us through the mass hysterics of Y2K mania with Saint Abdullah and The Lasso layering assorted ambient jazz touches to the Tron grid. ELUCID and SKECH185 fuck with the trellis modulation, raising a “Napster ’99” download speed from the titular 14.4kbps. They float over dial tones: “I dial in; you dial it down,” ELUCID says as he receives the signal from Armand Hammer’s “Landlines.” He’s charged with a “couple hundred-thousand watts,” so “do hold the line.” ELUCID and SKECH rap with “revolutionary millennial movements,” in the words of Eugene D. Genovese, “born in social catastrophe or in the fear of impending catastrophe.” Still, though, in the West African tradition, “time is cyclical and eternal; the religious tradition cannot then therefore readily provide for an apocalypse.” Fear all? Maybe it’s more fear none than we first thought.

I sometimes configure ELUCID as Aaron Dilloway (of Wolf Eyes, and—for our purposes here at present—their 2006 limited-release Dog Jaw) with a contact mic—full-contact stage presence | kilowatts killing | bringing the pain in a really real way. He wades in distortion, awash in both antiquated and active teknology (“*69—hit redial,” he remarks on “XOLO”). Hell is populated with tek—yottabytes of it like motes in sunlight, refracting his digipoetics. He announces proudly, “Afrika Islam loop in the key of my Lord,” which is a permanent—nearly park jamming—register for him to operate within. He dials in to Zulu Beats on WHBI 105.9 in New Jeruzalem and cracks codes for the afterfuture.

19.  THE HAINTS OF HAM RADIO

Never polemical, ELUCID makes aslant references to oppressive histories, dating back antediluvian. One second he’s “in ya sundown town holding [his] dick dolo,” and the next he’s bouncing to bear witness to an “illegal chokehold.” He time travels from crabgrass frontiers to a sidewalk slab on Staten Island. He may be “too old to comfortably rock logos,” but he’s in-the-ever-know [and the ever-now] of former lives—he embodies Gift of Gab running from Feds in his red Pro-Keds, and he hits the racks of Saks Fifth Avenue with the Lo Lifes. Nowadays, though, he’s Naomi Klein’s No Logo incarnate. In another nanosec, he’s a po-mo narcocorrido singer reading “the note like Chalino, except it’s off the SIM card.” He’s hopping through traversable wormholes of genealogical blues “from Ham to Cush to Nimrod.” Settle our assassin’s eyes on Ham, hm?

In A Season in Hell, Rimbaud “set out in search of the true kingdom of the children of Ham.” Wyatt Mason argues that part of Rimbaud’s legend can be attributed to the rumors of him as “the scoundrel who sold slaves in Africa.” Though it’s accurate that Rimbaud was free roaming, sub-Saharan, his vagabondage through the Horn of Africa might not have included slave-trading—that point is disputed by his biographers. In The Rebel (1951), Camus called Rimbaud a “bourgeois trader” of percussion rifles and Ethiopian coffee, but made no mention of slaves. In 1994, China Achebe stated that “[w]hen Rimbaud became a slave trader, he stopped writing poetry” because poetry and slave trading “cannot be bedfellows.” When he wasn’t tagging up the Luxor Temple on a lark in Egypt or running guns across the border into Shewa land, Rimbaud’s travelogue was interlarded with diagnoses of typhoid, synovitis, and osteosarcoma—his right leg eventually lopped off. Perhaps we can ascribe his disease-ridden body to A Season in Hell’s most profane moments, such as when he writes, “I’m an animal, a nxggxr. But I can be saved. You’re all fake nxggxrs…”

The so-called “curse of Ham,” a blasphemy on Black people courtesy of Christian whites, has long contaminated the discourse—a shibboleth adorning the flowstones and helictites of the teknohell. “According to the scriptural defense of slavery,” Eugene D. Genovese writes in Roll Jordan Roll: The World the Slaves Made (1974), “...the enslavement of the blacks by the whites fulfilled the biblical curse of Ham.” But Genovese’s research indicates “the slaves did not view their predicament as punishment for the collective sin of black people. No amount of white propaganda could bring them to accept such an idea.” When ELUCID talks of “hammers hang[ing] on loop” on “THE WORLD IS DOG,” or “hammers out the Hummer” on “VOICE 2 SKULL,” I construe this cargo pants weaponry, this pakinamac in the back of the Ac’ (or Hummer), as a means of countering white propaganda, comparable to Treach’s chainsaw or Havoc’s scythe. Throughout REVELATOR, we find ELUCID going ham—hard as a motherfucker—but ELUCID’s too humble for any Tisci gilded throne. Instead, think of him as John Henry driving steel through the carpal tunnels of sinners and thieves. He sings a Scaramangan screed as he works, something gleaned from Seven Eyes, Seven Horns (1998): “Alphabetic hammer, magnetic grammar.”

ELUCID advances with “apocalyptic movement,” which Derrida defines as “the gesture of denuding or of affording sight,” a gesture which is sometimes “more guilty or more dangerous,” such as when Noah gets krunk in his tent and “Ham sees his father’s genitals.” ELUCID sees through the myths, the slander; instead, he exposes us to a soundtrack of staticky swells as he ascends out of the teknohell. I imagine the noise is a replication of what Joyce’s radio in Finnegans Wake (1939) sounds like. Here’s that signal recounted superlatively:

tolvtubular high fidelity daildialler, as modem as tomorrow afternoon and in appearance up to the minute…equipped with supershielded umbrella antennas for distance getting and connected by the magnetic links of a Bellini-Tosti coupling system with a vitaltone speaker, capable of capturing skybuddies, harbour craft emittences, key clickings, vaticum cleaners, due to woman formed mobile or man made static and bawling the whowle shack and wobble down in an eliminium sounds pound so as to serve him up a melegotumy marygoraumd, eclectrically filtered for allirish earths and ohmes.

In Kodwo Eshun’s More Brilliant Than the Sun (1998) | [“MBTTS,” ahem], he writes that “Long-distance telecom systems intensifies sensations of imminent Revelation.” Oh, indeed.

20.  POST-INDUSTRIAL DOOM GOSPEL FOR THE GODLESS

On “Old Magic,” ELUCID announced himself as the “revelator, armed and dangerous,” so nothing he does on this album should come as a surprise. This lot of doom gospel spells shatters expectations, though. “I’ve been revelatin’” is what he told us on “Smile Lines,” and he’s yet to cease or even slow. The Book of the Seven Seals bulges, busting its binding and bending back its raised bands. REVELATOR, lyrics transcribed and beats notated in neumes, passes as ELUCID’s Book of Revelation.

I see it all, Michael Gira throat-sings. I see it all I see it all I see it all I see it all I see it all… over the sunn oh godspeed charnelhouse chanting and gunmetal grind of SWANS’ “The Seer” (2012). ELUCID is all-seeing as well—omniscient shit. It wasn’t always this way. On “Blame the Devil” from Save Yourself, ELUCID admitted that “revelation had [him] spooked.” In his preface to The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God (1932), George Bernard Shaw describes the Book as “a curious record of the visions of a drug addict which was absurdly admitted to the canon under the title of Revelation,” which only adds to the terror for an ’80s child who grew up with crushed crack vials underfoot.

On “Blame the Devil,” ELUCID saw the “seven eyes, seven crows” and “was lost.” “Now I’m found,” he would continue, “End of days—amazing time, / Everybody’s got a word—mine just happens to rhyme.” No longer cowering in church corners, surrounded by the congregants of what he has called a “death cult,” ELUCID’s Revelation remix has a liberation theology reverb. Pablo Richard’s Apocalypse: A People’s Commentary on The Book of Revelation (1995) places the curious record in the context of revolutionary power:

Revelation arises in a time of persecution—and particularly amid situations of chaos, exclusion, and ongoing oppression…. Revelation transmits a spirituality of resistance and offers guidance for organizing an alternative world…. Revelation is wrath and punishment for the oppressors, but good news (gospel) for those excluded and oppressed by the empire of the beast…. Revelation teaches us to imagine the present and final eschatology with a sense of joy and hope…. The book of Revelation is helping to create a new historical and liberating language.

21.

In The Book of Revelation: Apocalypse and Empire (1990), scriptural scholar Leonard L. Thompson points to the difficulties of understanding the “symbolic, metaphoric, even bizarre language of the seer.” John the Revelator confessed to being “in the spirit” when he composed the book, what Eugene D. Genovese might call “religious frenzy” in another context. Thompson receives the Book of Revelation as a nesting language, one in which “highly symbolic language” nests into “ever-larger contexts—ultimately into a cosmic vision that includes the whole social order, the totality of nature, and suprahuman divinities that invade but transcend both society and nature.” I think it wise to receive ELUCID’s lyrics in a similar manner. Lucien Goldmann might call it Towards a Sociology of the Rap Album. “The seer tends to develop his material concentrically into ever-widening rings,” Thompson contends. ELUCID reps such a structure in his verses, in his songs, even lending his own phraseology to the process, be it those “shimmer rims spinning loopy” on “VOICE 2 SKULL” or the “orbitings” we hear about on “IKEBANA.” ELUCID will “leave the meter running” only to “trigger doomsday.” He sips “Ethiopian coffee” and seconds later “space junk” floats by. We’re hipped to the particular and the panoramic. Scaramanga was similarly skilled. Samuel Diamond writes of how “Seven Eyes, Seven Horns” is “as much a meditation on symbology, semiotics, and brand identity as it is an erudite MC’s spin on a passage from the Book of Revelation.” Or, as Scaramanga Shallah himself says on the song, “What a script…” [as in, whew].

22.  MYSTIC STYLEZ

All a mystery…

—“THE WORLD IS DOG”

…nothing could have been more impressive than this cool, deliberate deep voice, stating a mystic paradox in terms of level reason.

—Rudolph Fisher, The Conjure-Man Dies (1932)

To bring it back to that damnéd Derrida essay once again [back is the incredible], MC Deconstruction redefines “apocalypse” as revelation: “Apokaluptō, I disclose, I uncover, I unveil, I reveal the thing that can be a part of the body, the head or the eyes, a secret part, the sex or whatever might be hidden, a secret thing, the thing to be dissembled, a thing that is neither shown nor said…” This revelation “not only affords seeing but also affords hearing/understanding.”

We’ve prior seen ELUCID as mystagogue—a mystik journeyman, a Walkman invader—he whose function is to initiate us into the mystery. As Guru was above the clouds, the mystagogue positions himself, according to Derrida, “above the crowd [which] he manipulates through…a crypted language,” but, despite what some dum-dums [to borrow a term from diggity Das EFX] may argue, ELUCID is not beyond understanding. We must strive to understand misunderstanding; we must endeavor forevermore to miss understanding. Those who throw fits and fail to accept these norms—I have to presume—have not been listening to hip-hop very long or well. “Words mean things but don’t have to,” ELUCID declared with Derridean flair on “Split Tongue.” “[I]f anything has outlived its usefulness it is ‘coherent’ metaphor, one with explicit contours,” writes E. M. Cioran in The Trouble with Being Born (1973). “It is against such metaphor that poetry has unceasingly rebelled, to the point where a dead poetry is a poetry afflicted with coherence.” “I’m okay with not understanding,” ELUCID said on Small Bills’ “Here Be Dragons,” “—I’m okay in the dark.” Dark Man X knows all directions.

Listening to ELUCID’s music, you enter a delirium, which Derrida refers to as a Verstimmung—“a social disorder and a derangement, an out-of-tune-ness…. The tone leaps and rises when the voice of the oracle takes you aside, speaks to you in private code, and whispers secrets to you.” On “IKEBANA,” ELUCID cops to “talking out [his] head, a fever set in.” Like Rimbaud in Obock, shivering, with his knee gauzed over, not a poetic thought to be found.

23.  SOUND & CEREMENT

Sound has a grammar to it—believe me—that will cause that thing that you call bending to open up in a way you won’t believe it.

—Ornette Coleman (2005)

…I just bend the rhyme…

—“Sir Benni Miles” (2021)

ELUCID, more than any other active MC, embodies a compositional approach that conflates poetics and musicality in a manner that doesn’t favor or diminish either—symbiotically rendered, synchronistically flexed: the orphic bend. In an epistolary novel by Nathaniel Mackey, Orphic Bend denotes a fictional album title of a fictional band. ELUCID asks on “RFID”: “Why play if I can’t bend the rules?” To forbid ELUCID these ludic junctures would be ludacris, a loss of not only file data but of finely wired rap filigree. ELUCID stays bent in both senses—his sentence inclinations, his word inebriations—bent like Miles Davis’s mouthpiece; dead bent like DOOM’s swilling death-drive to fund these experiments. These are “games I win at—mark me,” ELUCID gloats, but he also invites us to “share this reality.” If we’re willing, he’ll leave none of us behind; he won’t orphan us.

“We’re all eventually orphans,” Mackey has said. Elsewhere (namely, “Sound and Sentiment, Sound and Symbol [1987]), he kindles, he forges, the meaning of orphan and Orphic, “an orphan being anyone denied kinship, social sustenance, anyone who suffers, to use Orlando Patterson’s phrase, ‘social death.’” Mackey continues:

Song is both a complaint and a consolation dialectically tied to that ordeal, where in back of “orphan” one hears echoes of “orphic,” a music which turns on abandonment, absence, loss. Think of the black spiritual “Motherless Child.” Music is wounded kinship’s last resort…. Music is prod and precedent for a recognition that the linguistic realm is also the realm of the orphan…. This recognition troubles, complicates and contends with the unequivocal referentiality taken for granted in ordinary language…. Poetic language is language owning up to being an orphan.

ELUCID has previously instructed us on “the difference between loneliness and being lonely,” referencing like a hand reaching out—to Gwendolyn Brooks, who feels the “under buzz” of loneliness. But ELUCID’s bent is in the direction of populating his cathedral with the motherless children of his bastard style.

24.  INSIDE REPEATING NUMBERS

To stave off the dogs, the teknohell, and the unknown opps, ELUCID makes endless calculations but with an imprecise science. One can imagine the setting for such calculations resembling N’Gana Frimbo’s consultation room, what with “obliquely downcast light” and “lateral walls…adorned with innumerable strange and awful shapes.” Those strange and awful shapes—like glyphs carved onto dusty clay tablets—included “gruesome black masks with hollow orbits, some smooth and bald, some horned and bearded; small misshapen statuettes of near-human creatures, resembling embryos dried and blackened in the sun…forbidding designs.” The conjure-man’s mantelpiece showcases a “murderous-looking club, resting diagonally.” The club is actually “the lower half of a human femur, [with] one extremity bulging into wicked-looking condyles, the other…covered with a silver knob representing a human skull.” ELUCID holds the club like a stylus, dealing in tally marks and totalities until the skull smudges out an answer.

Numbers are concrete, seemingly. “Numbers don’t lie, but they damn sure don’t tell stories either,” ELUCID rapped on “NY Blanks,” skeptical of statistics. On “IKEBANA,” he starts with “3800 out the credits.” I ain’t count it, he admits, “but it’s sweat labor.” He narrows the narrative with estimates: “ten or something”; “on time, but off-key”; “almost, almost over…so close…almost over….” These are “complicated chemicals” that only work to deepen what Rimbaud called “numerical visions.” Do the math. On “YOTTABYTE,” it’s “dead money [and] thirteen guineas for a pickaninny piano.” On “BAD POLLEN,” he “brought a trunkful of tiny violins to the bloodletting.” ELUCID can “play one on each finger for every seven bodies.” These aren’t exact measurements or accurate costs. As he says on “INSTANT TRANSFER,” he’s “counting up in the dark” (in Frimbo’s consultation room, right?). Persevering and perseverating on “14.4”: “System error, / Less than zero, / Humanity pending.” Sounding like he needs to get his affairs in order.

The numbers game inevitably leads to money—nasty business like toxic assets and credit derivatives—and money is time; time, money. “Can’t clock the kills,” ELUCID says on “THE WORLD IS DOG,” echoing Master Ace in ’90 (“Can’t Stop the Bumrush”) and Jay-Z in ’96 (“Can’t Knock the Hustle”)—earning miles while on the clock as a touring musician, tallying transatlantic and domestic flights. But is there ever a time when he’s not “waiting on money, thinking of murder,” as he raps on “BAD POLLEN”? Does the hustle, the bumrush, the killing ever cease? Or is it an interminable loop of episodes mimicking bell hooks’ oft-quoted (by all the wrong people for all the wrong reasons) opening sentence from “Killing Rage: Militant Resistance” (1995)? “I am writing this essay sitting beside an anonymous white male that I long to murder,” hooks wrote. “I’m at the age they start to count my nights out,” ELUCID raps on “VOICE 2 SKULL,” because death or revolution seems “a black power nap away” (“IKEBANA”). “Time wore us out,” according to ELUCID, speaking in the past tense as if the deal has already gone down, the jig is up, the end is here. The “24-hour drones” he mentions on “14.4” survey the damage. Too easy to get greedy and selfish at the end (“Give me a minute…give me five…”), shuffling off this mortal coil as “we wait—who knows the hours?”

25.

“IKEBANA,” despite the time-and-numbers crunch, sketches a scene of restorative habits, a survival guide for the godless. It falls short of He-is-risen optimism (Orpheus is the figurehead here, not Jesus), but we’re headed from hell to the heliosphere. ELUCID wishes the world “good morning” with “oatmeal” and “Ethiopian coffee.” He’s calculating to find peace. He feels that “everybody knew” but him—crying it out; they must know the secret to peace. Miscalculations leave him envious. Everyone laughing at his ignorance, at “all [his] comings and goings”—the state-of-the-art GPS tracking of the teknohell. RFIDs on the heels of his feet triggering field detectors.

The solution is a sometimes-turn inward: Being alive, I must look up. If the Ethiopian coffee doesn’t cut it, he’ll order an “everything bagel with the tofu scallion” or “vacuum the whip” (as he does on “VOICE 2 SKULL”). We’ve heard of his domestic resolve before. On woods’ “As the Crow Flies,” ELUCID was “cleaning up [his] kitchen, / Emptying the fridge, bleaching counters, [and] sweeping corners.” By placing his “silverware in order,” he rebuilds the rubbled world. Peace is plucked from panic elsewhere, as on “YOTTABYTE” where he’s “squatting in a Barcelona hotel room playing Wu-Tang Forever,” observing the world rather than his phone, nourishing himself through sights rather than storing up the cache and cookies of his frequently visited sites.

After many calculations, the epiphany points toward what he details on “BAD POLLEN”: “I squeeze my children’s hand and walk harder against the wind,” the same wind that rustles the dead roadside bracken, as Cormac McCarthy writes in The Road (2006). ELUCID turns to his children, his family. woods, it should be stated, does the same, as noted on “Niggardly (Blocked Call)”: “I walk ’em to school, then the park, / Hold they little hands when we cross the street.” A small step to cross the street is far simpler than crossing the Rubicon.

“IKEBANA” is another ELUCID and Jon Nellen production, and Gabriel’s muted horn is buried in the mix of the song’s bridge, a distant and dour reveille as ELUCID sings softly. As he bemoans everybody knowing what he doesn’t, Nellen’s percussion pulls us to where ELUCID wants to be: looking up. Being alive, he’s looking up out of hell. We hear his will to struggle, to survive, and to exist, but we also hear our will to “look up,” or research meaning, reflected—manufacturing it if we have to—as in, “You must learn” (life being nothing more than a boogie down production). Improve ourselves through awareness of others, of our loved ones especially, of our situation within all the scattered “scorching space junk, x’s and orbitings.” You must change your life, in Rilke’s words.

26.  MAN THREATENS LANDLORD

Kill your landlord, no doubt…

—“Roaches Don’t Fly” (2021)

“SLUM OF A DISREGARD” celebrates thirty years of skullduggery since The Coup’s “Kill My Landlord” (1993), but underhanded housing policies—what ELUCID calls “comforts of material conditions core-rotted”—are nothing new. Look at Langston Hughes’ “Ballad of the Landlord” (1940):

Landlord, landlord, My roof has sprung a leak. Don’t you ’member I told you about it Way last week?

Last week is “way last week” because any leak sooner than soon, quicker than quick, becomes an inundation, a deluge, and the subsequent damage, mold spores, and stench overwhelms. Hughes’ subject alludes to withholding rental payment until the landlord “fix[es] the house up new,” but the landlord threatens back with “eviction orders.” The threat is communicated through the tenant’s account, through a series of questions—a dialogue masquerading as a monologue for the first five stanzas of the poem. The landlord is absent, a ghostly presence only there to extract profit. When the tenant turns to intimidation (“If I land my fist on you…”), we suddenly hear the landlord’s voice summoning police and precipitating an ugly and familiar scene:

Copper’s whistle! Patrol bell! Arrest. Precinct Station. Iron cell. Headlines in press…

For his threat of violence (which the landlord exaggerates as an attempt to “overturn the land”), the tenant receives a sentence of “90 DAYS IN COUNTY JAIL.” But for his neglect and threat of dispossession, the slumlord suffers nothing.

“The house is built on deceit,” Boots Riley raps on “Kill My Landlord,” acquired through primitive accumulation and the successive decades of sniping and stealing, compressing a courseload of Proudhon property is theft readings into a solitary verse. ELUCID’s landlord—nay, slumlord—is on a “Tel Aviv holiday” when the crisis hits. While the landlord uses ELUCID’s monthly rental payments to feed IDF soldiers [...my taxes pay police brutality settlements, billy woods shouts back], ELUCID struggles to get him on the phone. When he does, he finds the slumlord’s “sincerity was threadbare” and “urgency been missing.” ELUCID “smile[s] like watermelon slice,” a simile which upends the slumlord’s own race-based neglect through subversion. ELUCID will grin and bear it (for the time being), but he won’t let it go without signaling to the slumlord—or himself at least—that he’s privy to the power dynamics which undergird the exchange. In doing so, ELUCID enacts a stratagem used by poets before him. “We sliced the watermelon into smiles,” Terrance Hayes writes for fourteen consecutive lines in one of his sonnets from American Sonnets from My Past and Future Assassins (2018). In Langston Hughes’ “125th Street,” the poet doesn’t allow racist stereotypes to overshadow Black joy:

Face like a slice of melon grin that wide.

Hayes, Hughes, and ELUCID invoke historical [mis]representations by combining the smiling, subservient Tom caricature with the conniving, watermelon-thieving Coon to deliver a knowing wink to the reader/listener. In a promo video for REVELATOR, images of James H. White’s Watermelon Contest (1896) flash across the screen—an Edison film under Brakhage-like production techniques.

The longer ELUCID stays on the line with his slumlord, the sharper the sting. Mahmoud Darwish once asked, “Why did you lean on a dagger to look at me?”—and ELUCID listens long-distance to the slumlord “turn the dagger slow” with every second that passes. This is an abrasive exchange—ELUCID’s complaints and his characterization of the slumlord’s speech effectively evoked through consonance: “Too late to make it right, / Tongue-tied talk, / Make noose quick.” The slumlord stumbles over his words, speaks offensively, and we’re reminded to “believe what people say they are and do.”

Like “Ballad of the Landlord,” the conversational lines within “SLUM OF A DISREGARD” are one-sided. We hear ELUCID, in father-mode, pressing: “If this happens all the time, what’s the plan?” The slumlord’s excuses are elided, for his words are meaningless drivel. “Both my boys have my eyes,” ELUCID coldly explains, “—don’t force my hand.” His hand, like the tenant’s fist in Hughes’ poem, communicates to us that stakes is high. “Don’t force my hand,” he pleads, but Darwish writes that “we are forced to return to the inhospitable myths / where we have no place.” On “Between the Lines” (2001), Slug rapped: “If I see you as a threat to my seedling or my sibling, / I’ll die to pull the plug on your machine.” This kind of escalation really isn’t escalation at all—it is meeting the violence of the slumlord, a violence aimed directly at the face of children. “Black mold, / Black lung, / Black child,” ELUCID chants, delineating the equation. He receives “no callback” and his fury rises. An international call culminating in a rat’s nest of cords and wires—a switchboard in a landfill.

“Abuse of power comes as no surprise” isn’t just a Jenny Holzer holdover, it’s ELUCID seeing and stating that which has become so tiresomely obvious. We would have to delude ourselves to see something other than what stands before us. “I am not a prophet claiming revelation, or that my abyss reaches heaven,” Darwish writes in “Mural” (2003), “By the full power of my language I am the stranger.” We’re no stranger to oppressive language, language that oppresses. On October 9, 2023, Israel Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said, “We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.” A year later, nearly to the day, ELUCID tells a truth to counter that lie: My landlord is a Zionist.

27.  FRESH AS FUCK ON STOLEN LAND

With his home in disrepair, ELUCID looks elsewhere to ease the tension of his rent-strife. “IN THE SHADOW OF IF” documents a search for refuge. He seeks to construct alternate realities and “alt timelines” where he’s making “[his] own breaking news” and “Lucy shit[s] diamonds” instead of habitating the sky with them, her kaleidoscope eyes gouged out. But you would need kaleidoscopic vision, of sorts, to manifest such a place. Though ELUCID has copped to “nam[ing] a thing or two into reality” on “SKP,” “IN THE SHADOW OF IF” postulates an added if—if he wasn’t “born in the year of this country’s last recorded lynching,” maybe he’d be better off. But as he says on “Microdose,” the question—and the reality—is “who stopped recording?”

Fleeing the city, ELUCID heads upstate and beyond—somewhere coastal that he can walk “barefoot in the sand.” We discover him “stepping over dead fish in a bucket hat.” This is the downbeat of deep ecology. “Salt and sulfur,” he raps, and he “can’t tell where the wind blows.” Gusts die down and Hell reemerges (as if it ever left) | guts tighten. “I’m on that Black leisure for the increase,” he says, calling in a reservation at The Black Dog while reclined on his beachchair on Martha’s Vineyard’s Inkwell. ELUCID uses his ink well. But this all seems a reverie, an abstraction, as he challenges us to “pick a coordinate / [And] show [him] where localized perceived violence didn’t come with receipts, / White sheets.” Klan presence pervades any and all vacay getaways. You might not see the hoods and horses up north, but you will see “too many flags—one too many flags.” He’s not gonna front, “seeing all those flags outside the city make[s] [him] nervous.” These are ELUCID’s dead flag blues. They represent “physically violent reminders.” Natasha Tretheway writes that flags “inscribe both a figurative and literal white supremacy onto the physical landscape and the psyche landscape of the American imagination.” Go back to “The Blackout” (1998) where Jadakiss warned that those “rednecks up in the mountains’ll try to slay you.” ELUCID ends up feeling like he’s “been cursed to concrete,” cordoned off by external forces, told to stay in the city, which makes him wonder how he’ll keep from going under. 

“The devil is a lie,” he exclaims, realizing “we are the ecology.” The mob made the devilry, manufactured it out of gurgling hate, and unfortunately “a moment to pause never goes on sale,” so peace can’t be purchased. ELUCID told us he was a “green book reader” on Armand Hammer’s “Stole,” navigating the netherworld of where no Black man, woman, or child is welcome. Time is warped; he angles through a simultaneity of oppressive timelines—“twenty years behind and ahead.” The “Black futures” he sought to build on “Stole” start to feel unattainable. Instead, he finds himself gripping “black steel in the hour of submission in search of a place to land… / …in search of a place where our blood don’t precede us.” Fact is, they built it on Indian graves. The land is composed of blood-soaked soil—runaway slaves torn to shreds, lynchings, and extrajudicial killings. On the original “Black Steel,” Chuck says, “Here is a land that never gave a damn.” ELUCID wants “purple rain” and “wild greens,” a lush and fertile vista where’ing the flowers grow and the price of avocados is free. “Search[ing] for a place to land”—forty acres won’t do. Can a reparations calculator really tell the cost of dispossession and plunder?

28.  WHO’S THE SUN SEEKING?

Xoloitzcuintli guides ELUCID into Hell, but ELUCID guides us out of Hell, penning a travelogue in miniature—traffic patterns and images of languid BK denizens. Virgil-level guidework, as Mos Def once said, “from the tree-lined blocks to the tenements,” so you don’t get vicked. On “No Grand Agenda,” ELUCID spoke of his “daydream on city buses, / Brooklyn pushing [his] button,” and on “XOLO,” we appear to receive the full panorama once the sound of sulfuric screeches and barking dogs in the distance fades:

Staring at the sun— a corner florist fell asleep with his mouth open on St Felix,  downhill on Dekalb, Green light succession, Stop-and-go, rubbernecking, Swerve, change directions,  Head in a smoke cloud…

He squints through the sunlight so that “he won’t burn” his retinas. Not to worry—he comes protected. REVELATOR’s cover image (photograph’d courtesy of A. Richter) shows ELUCID in shades. We can map the antecedents—be it Miles Davis’s shield sunglasses, Porsche 5620s with the frame screws (precursor to Kool Moe Dee’s steez); be it Sun Ra’s Courrèges Eskimo slit glasses that he rocked on the cover of Rolling Stone in 1969; be it Afrika Bambaataa’s future-geometry set of shades. ELUCID’s might as well be a Makrolon face-shield, as he’s protected from the welder’s flash of Hell’s ultraviolet flames. On “CCTV,” he fends off the “sunshine and teargas,” the “flash bang” of dispersal orders, the anti-crowd dog’s growl and howl, the Brooklyn confetti of uprising. He does so just as the Irish travailed through the Troubles, as depicted with punkish punctuation in Ciaran Carson’s “Belfast Confetti” (1989)—with shrapnel (the titular “confetti”) in motion like movable type. ELUCID’s text goes explosive in the same ways as Carson’s: “Suddenly as the riot squad moved in, it was raining exclamation marks, / Nuts, bolts, nails, car-keys. A fount of broken type.” ELUCID’s sunglasses allow him to “see now”—all the “details” with “color-cut clarity.”

Elevating out of Hell requires him to forge his own way, an avenue that becomes familiar: “I’m acclimated, black upon a path, / I made it outta clay.” Rakim crafted in the same Creator-cum-MC way on “Follow the Leader”: “Planets as small as balls of clay.” Get the fuck back, ELUCID orders, Stay the fuck down. Run for your life; duck down—his alarum’s a Rude Awakening. When ELUCID summons N.O.R.E.’s “theoretical niggas on the run eating,” the tempo starts to increase, steadily. Fire kindles and ELUCID says what we already feel: “The house is burning here…yeaaaah.” 

In William Melvin Kelly’s A Different Drummer (1962), Tucker Caliban is a slave descendant who, after serving the Willson family for generations, has had enough. He shoots dead his livestock, salts his land, and sets his house aflame in an act of defiance. The Lasso’s tempo-shift tracks with Kelly’s description of the inferno:

Orange flame climbed the white curtains in the center section of the house, moved on slowly to the other windows like someone inspecting the house to buy it, burst through the roof with the sound of paper tearing, and lit the faces of the men, the sides of the wagons, and the faces of the Negroes…. Sparks curled up and then died, dissolving against dark blue sky…. [T]he rubble of the destroyed home looked like a huge city seen at night from a great distance.

Tucker’s family leaves the town of Sutton and the other Black residents soon follow, baffling the white residents who watch the procession of “suitcases or empty-hand[s]” headed for the state border. As a crowd watches Tucker blast bullets into his horse and cow, witnessing the “sticky blood r[u]n down” their fur,” as they watch him ax “the twisted tree” on the Willson Plantation, “on which his great-grandfather and grandfather had been slaves and then workers,” they think he’s gone mad. Enlightened Harry Leland refutes this, though. “It’s his land. He can do anything he wants to it,” he tells his young son.

29.  P.L.O. STYLE

You may burn my poems and books You may feed your dog on my flesh…

—Samih al-Qasim, “Enemy of the Sun” (1968)

ELUCID dropped a zim zala bim on Armand Hammer’s “Solarium,” but—in recognition that magic can’t be the only survival method—he now promotes a zigzagzig. DJ Haram provides the sound design—a metallic gnashing, a chittering of rebar stakes, and a bass that throbs, muted and distorted, like eustachian tubes swollen from proximity explosions. On “Old Magic,” ELUCID offered a “double portion of protection,” but even charms and conjurings aren’t always enough. Under “war clouds” and a “cruel sky,” his “niggas survive like a moving target.” Zig. Zag. Zig. With the Knowledge, Wisdom, and Understanding of the last letter in the Supreme Alphabet—the zed, the end. Another bend of the body—an Orphic bend toward protest. The thousands upon thousands of Gazan orphans crying out to be heard.

For years, dead prez’s M-1 has argued that the struggle for Black liberation and the struggle for Palestinian liberation were “the same struggle.” “We have always been an international cadre,” he has said, “We have to see ourselves as a movement without borders.” Teknology allows deaths far and wide to be televised, rewound, reproduced on a “watch again” | replay | “share” exploitation loop. “I didn’t watch the video,” ELUCID says—and who can say which video? We wade through yottabytes of video footage like tonnes of debris. The video could be of grieving mothers in Khan Younis carrying the corpses of children, or it could be of Philando Castile bleeding out in the passenger seat of his Oldsmobile 88. ELUCID willed himself to not watch the video—to not tune into the Black death | Palestinian death broadcast—because he already “remembered in [his] body,” in his bones in which the trauma sings, in the code genetically imprinted.

The specter of Palestine pervades REVELATOR. Listeners are more likely to scan ELUCID as “abstract rap” than “conscious rap” or “political rap,” but that’s only because ELUCID’s art is so innately revolutionary and activist, lacking the sharp edges and defined features of more contrived artists. The abstraction is that the unacclimated will perceive ELUCID as a mystic on the mic rather than a rebel. He can be both; he can defy categorization; he can perform more powerfully than any single genre tag or pigeonhole could signal.

The history of solidarity reaches back to the 1970s with communiqués shared between the Black Panther Party and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (Method Man’s P.L.O. Style would never…). Kwame Ture (née Stokely Carmichael) dreamt of “having coffee with [his] wife in South Africa” and “having mint tea in Palestine.” Liberatory lucid dreaming. We collectively hope—and work—for better futures, for the dogs of Abu Ghraib and the hounds of the Great Dismal Swamp pace the same Hell. “I shall not compromise,” Samih al-Qasim writes, “And to the last pulse in my veins / I shall resist.” al-Qasim’s poems were discovered in George Jackson’s San Quentin cell after his death. “Enemy of the Sun” would even be misattributed to Jackson because he had transcribed the poem by hand.

ELUCID finds the energy, the caloric boost, in “locust and wild honey”—embracing this ascetic appetite of John the Baptist. He changes out his alpenflage cargo pants for a camel’s hair robe and leather belt about his waist (getting down with the animal pelts). He shelters in a “deeper shade of carnage,” turned from a whiter shade of pale, and “stare[s] into the fire,” scrying, divining answers from the glowing embers. On “14.4,” he said he “live[s] between two mirrors,” spitting catoptromancy raps wearing the “bulletproof Girbaud” from “YOTTABYTE,” backpocket containing a bulletproof wallet. Layers of protection. It’s the only way to “fix up sharp,” as he says on “IKEBANA” with dizzee rascality. Dressed to impress, he’s a “stiff-lip maroon.” In Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas (1973), we learn that “in Surinam, as in Haiti, Jamaica, and elsewhere, warriors underwent complex rites and wore amulets intended to make them bulletproof…. [I]t was their gods and obeahs that spelled the ultimate difference between victory and defeat.” You already know ELUCID’s been spellling. And because the world always has been and continues to be dog, Cujo, Stephen King’s rabid St. Bernard, can be traced to Cudjoe, the Jamaican maroon leader. “A fearless rebel [who] boasted numerous bloody victories against the British,” Boisseron writes.

When ELUCID sees the “heads of state laughing” on “ZIGZAGZIG,” he knows they’re “liars” and that “hate has a logic.” They laugh “an idiot’s unbearable laughter,” to quote Rimbaud, still sweating through his Hell szn. But so are we all, grappling with the fact that “there’s no conscience, no authority.” ELUCID “live[s] to tell the story, / …to sing the song”—witness to atrocities, articulator of awfulness. When he can, he hammers out a warning. But he’s always on alert for imminent attacks which strike “without a warning.” Despite our teknological advances, we’re still a primitive society—our world still reduces to rubble, routinely. MPR500 precision-guided missiles fall from the sky and a Palestinian child stashes snacks in an abandoned IDF ammunition box. We search for survivors by hand—“Stony ground, metal poke out rubble, / Body twist angles akimbo, / Covered heads huddled”—hoping and praying for signs of life—head aching like rebar through skull, an inglorious Phineas Gage. 

On “Revelation Narrative” from Horse Latitude (2017), we hear the voice of a young child calling out: I want mama. How prescient. But the past tells the present, the future. 1948 | 1967 | 1987 | 2000 | 2008 | 2023 | & every increment in-between. ELUCID calls “from river to sea in lieu of peace, absence of truth.” He finds the gutless heads of state “guilty as charged.” They’re “monster[s] out the darkest abyss,” and—like dogs, like hellhounds—they exhibit a “gnashing of teeth.”

The death toll tolls for thee. John Donne felt the weight of every dun: “Each man’s death diminishes me, / For I am involved in mankind.” ELUCID makes the same pitch, even to those deaf to reason. His mathematics don’t need to be supreme; the most basic arithmetic tells a truth:

Who can still ignore the score? One more—to what end? Man-made horror beyond comprehension.

30.  I WOULDN’T TRUST IT IF THE POET DOUBT

After Revelation come a Genesis…

—Small Bills, “Falling Up” (2020)

No variety of literary originality is still possible unless we torture, unless we pulverize langage.

—E. M. Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born (1973)

ELUCID pulverizes language. The lyrics on REVELATOR read like Bible page cut-ups, like Gysin and Burroughs put the scissors to ’em, like garbled Ghostface transcriptions. Narrative gets negated—not to confound, but to complicate communication. In doing so, ELUCID mirrors our shattered contemporary speech patterns, only it's art not the garbage glibness that the Geto Boys apprised us of in ’89—talkin’ loud but ain’t saying nothing. His Orphic bend and cadence flexing leave us levitating, lost in what Rimbaud calls a “hallucination of words.” More from Rimbaud:

I regulated the shape and movement of every consonant, and, based on an inner scansion, flattered myself with the belief I had invented a poetic language, that, one day or another, would be understood by everyone, and that I alone would translate…. Worn-out poetical fashions played a healthy part in my alchemy of the word.

On “VOICE 2 SKULL,” ELUCID cops to “complicating noun combinations over drumbreaks.” He felt the existing “language insufficient—chess pieces to the checkerboard.” His new language includes words for the living and “words for the departed” (“ZIGZAGZIG”), as if a seraph touched a burning coal to his lips. His diction ushers in cosmic agonies. His voice is “the strange instrument of death,” loaned from the conjure-man Frimbo. Listening to REVELATOR, I see the colors, geometry, and nonlinear wanderings of Wadada Leo Smith’s scoring of improvisation, his Ankhrasmation language articulated into words.

31.

In 1965, Amiri Baraka ended his liner notes to The New Wave in Jazz on this hushed note: “New Black Music is this: find the self and kill it.” Nathaniel Mackey has interpreted Baraka’s statement in the following way:

...in the course of improvising and getting to the point where you can play free music, you have to find yourself. You have to find out what your sound is. It may be something innate, but you have to practice and find what it is, where it is, and how to get it out, and how to translate it through a horn or a piano or a bass—whatever—which you likely call “technology.” How do you technologize yourself? How do you utilize that technology to render something that may be unspeakable, or there before not spoken—and maybe unrenderable? How do you get out a version that at least approximates that self and, at the same time, registers your refusal to be satisfied that you have properly and authoritatively, or with some finality, articulated that self?... In some ways, you have to be prepared to lose that self, or even to be an instrument of losing it, which is to say, to be killing it.

By this measure, ELUCID has found out what his sound is. On REVELATOR, he’s getting it out, violently. He’s translating it through his trauma mic—that is his chosen teknology. He has killed the self, and—to speak in the terminology of today—he keeps killing it.

“This ELUCID for whoever’s asking,” he once said on Armand Hammer’s “Resin,” and he’s forever been “staring at the sun” (“XOLO”). Often overlooked is the irony (or anti-irony, depending) of the MC’s name. Elucidate—to “throw light upon,” to “render intelligible,” perspicuity for the patron saints of post-rap. These ideas are at odds: How can he complicate and clarify? Make the equation make sense [ELUCID = light = “sun”]. “[W]e know that every apocalyptic eschatology is promised in the name of light, of seeing and vision,” Derrida writes, “and of a light of light, of a light brighter than all the lights it makes possible.” John the Revelator’s apocalypse is “lit by the light of El, of Elohim,” he adds. [T]he glory of Elohim illuminates it [21:23]. It’s as if ELUCID is “applauded by sunrays,” as Saul Williams says on “Elohim (1972).” Gnaw on this while you head-nod:

 ...what imposes itself as the enigmatic desire for vigilance, for the lucid vigil, for elucidation, for critique and truth, but for a truth that at the same time keeps within itself some apocalyptic desire, this time as desire for clarity and revelation, in order to demystify or, if you prefer, to deconstruct apocalyptic discourse itself…

ELUCID takes on the apocalyptic tone, and whoever takes on the apocalyptic tone comes to signify to, if not tell, you something. What? The truth, of course, and to signify to you that it reveals the truth to you.

Images:

A close-up of “the Envious,” Anonymous, The Last Judgment, (ca. 12th century), Gold and glass mosaic, Santa Maria Assunta, Torcello | A hand-colored woodcut of a 19th-century illustration shows an escaped slave trying to elude slave hunters and their dog. (North Wind Picture Archives/AP) | Gilbert Shelton, The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, Unknown issue (detail) | Bill Hudson, “Parker High School student Walter Gadsden being attacked by dogs in Birmingham, Alabama,” The New York Times (May 4, 1963) | McGruff the Crime Dog PSA, “Don’t Talk to Strangers,” 1984 (screenshot) | Robert Cohen, “Ferguson police officers during a protest in August 2014” (Associated Press) | DMX, “Get At Me Dog” music video, dir. Hype Williams, 1998 (screenshot) | Tadayuki Naitoh, “Miles Davis” (1971) | Jacob Riis, “The Trench in Potter’s Field on Hart Island, New York,” (ca. 1890) | Barry Williams / Getty Images, “Mayor Eric Adams and NYPD officers look at a robotic device from Boston Dynamics” (2023) | The Wire theme song, dir. David Simon, 2002 (screenshot) | Dread Broadcasting Corporation flyer (ca. 1981-83) | Unknown photograph of computer desk (c. 1999) | Stephen King, Cujo, first edition cover, 1981 (detail) | Joan E. Biren, “Portrait of writer Audre Lorde at work at her desk, surrounded by papers, books, and posters” (1981) | Image of ham radio (Lehigh Special Collections) | Self-portrait of Arthur Rimbaud in Harar, Ethiopia (1883) | Scaramanga, Seven Eyes, Seven Horns, interior cover art, Sun Large Music (1998) | Rudolph Fisher, The Conjure-man Dies, first edition, Covici-Friede Publishers (1932) | Illustration in Abel C. Thomas’s Gospel of Slavery, 1864 (detail) | Gordon Nye, “New York City Rent Strike” in the Yiddish newspaper Di Varhayt (1907) | Afrika Bambaataa (unknown) | Sun Ra, photograph for Rolling Stone (1969) | REVELATOR album cover, Alexander Richter (2024) | Richard Ansdell, “The Hunted Slaves” (1862) | “Black Panther Party founder Huey P. Newton outside an unnamed Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon,” Unknown photographer (1980) | Wadada Leo Smith, “Kosmic Music” (2008) | A close-up of “the Envious,” Anonymous, The Last Judgment, (ca. 12th century), Gold and glass mosaic, Santa Maria Assunta, Torcello

[caltropspress]

RAPS + CRAFTS #32: jesse the Tree

1. Introduce yourself. Past projects? Current projects?

My name is Jesse Ramos aka Jesse the Tree. I’m from Rhode Island. I am avid basketball fan and father to three beautiful cats. I started putting out music out when I was 19 and released my first album in 2017. I’m on Strange Famous Records and released my debut album produced by Mopes Pigeon Man with them in 2022. More recently I’ve been collaborating with my dear friend andrew as sleepingdogs. We’ve put out two albums in the last two years on Three Dollar Pistol, and he produced my solo album Not Fade Away that came out in January. Currently I’m working on finishing up another album produced by Mopes and the third sleepingdogs album with andrew.

2. Where do you write? Do you have a routine time you write? Do you discipline yourself, or just let the words come when they will? Do you typically write on a daily basis?

I’m usually pretty busy during the week and don’t get a ton of time to just sit down and write. I like to write whenever I get a break in time during the day. During my lunch break. In my car before or after leaving work. Sometimes I’ll stop somewhere by the water on my way home and put a beat on in the car and write. Sometimes it’s right before I go to sleep. I get motivated by my peers, hearing what they’re working on, observing their growth and dedication, and just life shit, when I’m feeling overwhelmed by what’s going on around me. Writing can feel like a way to either process or take a break from intense feelings. I try to write everyday but it’s never like a full verse - I might write four bars and return to them when I have the time another day. I don’t want to overthink or under-think what I’m writing. I try to focus on making sure I’m enjoying the writing and being aware of how I can improve it.

3. What’s your medium—pen and paper, laptop, on your phone? Or do you compose a verse in your head and keep it there until it’s time to record?

I kind of write however I can. Lately it’s been a lot of writing in my phone because it’s what’s closest to me. A lot of my writing is on the go. I love to physically write rhymes out in a notebook or on a piece of paper just because it feels good that way. But I’m a pretty forgetful person so there are some verses I’ve written that have gone with the wind somewhere because of that. I don’t really like to write on my computer - it feels weird to me, probably because I type a lot at my job. I don’t want it to feel like homework. So yeah mostly my phone, which works out cuz I can store and find it in a pinch if I need to.

4. Do you write in bars, or is it more disorganized than that?

Definitely. A lot of my writing style feels like dipping a toe in the water to start. I want the first lines of the song to hit hard/feel smooth. Once I can get those down I can get into a downhill motion and feed off of that energy. A lot of times when I’m writing with Andrew on a song, I get excited by what he writes and it feels like a relay race - if he goes first, I want to anchor it home; if I’m first, I want to set him up to take off. I have always kind of written in that structure since I was young, stringing bars together, it helps me to visual the pace and energy of the song and decide where to punch or where to string together the ideas and emotions I’m trying to get across.

5. How long into writing a verse or a song do you know it’s not working out the way you had in mind? Do you trash the material forever, or do you keep the discarded material to be reworked later?

This is a good and tough question - tough because it’s a harsh reality sometimes! I will for sure write a whole verse and then scrap some of it or all of it if I feel like I didn’t go hard enough. I’m pretty self-critical with my writing - I don’t want to put something out that I don’t feel completely proud of or feel like I could have done better on. If I trash a verse, I might go back and pick out the lines I did like and Frankenstein them into a new verse, which can work out really cool sometimes. I’ll start fresh if I feel like I’m just rapping to rap on a verse, instead of having an intention and finish line in mind of where I want it to go.

6. Have you engaged with any other type of writing, whether presently or in the past? Fiction? Poetry? Playwriting? If so, how has that mode influenced your songwriting?

I used to write a lot of poetry, especially when I was younger. I still like to go back to it sometimes, once in a while I will start writing a poem and then build it into a verse. But I definitely incorporate a lot of poetry elements into my songwriting. I would love to write some form of memoirs and have kind of started and stopped with that pursuit over the years.

Eventually I want to write some prose/short stories about my family and our experiences. Fiction writing would be badass though. If I had all the time in the world I would want to try all of this. Maybe when I’m older and life slows down a little more. For now, I take whatever time I can get to try to build a song piece by piece.

7. How much editing do you do after initially writing a verse/song? Do you labor over verses, working on them over a long period of time, or do you start and finish a piece in a quick burst?

I used to do the latter. I kind of thought what I wrote should stay as it was because it’s what I felt in the moment. But I’ve been editing and taking my time with verses a lot more in recent years. Sometimes I look at a beat like, "I get only one chance to put a verse on this beat, I want it to count; I don’t want to listen back to it and think I should have treated it more patiently." The process has definitely become more drawn out because of that. There may be some lucky days where I feel the writing falls into place quickly, but mostly I work through a bar or two at a time, trying to make each one feel special and fit within the story of the production.

8. Do you write to a beat, or do you adjust and tweak lyrics to fit a beat?

I pretty much always write to a beat. I like to play it on loop for a while and sit with it, especially when I’m driving. When I get a pack of beats, I will spend a while just listening to them in my headphones and in the car. There are times I’ll write a verse to a beat and then notice its cadence and rhythm fits smoother on a different beat. But I usually try to understand the tempo/direction of the beat and then see how I can become part of it. That’s a fun part of the process - it’s like a dance or trying to ride a bull. I like finding out where to make certain rhymes hit over certain instrument sounds.

9. What dictates the direction of your lyrics? Are you led by an idea or topic you have in mind beforehand? Is it stream-of-consciousness? Is what you come up with determined by the constraint of the rhymes?

A lot of times it’s the emotion I feel from the production. When I work with Mopes, his beats are super crisp and original. They have a classic feel - the drums are really alive. He does a great job of making the beat itself feel like a song on its own. When I work with Andrew, his beats hit are a more mellow tempo. He finds treasure trove samples, rad melancholy shit that I feel really comfortable digging into. They both inspire me deeply because I want to do their production justice. I rarely pick a topic, or concrete concept, unless it’s a feature and someone has an idea in mind. I would say a majority of my writing is stream-of-consciousness and weaving themes that are important to me like my family, hoops, mental health, nature - shit that makes me feel human. I like to see where it goes once I start, and I like to write rhymes that I think will stick with people or make them feel something.

10. Do you like to experiment with different forms and rhyme schemes, or do you keep your bars free and flexible?

I would say I like to experiment, sometimes with my voice, sometimes trying to give more of a melodic feel to some of the bars. I like to sing too and try to incorporate that once in a while if the song calls for it. I try to push myself to just get better with my rhyming every time I work on something new. To sound confident, to sound natural and not like I’m just reading it, to have conviction. I look at rhyming like basketball a lot, in terms of pacing and skill and vision. I want the rhymes to have a life of their own, sometimes like a smooth mid-range jumper, sometimes like a flashy pass, sometimes I want to talk some shit like a dunk over a defender. I want the rhymes to have legs and personality and show people who I am, whether I’m feeling on top of the world or I’m feeling like shit, I want to rhyme through it and tell the story.

11. What’s a verse you’re particularly proud of, one where you met the vision for what you desire to do with your lyrics?

I felt happy with this verse I wrote for my song "Bug Flesh." It felt heavy and weird like I was feeling when I wrote it.

Full moon rotating on the pinky, Half a roach packed with the sticky, You cats iffy, I’m that stick, no sheet on the mattress, Praying mantis on the nightstand, laughing It gets graphic whenever the eyes shut, The cymbals start crashing, Funhouse mirrors made of plastic, Arachnids, dancing on the ceiling doing backflips Ready set action Bloodhound howling at the glass door, Scaring the wrens, Never forget the weather when you bury a friend And now I move with a precarious grin, Comb the area slick, And watch him make it by a hair on his chin

12. Can you pick a favorite bar of yours and describe the genesis of it?

This is a line from an unreleased song I made with Mopes for our upcoming album. The song is about watching basketball with my dad. I like it because when we watch together, we go through such a wild range of emotions - frustration, elation, joy, sadness, even laughter. It’s one of my favorite parts of my life, watching basketball with my dad, and I think this line is like a photograph of it.

2-3, Sacred geometry, Gorman on the commentary, gems like Socrates, I call it jazz, you call it dark comedy, Either way I wouldn’t trade for spots up in the lottery.

13. Do you feel strongly one way or another about punch-ins? Will you whittle a bar down in order to account for breath control, or are you comfortable punching-in so you don’t have to sacrifice any words?

I used to try to ironman that shit all the time. And if something felt clunky or I couldn’t get it off with my breath control, I would change it so I could. Now I don’t really care how it gets there and, if it’s a line I’m fond of, I will punch it in to make sure it’s included. Most of the time I’m writing in a way that I can pull it off because I perform live pretty often and want to try new songs out. I don’t think less of anyone’s capabilities or skill if they punch-in. As long as the song is dope, that’s all that matters.

14. What non-hiphop material do you turn to for inspiration? What non-music has influenced your work recently?

I watch a lot of TV, movies. I try to read when I can and play video games. All of that kind of keeps me on a hunt for understanding different experiences and ideas and references. I listen to a lot Neil Young, Silver Jews, '60s and '70s Laurel Canyon music, old gospel songs. I think within the last year a lot of my influence and inspiration has come from my work. I provide therapy for people with severe mental illness, substance use disorders, trauma. Hearing their stories, watching them persist even though they’re struggling, it is all really humbling and human. I think psychology has started to become a more prominent theme in my music, trying to understand and empathize with myself and others. And on the other hand, after a really heavy week, writing to decompress becomes important, so sometimes I just want to write something kind of psychedelic, or talk shit to an imaginary foe, or rap about something simple and light.

15. Writers are often saddled with self-doubt. Do you struggle to like your own shit, or does it all sound dope to you?

Absolutely. I struggle with my mental health. I have depression and anxiety. It is a pretty constant war and something I’m grateful to have worked through a lot with my writing. There are times when I just don’t feel good enough to create, or get too far in my head and start to lose confidence in my abilities. But writing is also something that can pull me out of a depression. I’ve been doing this for a long time, and it’s sacred to me in a lot of ways. I never tell myself I’m wack or tell myself to hang it up. I know I put the work in to be good at what I do. But it can for sure be difficult to be in the process of making an album or something and then lose momentum because my mental health is suffering. I’m learning to take better care of myself, to be more self-compassionate, and to just be myself. I’m getting to a place where I am more proud of myself for creating at all than I am critical. I used to feel weird listening to my old shit, but now it’s almost endearing hearing a younger version of you, who was still trying to figure shit out then.

16. Who’s a rapper you listen to with such a distinguishable style that you need to resist the urge to imitate them?

Maybe Method Man? I just love how he rhymes - it feels so natural and cool. There’s so many emcees I dig and respect for capturing a style and making it their own. So many of my peers in today’s scene are really carving out their own sound and it’s really exciting to listen to. I just want to be me though.

17. Do you have an agenda as an artist? Are there overarching concerns you want to communicate to the listener?

To share myself and my stories with people in hopes that it helps them to make it through the day.

RAPS + CRAFTS is a series of questions posed to rappers about their craft and process. It is designed to give respect and credit to their engagement with the art of songwriting. The format is inspired, in part, by Rob McLennan’s 12 or 20 interview series.

Photo credit: Noah Anthony Mezzacappa

[caltropspress]

RAPS + CRAFTS #31: andrew

1. Introduce yourself. Past projects? Current projects?

I’m andrew. Currently working on sleepingdogs related stuff as always, a project with my guy esh & the isolations from Boston, a project with Brian Ennals, and then I’m producing a few things for some people right now as well. Just dropped a record with Height Keech this July. Earlier in the year I dropped a split with my brother ialive and the second sleepingdogs album. Right at the end of last year I dropped my third self-produced solo, don’t forget me, bluest, Too many past things to name them all - you can get my last solo and the latest sleepingdogs vinyl @ threedollarpistol.bandcamp.com.

2. Where do you write? Do you have a routine time you write? Do you discipline yourself, or just let the words come when they will? Do you typically write on a daily basis?

I write any and everywhere but not really by choice. The mind is always going, and you never know when it’s gonna start putting shit together. I write a lot of stuff in my head when I’m driving and just repeat the lines over and over trying build on it, but mostly trying not to forget. I also write at work a lot when I’m just zoned out building stuff. I’m always writing down bars or couplets throughout the day, but if I get on a roll I’ll step off the floor and duck into the bathroom for a second to finish a thought 'cause I don’t wanna be standing there on my phone too long. Those are probably the two places I write the most, but, as I said, it’s not really confined to any time or place. It all comes in spurts. I’m always writing something down, be it lists of words, phrases and random lines, or full verses. It seems to come in waves for me. I’ll be going crazy for a few months writing seemingly non-stop, then the next few months will pass and I haven’t really written shit as far as songs go, and I’ll think that it’s a wrap for me. Lots of ebbs & flows for sure.

3. What’s your medium—pen and paper, laptop, on your phone? Or do you compose a verse in your head and keep it there until it’s time to record?

These days it’s mostly phone, for sheer convenience. We always have our phones with us, so that just became the medium unfortunately. Up til a few years ago, I didn’t really write anything down. I would just write in my head and go over it out loud til I had it down pat and kept it only there until I laid it down, but over the years my memory seems to have less storage capacity. So, just to be safe, I started writing everything down in my phone. I think this actually maybe even caused me to start writing more because now instead of writing whole verses at a time, I’m constantly just writing down random lines and thoughts to put together more verses & hooks. When it comes to recording though, I really strive to have my verses memorized and read off my phone as little as possible.

4. Do you write in bars, or is it more disorganized than that?

Oh no, so disorganized! Lists of words, phrases, bars, concepts for hooks, any and everything really.

5. How long into writing a verse or a song do you know it’s not working out the way you had in mind? Do you trash the material forever, or do you keep the discarded material to be reworked later?

If I’m writing something and don’t like it within the first fours bars, I gotta trash it and start over. If I get like 10-12 in and I’m not loving it, I’ll just finish it anyway since I didn’t dislike it enough to stop at four. Then I’ll probably come back and cherry pick the good lines for another verse until the verse is just skin & bones and delete the rest if I don’t feel there’s anything more worth repurposing.

6. Have you engaged with any other type of writing, whether presently or in the past? Fiction? Poetry? Playwriting? If so, how has that mode influenced your songwriting?

I’ve written poetry as a much younger man and also started a novel at some point that got shelved indefinitely. Never really plays, but I used to storyboard write & illustrate ideas for music videos. I do design as well, so I used to have fun writing fake ad campaigns for products and foundations for school. And I’m seemingly always making up slogans or jingles for businesses for no reason at all. I dunno I guess I’m just always writing, consciously or unconsciously.

7. How much editing do you do after initially writing a verse/song? Do you labor over verses, working on them over a long period of time, or do you start and finish a piece in a quick burst?

I tend to get in zones and write whole verses and/or songs in one shot, depending on the project. Those verses could be comprised of some of the random lines and word lists compiled over time or completely fresh - you never really know. I definitely edit if I’m on roll, but if there’s a line or two I don’t love I’ll just leave it and come back later and revisit or strengthen it. Sometimes you got a good rhythm and you can kill it by getting caught up on one line that’s bothering you, so I usually will just try to tell myself I’ll come back and I move on.

8. Do you write to a beat, or do you adjust and tweak lyrics to fit a beat?

Both. Sometimes I’m feeling inspired to write and I don’t have beats on deck at the moment, whether my own or someone else’s, so I’ll just write, and later I’ll either make something that feels like the right fit, or hear something in a pack from someone that does and freak it and make necessary adjustments per the beat. Then there’s also some beats that just demand my attention and compel me to start writing immediately.

9. What dictates the direction of your lyrics? Are you led by an idea or topic you have in mind beforehand? Is it stream-of-consciousness? Is what you come up with determined by the constraint of the rhymes?

I think just the way I’m feeling most days. That’s why it’s a lot of dark humor raps and things of that nature. That tends to be the majority of my material but obviously if there’s a specific theme that dictates the bars. I think it can really start from anything, but a lot of the time if I’m messing around in my head at work or driving and I come up with a few good bars that feel like they are good ones to open a verse with, it’ll propel me to keep going. They could be anything - some goofy, funny shit or something dark. I guess again it comes back to the headspace I’m in at that moment.

10. Do you like to experiment with different forms and rhyme schemes, or do you keep your bars free and flexible?

I do, but I’ll be the first to admit I that don’t stray enough from the traditional when it comes to schemes and flows. I do mess with it on my own and try different things and write different ways, but I guess I usually don’t think that they’re strong enough and stick to the more traditional, though I’m definitely trying to break out of that and expand, for sure.

11. What’s a verse you’re particularly proud of, one where you met the vision for what you desire to do with your lyrics?

I really like my verse on “flutes” on the first sleepingdogs album. I dunno it’s one that every time I do it live it just feels satisfying. It’s no real concept; it’s just bars, but it’s one that feels good every time. "living blues" from don’t forget me, bluest is another one. I think maybe just everything about that one makes me feel good - the hook, the verse, the flow, the outro. That was one that I made that when I was done writing I was immediately like, “Yeah, this one is something.”

12. Can you pick a favorite bar of yours and describe the genesis of it?

"And I heard em sayin', 'Yo, why's drew the best? / I’m handin' out bodies like I'm breakin' up the Eucharist (eucha-rest)” from "flutes" as well has always been a fave, though it doesn’t really translate as anything special now that I'm typing it out - haha.

13. Do you feel strongly one way or another about punch-ins? Will you whittle a bar down in order to account for breath control, or are you comfortable punching-in so you don’t have to sacrifice any words?

I definitely write with breath control in mind and definitely prefer to record a verse start to finish. I’ve definitely punched in but not because I wasn’t able to rap the whole verse, but more to make sure I hit certain words stronger than I could if I was doing it all straight through. As long as I can do the verse live and spit it straight, I don’t really care about having to punch because when recording and delivering a product you’re trying to present the best product, so for the sake of that I think it’s okay. So long as you can actually spit the verse, that is. That’s just me, though. I know there’s a lot of different views on this and some people are against it and some people do it obviously with the overlaps and all, but that’s just my take. I don’t particularly care too much about it one way or another.

14. What non-hiphop material do you turn to for inspiration? What non-music has influenced your work recently?

Man, too much. I get inspiration from all kinds of music. All good music makes me want to make music. Lately I been listening to a lot of Lykke Li, Rolling Stones, Heatmiser, Charles Bradley, Lee Moses, Courtney Marie Andrews, Lady Wray - too many to name. Outside of music, reading really inspires me as well. I been reading / listening to a lot this year and it definitely gets me going.

15. Writers are often saddled with self-doubt. Do you struggle to like your own shit, or does it all sound dope to you?

I have flashes of it, but overall I feel like I know when something is dope and when something isn’t working. And when it’s not, then I put it to the side and rework until it is. And if it never gets to where it needs to be, then it doesn’t come out. I feel being honest with yourself and admitting when something isn’t quite there is super important as an artist to make sure you’re putting out quality work, not just everything you put down on the page.

16. Who’s a rapper you listen to with such a distinguishable style that you need to resist the urge to imitate them?

Freeway. Every time I listen to Free I start rapping like him to myself in the car, but that’s where it stays - haha.

17. Do you have an agenda as an artist? Are there overarching concerns you want to communicate to the listener?

I think really just mental health stuff and the will to keep pushing forward. I write a lot of dark stuff laced with humor 'cause I feel it and I need to say it to get it out of my head and try to deal with those thoughts and feelings. And I think that’s important 'cause hopefully it can help people dealing with the same kinds of things and they’re not alone in it. It’s really just one day at a time, as cliche as that is. Just gotta do your best to get through the day, and tomorrow is a fresh start.

RAPS + CRAFTS is a series of questions posed to rappers about their craft and process. It is designed to give respect and credit to their engagement with the art of songwriting. The format is inspired, in part, by Rob McLennan’s 12 or 20 interview series.

Photo credit: Noah Anthony Mezzacappa

[caltropspress]

RAPS + CRAFTS #30: blackchai

1. Introduce yourself. Past projects? Current projects?

Ayoo, I go by the name of blackchai, preferably stylized in all lowercase. I started out rapping under the name JinSol, but I think I scrubbed 98% of that shit off the internet. I’m based in Brooklyn, but I grew up a little outside NYC in Putnam County. I’ve been releasing as blackchai since either late 2019 or early 2020 - I forget exactly. I put out my first EP titled No Expectation in August 2020. My first full length titled Time & A Place came out April 2022, followed by 2 EPs A Momentary Lapse in October 2022, and SECOND WIND produced entirely by my good friend/collaborator, a haunted house, in January 2023. My most recent release as of right now is my album Year Wandering which released March 2024. My next album OTHERWISE A BLUR is set to release September 6th and that is fully produced by August Fanon, who has also been a friend of mine since before we even started making music together.

2. Where do you write? Do you have a routine time you write? Do you discipline yourself, or just let the words come when they will? Do you typically write on a daily basis?

I find it easiest to write in the comfort of my bedroom. I work best in solitude. Over the years I have usually written the majority of my stuff late at night, but lately I’ve found I have better ideas in the morning before the day has a chance to influence my mind state. 

I’m a notoriously slow writer as in I can probably count on less than two hands how many verses I’ve written in a single sitting, but lately I’ve been trying to push myself to write faster without second guessing myself or losing my attention span, and it’s been working somewhat.

I find that I kind of go back and forth with how disciplined I am in terms of writing every day, but I prefer to always be in a constant state of having “something” that I’m working on, even if I don’t make daily progress. The only time I don’t have an unfinished verse on my plate is if I’m doing an album rollout or in the mixing process or something like that. Not being in the middle of some kind of creative process gives me really bad anxiety.

3. What’s your medium—pen and paper, laptop, on your phone? Or do you compose a verse in your head and keep it there until it’s time to record?

When I started rapping it was all pen and paper, but I have horrible handwriting as well as horrible eyesight so it’s been strictly Notes app for the past few years. There are some things I’ve done in my head and wrote down later, but usually like 4-8 bars. Nothing crazy. My short term memory is unfortunately very compromised at this point in my weed smoking career.

4. Do you write in bars, or is it more disorganized than that?

I kind of write in spaced out lines depending on how connected each phrase is to the previous one. I use a lot of my own shorthand to signify pauses and things like that, but sometimes I don’t really solidify the way I’m going to rap the verse until I’m actually recording. It’s a lot easier to rap without breathing when reciting under your breath than when trying to project into a mic. When I started, I would just write in a big paragraph, but I kept losing my place. I used to be able to memorize my verses before recording. but my style has developed into a very stream-of-consciousness word soup sort of thing, so now I don’t usually have anything locked in until after it’s recorded.

5. How long into writing a verse or a song do you know it’s not working out the way you had in mind? Do you trash the material forever, or do you keep the discarded material to be reworked later?

If it doesn’t start out strong, typically I’ll scrap it and start over. Either that or if I write like half a verse then don’t come back to it until days later I can’t pick up the same energy and struggle trying to actually end the thing and it just goes on for way too long and feels redundant. I am a big believer in recycling lines for future use. Sometimes it’ll just be one phrase that I know I need to be a part of a verse. I just need the right beat or placement or whatever. But very rarely do I ever fully delete something. There's always some gold nuggets in a subpar verse.

6. Have you engaged with any other type of writing, whether presently or in the past? Fiction? Poetry? Playwriting? If so, how has that mode influenced your songwriting?

So my first girlfriend in high school was a writer. She was writing a novel when we were like fifteen. I’ve always admired people who can write in more traditional structures, but I just don’t possess that skill set. I never knew how to write essays that sounded natural in English class. I always felt like I couldn’t break away from that rigid template they give you when you’re in elementary school. That’s why I really like writing raps. I get to be a writer without having to care about the rules. As a rapper, you can fully disregard grammar, you can make words up, etc. I learned all that studying people like Ghostface Killah and Vordul Mega. But growing up I was definitely reading earlier than a lot of kids my age, and as an adult I really appreciate people like Cormac McCarthy and Tolkien and people like that. They write so descriptively it’s amazing, and I try to take some influence from that in the way I write raps.

7. How much editing do you do after initially writing a verse/song? Do you labor over verses, working on them over a long period of time, or do you start and finish a piece in a quick burst?

I don’t necessarily labor but definitely the past few years as I’ve been taking this more seriously I’ve put in extra effort to edit my lyrics. Especially because my flow is in such weird pockets sometimes, I have to be really specific about how I say some things so I don’t get lost in the beat. Anything from rearranging bars to fully rewriting some things.

8. Do you write to a beat, or do you adjust and tweak lyrics to fit a beat?

Most of the time I write to a beat. Sometimes I’ll have a few lyrics in my head that I think of while walking, taking the train, etc. Recently I’ve been writing one verse while switching between beats. It helps when I start to feel like I’m losing momentum. The beat usually tells you what it wants and sometimes my ideas clash with that, so it takes some searching to finesse the formula. Sometimes I’ll have an old verse I never did anything with and I’ll get a new beat and it just fits perfectly. But I don’t do it in the same way Talib Kweli apparently used to do. I'm not tryna rap super fast and sound crazy just to get a verse off.

9. What dictates the direction of your lyrics? Are you led by an idea or topic you have in mind beforehand? Is it stream-of-consciousness? Is what you come up with determined by the constraint of the rhymes?

I don’t typically write songs about any singular thing. Sometimes it’s a general vibe and I’ll address multiple things that kind of fit that idea even if they’re not directly related, and sometimes I’m just rapping and making references to anime and things I think are cool. I try not to let it get too jarring content-wise, but at the same time I’m a self-proclaimed student of Ghostface, so I don’t care too much if people don’t get it. I’ve definitely been told I’m very stream-of-consciousness by multiple people. I’d say in general the average blackchai song has sprinkles of Marxism, anime references, interpolations of 90s rap lyrics, and just general ruminations on the way I navigate through life and things I observe on a daily basis. And then all the blank spaces are filled with slang or just general “talking my shit” rapper guy stuff. Nothing too crazy. But I definitely do want to put in the effort in the future to write more concentrated songs. I don’t want to be a one trick pony, especially now that I’m getting more optics as an artist.

10. Do you like to experiment with different forms and rhyme schemes, or do you keep your bars free and flexible?

I go through phases. I think the thing that comes most naturally to me is flow, so that is usually the thing I like to experiment with the most. I’ve been in a very rapid fire kind of bag for a minute, which is a lot of fun. I did a lot of features just rapping super fast this past year. I also am a big fan of writing non-rhymes or ending bars with words that don’t rhyme. I know a lot of people, mostly older heads, hate that style these days along with the drumless beats and all that, but it’s where I feel I shine the most and can be the most creative. I rap mostly over loops, so there’s less constraints with the way I can actually land my rhymes and everything. But like I said before, the beat usually tells me what it needs. Lyrics are the tougher part for me.

11. What’s a verse you’re particularly proud of, one where you met the vision for what you desire to do with your lyrics?

One of the bonus tracks off Year Wandering titled “All For The Win." The album itself was largely inspired by the manga Vagabond and the themes explored in that and the song kind of encapsulates that. There’s a throughline that I repeat that goes “From preoccupied with the leaves to invincible under the sun,” which is nearly a direct quote from the manga and basically the whole theme of Musashi Miyamoto's character journey as well as my own kind of declaration of artistic growth. Where I’ve been and where I want to be. Reflecting upon being some kid writing horrible rhymes in my mom's living room to working with people I’ve been a fan of for years and having people tell me I’m their favorite rapper. I just think this is the best example of me mixing contemplative ideas right next to my usual brand of non-sequitur lyricism. Plus a really dope reference to Cannibal Ox that is just so much fun to rap on stage.

The usual intent’s not a spectacle the proof’s in the outcome I’m counting flaws to strike a healthy balance From preoccupied with the leaves to invincible under the sun Contemplating parts of myself that’s hard to face Placating the anger that’s building up from day to day Made a wish, made a plan  Sometimes it’s an aim and a miss but gained an understanding regardless My heart’s a big lender Depart with less than what I need to fill the chest up Blades drawn like a breath  Duress often but can’t halt the flesh  It’s the best of times Measure my regrets next to gratitude it’s too many hard questions Not enough in mind to concentrate Binded by fate with my brothers  Keep it in conversation Fuck a wait list I hate wasting time more than most things in my peripheral  Direct line of sight manifesting pictures from a past life Tryna simply grab it, inhabit the space I’m happy to play a part pondering til the dark divide Niggas is wildin’ I think you better find yourself - before you get ejected from the deep end My shell monumental mechanical found ghost Effortless like a cold reservoir of blood in the vessel Known unknowns  It’s the presence of ancestors weaponizing the mental Head in the sky Treasure refinement  It’s no sweat  Don’t hold me on shit I never said that’s my only lesson to give at the moment Pay attention Unsteady on the way in the present’s a testament to resolve My whole body and soul get the message Surrender control? Probably not It’s dark and Hell is hot as the block in the dead of winter Sounds like a personal problem you probably deserve it dawg Don’t make me call it off it’s all for the win You probably deserve it dawg Usual intent’s not a spectacle the proof’s in the outcome I’m counting flaws to strike a healthy balance From preoccupied with the leaves to invincible under the sun

12. Can you pick a favorite bar of yours and describe the genesis of it?

Off the song “Feed The Land” from Year Wandering:

High risk high reward Formula been tired no time to react $30 til the next check what we scrambling? Don’t take it for granted like God gave up the answers Feed The Land

I really like this one because it’s one of the more straightforward things I’ve ever written. I was literally in my kitchen making an egg scramble of random things in my fridge because I was broke and couldn’t afford to buy food until my next check. Very simple but I remember every detail and it was just a very real relatable thing. Nothing esoteric about it, just struggle turned into art.

13. Do you feel strongly one way or another about punch-ins? Will you whittle a bar down in order to account for breath control, or are you comfortable punching-in so you don’t have to sacrifice any words?

I don’t do them personally, mostly just because I usually record by myself and it’s annoying to do. But I don’t have an issue with them as a stylistic choice. There’s plenty of punch-ins on like Only Built 4 Cuba Linx, Ironman, Funcrusher Plus, etc. I like to be able to actually rap my own stuff live though. I hate the whole “live show karaoke” thing. Especially in the underground scene. Maybe I’d do them if I had a hypeman or something.

14. What non-hiphop material do you turn to for inspiration? What non-music has influenced your work recently?

I mentioned before I like to interpolate lyrics from a lot of 90s rap, but I do this tenfold with rock music. I played guitar before I started rapping and played in a few bands, so I am super pretentious about indie rock/emo/punk etc. I really don’t listen to a lot of rap when I’m writing. At least not a large variety. I’ll usually hyperfixate on one or two rap albums at a time when creating because I don’t want to be influenced too much in that way, but I’ll bump a huge variety of guitar music. 

Like when I was writing Time & A Place the only rap album I was listening to was OB4CL, but I was also listening to a ton of Jawbreaker, Cloud Nothings, Rilo Kiley, Mannequin Pussy, and this Japanese band Number Girl. And when I was writing OTHERWISE A BLUR the only rap I was listening to was like 2016-2017 Mach-Hommy, but I spent most days listening to Interpol and these random obscure indie bands with like 200 Spotify listeners. 

I’m also in the middle of reading Blood Meridian. Other than that, my main non-music inspirations/influences are just whatever shows I’m watching. I watch The Sopranos about four times a year, so that's a permanent fixture and source of reference. I just rewatched YuYu Hakusho. And then whatever communist/leftist literature I’ve read will pop up now and again. Obviously some Marxist stuff, Kwame Ture, Malcolm X, Huey Newton, etc. but I wouldn’t call myself a thoroughly read or educated person in that regard.

15. Writers are often saddled with self-doubt. Do you struggle to like your own shit, or does it all sound dope to you?

I didn’t like anything about my own music until like my last two projects, for the most part. I hated my voice. I took a long time getting comfortable on the mic. Things like that. But I feel like I’ve really started to feel and sound like the artist I’ve always wanted to be. Going back to my older stuff, now I see the merit in it, but at the time I hated almost everything I put out by the time I put it out. I really love this next album I’m about to drop though. I also made it in a significantly shorter timeframe than anything else I’ve done, so I haven’t had the chance to grow to hate it.

16. Who’s a rapper you listen to with such a distinguishable style that you need to resist the urge to imitate them?

Definitely billy woods and E L U C I D. I’m a huge fan, and they both have definitely influenced me a ton, but sometimes I stop myself from listening to Armand Hammer while I’m making stuff. Especially while making this record with August Fanon - haha. Aside from them, I’d say a lot of people in the scene in New York right now. Like people I see at shows and know personally. Like it’s one thing to subconsciously bite a rapper that you know from a distance, but when it comes to people who are closer to your level or whatever, you want to kind of maintain a sense of friendly competition. I like the idea of everyone having their own style. It’s like super powers. Spider-Man and Human Torch are homies, but they can’t do what the other does.

17. Do you have an agenda as an artist? Are there overarching concerns you want to communicate to the listener?

When I was a child I think the first thing I ever wanted for my future was to be an artist. I don’t even know why or what kind of artist I wanted to be. I just liked things like that. I also wanted to be a ninja. Presently, I just want to make a mark and be a part of rap-lore. When I started rapping, one of the more formative influences for me was The Juggaknots but I’ve never met anybody outside of hardcore rap nerds who even know who they are, but Breeze is like the best rapper ever. If I can do that for some kid 20 years from now, that’d be crazy. 

Obviously the deeper I get into this and the more things I accomplish that I never thought possible there will be more things I strive to achieve, but my initial goal was just to be a dope rapper who other rappers think is dope and just do cool shit because I can put words together in a cool and interesting way. And I kind of feel like I finally opened the door for that possibility. I can’t go to a show in New York without running into someone I know through music. I’ve even been recognized by strangers a couple times in the crowd of billy woods shows and stuff, which is really insane, and kind of weird.

There’s messages and beliefs I have that I put into my music, but I was never someone who wanted to make political music or anything like that. It’s a good gateway, but I’m not a professor. You can learn a lot more about revolutionary politics by reading books than from listening to Public Enemy, but a lot of people probably didn’t even form an interest in black leftist politics until Chuck D screamed into their ear about the Black Panthers. I suffer from really bad depression and anxiety. I wouldn’t feel comfortable counseling someone on their own mental health issues, but maybe my music might inspire someone to take action for themselves. Just having a positive tangible effect on people is really all you can hope for.

RAPS + CRAFTS is a series of questions posed to rappers about their craft and process. It is designed to give respect and credit to their engagement with the art of songwriting. The format is inspired, in part, by Rob McLennan’s 12 or 20 interview series.

Photo credit: E. Fortson

[caltropspress]

Caltrops No. 18 Available now!

Caltrops issue eighteen: ShrapKnel in the Bardo is available now.

28 pages. Staple- and spellbound.

Featuring show reviews, analysis, and oral history by a slew of crew.

DM or email caltropspress[at]gmail[dot]com for a copy.

[caltropspress]

RAPS + CRAFTS #29: Masai Bey

1. Introduce yourself. Past projects? Current projects?

Peace. My name is Masai Bey. I did a few albums. The Panacea Goldmind, C87 (with BMS), Natural Magic Music, Art Of The Covenant, Beboppin, Guardians Of The Gate (performed with L.I.F.E. Long as Auxiliary Arms). I’ve done a bunch of features and collaborations with other artists. I am currently “retired” from making albums, but I still practice a little.

2. Where do you write? Do you have a routine time you write? Do you discipline yourself, or just let the words come when they will? Do you typically write on a daily basis?

I usually write at home. Lots of times the ideas come while driving in the car, but the construction is usually at home.

3. What’s your medium—pen and paper, laptop, on your phone? Or do you compose a verse in your head and keep it there until it’s time to record?

I would say I’ve always been more of a pencil and paper person, but for the last couple of years it’s been my phone because I use the phone to make notes of ideas. Before I know it, some of those ideas transform themselves into half verses.

4. Do you write in bars, or is it more disorganized than that?

Both.

5. How long into writing a verse or a song do you know it’s not working out the way you had in mind? Do you trash the material forever, or do you keep the discarded material to be reworked later?

I usually do all of my editing while I write. I keep the discarded material if it can be reworked in a different context.

6. Have you engaged with any other type of writing, whether presently or in the past? Fiction? Poetry? Playwriting? If so, how has that mode influenced your songwriting?

I used to do a little poetry writing. Writing poetry taught me how to display an idea a few different ways while reinforcing the single concept.

7. How much editing do you do after initially writing a verse/song? Do you labor over verses, working on them over a long period of time, or do you start and finish a piece in a quick burst?

Most of my editing happens while writing.

8. Do you write to a beat, or do you adjust and tweak lyrics to fit a beat?

I like to write to the beat. It gives me the space to put the pieces together rhythmically.

9. What dictates the direction of your lyrics? Are you led by an idea or topic you have in mind beforehand? Is it stream-of-consciousness? Is what you come up with determined by the constraint of the rhymes?

Everything you just asked. All of these are used.

10. Do you like to experiment with different forms and rhyme schemes, or do you keep your bars free and flexible?

I do both. Whatever seems to make sense to me at that moment.

11. What’s a verse you’re particularly proud of, one where you met the vision for what you desire to do with your lyrics?

"Nonstop." That song was the B-side to the "Paper Mache" single released on Definitive Jux. That song is me.

12. Can you pick a favorite bar of yours and describe the genesis of it?

“My flav was made for any particular age: zero years to eighty, / 7000 B.C. to 7000 A.D.” 

I wanted to use the word age two different ways.

13. Do you feel strongly one way or another about punch-ins? Will you whittle a bar down in order to account for breath control, or are you comfortable punching-in so you don’t have to sacrifice any words?

I’d rather not punch-in only because I like to record the energy flow of the entire verse.

14. What non-hiphop material do you turn to for inspiration? What non-music has influenced your work recently?

Soul, funk, club classics, freestyle, jazz, etc.

15. Writers are often saddled with self-doubt. Do you struggle to like your own shit, or does it all sound dope to you?

Sounds dope to me.

16. Who’s a rapper you listen to with such a distinguishable style that you need to resist the urge to imitate them?

I never had the urge to imitate anyone.

17. Do you have an agenda as an artist? Are there overarching concerns you want to communicate to the listener?

I have no real agenda. I just always wanted to make music that sounded dope to me and share it with the world.

RAPS + CRAFTS is a series of questions posed to rappers about their craft and process. It is designed to give respect and credit to their engagement with the art of songwriting. The format is inspired, in part, by Rob McLennan’s 12 or 20 interview series.

Photo credit: Unknown (contact me).

[caltropspress]

ShrapKnel in the Bardo

Two Nights on Tour with Curly Castro and PremRock

19 June 2024 | Brooklyn, NY | Public Records

20 June 2024 | Rutherford, NJ | Soldato Books

How many intelligent people in the house tonight?

—KRS-One for Boogie Down Productions, “Poetry,” Live Hardcore Worldwide (1991)

When I say it’s about wanting to live, I just say that because that’s how I feel. When you get hit with death, sometimes as horrible as it is, one of the things that can come out of it is a reaffirmation of how much you don’t want to go…

—El-P, Cancer 4 Cure press junket (2012)

This is beyond my wildest dreams. Every fucking minute of this hip-hop shit. I’m here to live it, and I’m here to love it.

—Curly Castro, prior to performing “Dreadlocs Falling”

1.

I am not a spiritual person. But when something’s got cha opin, it’s a must to be receptive to the signal and the signs. Ignoring the counsel of billy woods, I was at soundcheck. Public Records was sparsely populated when I arrived around five o’clock, earlier than the artists even, the soundman assuming I was the talent. As Prodigy says on “Live Nigga Rap,” “NYC, U-N-I-verse, seriously.” Because, seriously, a universality and a convergence would be taking place in New York City this evening. The first of the night’s performers to walk through the door was Controller 7, flanked by Emynd and Scott Matelic. 

CONTROLLER 7:  The last time the three of us were together was Scribble Jam in 2000. I think we fell right back into the old flow. I was staying at Scott’s and he lives in Brooklyn, so it made things a lot easier. He knew where things were and I didn’t have to worry about anything. He and I hung out at Dove’s studio the night before with Sharif and Dose. That kinda helped break the ice a bit too, since I knew Sharif was going to be a guest in the ShrapKnel set. Emil and Scott ended up walking with me to the venue and it probably did set me at ease. When we were at the venue, I just kept meeting person after person, faces I already knew from the internet, and I really never had a chance to even get too nervous about anything. Everyone was so cool that I felt really welcomed. I hadn’t done a show in about 15 years and, in all honesty, I’ve never really done a show. It’s just been like 2-3 beat sets over a 26-year period.

We immediately started conversing about production credits from 25 years ago. There I was, a disembodied voice from the telephone made manifest, warping time, fixated on facts and fictions from another lifetime. But they indulged me, kindly.

1.1

Watch me breathe…feel me breathe, Mike Ladd spoketh on “Blade Runner” in 1997. I want to believe in the Latin sense of spiritus—that windnbreeze, that inspiration, that black star respiration, the collective breath that circulates communally, historically. And then there’s the spirit-rapping. Not breath control, per se, but when mediums had their way and say in society, they listened for the knock, knock [GZA adjacent] of paranormal communications. U.N.K.L.E. and Kool G Rap called it the “drums of death.” In the 16th century, Paracelsus cited the [something like a…] phenomenon as pulsatio mortuorum, or “death omen,” homie. 

1.11

On Live Hardcore Worldwide, Boogie Down Productions’ live album from 1991, KRS-One’s performance of “Breath Control” exhibits mostly that, though I must confess he sounds, ironically, a bit exasperated as he repeats, Breath control, breath control, breath control… This, in no way, sacrifices his reigning supreme. To err is human. (And the adverbial doubt inherent to “Over Nearly Everyone” tells me he recognizes this as well.) ShrapKnel, on the other hand—emcees Curly Castro and PremRock—make no such sacrifices. They amethyst rock with ānāpānasati, zen masters of the ceremony. Amethyst rockstars heed the cautions set forth by the Blastmaster on “Breath Control,” though. They know what the weaker performers among us rely on: “They want dancers, they want lighting, / They want effects to make ’em look exciting, / But it’s frightening, ’cause without that, / The whole crew is wick-wick-wick-wack.”

1.12

I introduced myself to Controller 7. We’d been acquainted for several years, but had never met in person. I [un]officially began gathering notes for a book on the Anticon collective, of which Controller 7 was an early member, in March 2017. Seven years later, that book is nearing completion. Tommy (Controller 7) was one of the first interviews I conducted for the book—we had that phone call in March of 2019. Scott Matelic and Emynd, affiliates to Anticon, were also some of my earliest interviews. I spoke with them on the phone in January and February of 2019, respectively. Caltrops Press was born in July 2020, concurrent with the underground rap renaissance that we’re now experiencing. One of the central themes of the Anticon book (title TBA soon) examines the underground scene(s) as a sprawling network. So when Tommy confided in me early last year that he had been commissioned to produce the new ShrapKnel record, I began to feel the thrum of an everything that rises must converge momentum. I’d considered alternate realities in the seven years spent working on the book—those preexisting, premillennial networks couldn’t have completely collapsed—and now time and space seemed to begin to bend and bow in strange and suggestive ways. 

1.2 On June 1, 2023, I attended the Maps record release show at Baby’s All Right. ShrapKnel opened for woods and Kenny Segal. They performed “Illusions of P,” a song they had started to debut on tour stops around the country. I sent a woefully insufficient iPhone 6 video of the performance to Tommy.

1.3

In August of 2023, Tommy messaged me: “I can’t tell you what, but there is a song that features Aesop and he says ‘caltrops’ on it.” Two months later, that song would turn out to be A7PHA’s “Many Headed,” a hell-bent hydra head nadda’s journey featuring the likes of Self Jupiter and Buck 65. And there was Aesop Rock speaking of “hopscotchin’ caltrops, / Cloud of black smoke, no black box.” On April 19, 2024, the “Many Headed (Controller 7 Remix)” was loosed upon the world. Tommy recruited Curly Castro and PremRock to contribute to the ever-expanding posse cut, a guest appearance in anticipation of Nobody Planning To Leave. Therein, Prem promises a “double-edged sword on the neck of an edgelord,” and Castro paints a militant picture: “Once it took a nation, / Now it takes a phalanx.”

CONTROLLER 7:  I asked them to do a trade-off like on “Babylon by Bus.” The remix feels a bit like my Deep Puddle Dynamics remix [“Rain Men”], 25 years later. Posse cut, changes in the music, unexpected. It feels kinda full circle. Dose is at the end of both. The Deep Puddle remix was kinda the “Well, let’s see what I can do,” and my skills and equipment were so basic at the time. This is now the 25 years later “Let me show you what I can do.” But somehow they actually come very much from the same spirit.

Spirit. Convergence.

2.

By 5:30, PremRock arrived in his unassuming human form—a man who has measured out his life in cocktail spoons, to paraphrase Prufrock; Castro appeared not long after that in camo pants, prepped with silent weapons for the loud wars to come. Prem, I noticed, had a mic in his pocket.

PREMROCK:  I bring my own mic everywhere! A gift from Willie Green some years ago. I believe it was a beta test and now many venues use it. It’s more suited for live performances and the dynamics don’t change with cupping. Also, I’m a bit of a germaphobe, so there’s that too.

For soundcheck, they got right into “Metallo.” Soundman checked the levels in the center of the room while Prem mentioned bots trying to sell tickets to the show online—“a breakthrough,” he called it. Where Prem is gregarious during the pregame, Castro is focused with the concentration of Simeon Stylites atop the pillar (Simeon says, Shut the fuck up!)—he makes medieval monasteries of any modern venue. When they ran through “Deep Space 9 Millie Pulled a Pistol,” the venue experimented with casting a red light over them—the color of De La’s predator Santa suit and the guns pointed at El-P. Ideas began to click for me while listening to the guys test the levels on “LIVE Element” acapella. When Castro raps, “Prem and I, two-headed Cerberus Killa Show,” he’s not kidding. In that moment, even in an empty space with no audience to witness it, they were the “iLLest Duo, Known throughout the Known Earth.” Prem claims to be a “one-man tour machine” on “Dadaism 3,” but he does better with a two-man (like Duncan and Parker operating under the Coach Pop playbook).

PremRock and Castro don’t rehearse in any traditional way. Their method of preparation relies on trust in one another’s craft, and they covet a spirit of on-the-go recalibration. 

CURLY CASTRO:  Considering how far away we live from each other (Philly & NY), our rehearsals are slightly unorthodox in its practice. We select a set list with extreme detail, and then put in the hours on our own to master our parts. Usually, at the start of each respective tour, we are doing a fistful of songs for the first time. Then as we do the songs multiple times, we see what works, and by the end of a run, we have figured out the Live incantations of said songs. For the most part, once we settle into a set before a run, we have certain interchangeable Blades, but the set remains the same for most of any run we complete. Once upon any stage we can lengthen or shorten, or adapt our alchemy, for any Live setting in any Location.

I think about the aptness of their group name: ShrapKnel—with that capital-K stolen from Cube’s amerikkka. Lethal fragments and filings. The chorus on “Dadaism 3” tells the story: “Metal from the blast zone flying Each and Every Way.” Later, on “Steel Pan Labyrinth,” Castro describes using “the blades to write bars.” ShrapKnel with a K that cuts. A grapheme sans curves, a razor-sharp letter. “Sharp” and “Shrap” kindred as anagrammatic matters go. “Shrap is here to sharp the Blade,” Castro spits on “Uru Metal,” “De La Soul skits, decode and you’ll find the answer.” By the conclusion of soundcheck, the other performers and notable attendees—Child Actor, August Fanon, phiik and Lungs, even E. from The Next Movement podcast who picked up the ubiquitous Fatboi Sharif as she drove through Jersey—had filled the floor. 

AUGUST FANON:  I saw Lungs walking up to the venue right as me and my girlfriend Khadija were arriving, so we walked in together. phiik was already in the venue and, once together, they quickly jumped into their soundcheck. When I heard phiik spit that shit live sounding crispy like the record, I went crazy inside. I was like, Hell-fuckin’-yeah! Let’s go!

3.

I am Lungs…this is phiik, and it’s good as fuck to see so many familiar faces…

If phiik and Lungs—jointly recognized as Another Planet—have received much buzz of late, that buzz reached Havana Syndrome levels while opening for ShrapKnel on tour. Straight C.I.A. shenanigans that leave your neural-well unsteadied. They talk in maths and buzz like a fridge, like a detuned radio. They are Red and Meth for the anthropocene—a blackout, one-two, one-two punch who smoke bud and sniff a bee’s ass to get a buzz. 

phiik:  Prem & Castro really showed us the ropes & were such a joy to travel with. This was the first tour for both of us, so it was really helpful to get so comfortable so quickly. Something that Castro put us on to was drinking tea constantly. Pretty much every show we did he would be sipping on some beforehand. I never realized how your voice can go at any point.

CURLY CASTRO:  Prem and I caught wind of [phiik and Lungs] a few years back. Their respective style(s) appeared unparalleled. They were a galvanizing duo, who’s YouTube clip on “Off Top” gets the internet’s panties inna bunch and generates mega-bandwidth, as folks argue over their particular brand of word sorcery. The only surprise (even though I knew them capable, but it’s another thing to see it) was that their whirlwind quicksilver tongues were identical to what was put down on tape. An impressive feat all in itself, but a reassurance of the Blade protocol needed to run with us Wolves.

PREMROCK:  That was Nik Oliver, our booking agent, who suggested the pairing [with phiik and Lungs]. I was already a fan, and Castro was very tapped in too. I saw the vision pretty quickly. They are a rising duo and their reputation as people was strong. Always important to have folks vouch for you. It was a home run, in my opinion. They are special artists making special music. For their first tour, they approached it like seasoned vets. The road is a grind and your comfort zones and routines are shattered. They adapted quickly, and I was impressed by their nightly performances. Shout-out GAM, too. He’s a GRIP mainstay and a real stabilizer on the road. We had fun and got the job done. The best result.

phiik and Lungs fed off and ate up the hometown crowd throughout their unswerving 40-minute set at Pub Rex. They started with “Captain Picard” from Another Planet 4 (and they’d be planet-hopping haphazardly with quick shouts of “AP2!” and “AP3!” and such for their setlist), and they proceeded to “burn the house down like David Koresh,” as Lungs says, or like David Byrne in ’84 blackface. It’s good to be home, phiik said after the first number, sounding like Dorothy windswept and word-vexed. Drink of water demands were made prior to “SCOOBY” (off Planet X), but not in a diva way, just to stave off dehydration from the tireless spittin’ over the haunted industrial plant of a noface beat. Lungs taunted MCs who “can’t rap better than [him]” on “Kurt McBurt,” and by the middle of “She Could” I began to notice the full and crushing support that TASE GRIP offers up to each other. The whole cru pushed up against the stage, slapping and banging it when emotion flowed and numbers thronged, finishing bars for phiik and Lungs, sometimes screaming the whole damn thing. Wavy Bagels, AKAI SOLO, and S!LENCE at the center of the Dark & Stormy scene. When phiik rapped, “Never took a village to be the villain, / But we still in the building,” and a chorus of voices join him in dragging the end-rhyme out (...buildinnnnnn’), we felt the thrum. It takes a phalanx.

phiik stutter steps when it’s his turn on the mic, rapping to the ground. Lungs leans toward the edge of the stage—skinny elbows out, eyes bulging—and raps to the sky. Hell and heaven unified—purgatory raps for a cleansing of your soul. A barrage, as many have remarked. It’s like putting your face to the fan, your visage to the vents. “Make some noise for Lungs!” phiik shouts, hyping up his homie. “It’s not easy going from one track to another. The fuck is he doing? He’s a nut. He’s a crazy fuck.” There’s a symbiosis of support between phiik and Lungs, rooted in friendship. 

phiik:  Our work ethic together has definitely only developed & gotten better over the years, but our foundation of knowing each other so well helps without a doubt. Lungs & I have known each other pretty much our whole lives, so it was almost seamless in a way when we started to work on music together.

My mind goes to Live Hardcore Worldwide again—“The Eye Opener”—where it’s said: “Make some noise! This is all live, as you can plainly hear and see. There’s no lipsync business going on here!” Listening to them perform “Secret Power,” the titular secret power, I contend, is a guttersnipe glossolalia. Some trip-wire of tryptamines, divine DMT entities exiting their maws, untranslatable.

The affair became even more familial as phiik and Lungs invited GAM to kick a verse (“He DJs, drives us around, fucking raps…”). AKAI was brought onstage for a song triad. He rocked a keffiyeh in a classic P.L.O. style and demonstrated the muscular rapping we’ve come to expect when he’s in front of an audience, each word a heavy load to lift and spirit into your soul, slackening the suspensory ligament of your Third Eye lens. Confident, AKAI only has to lead the crowd with a “TASE” for them to follow back with “GRIP.” The chant doesn’t require any instructions of When I say… That’s the command he has.

phiik:  Heads are really a unit & move as such. And on top of that, everybody fully understands what’s going on & how much the support means. After seeing random heads for the majority of the tour, it was so nice to see the team when we came back home.

Another Planet closed their set with “Don Quixote,” but these MCs are less tilting at windmills than slicing at windpipes. “This is not mom’s spaghetti,” phiik raps, apropos. They’d recently been subject to some Eminem-like internet parasocial Stanic panic when P.O.W. Recordings put out a message saying “Funcrusher 2024” with a clip of Lungs’ “Off Top” Freestyle from 2022. Lungs, a man of bare minimum words on the interwebs, said: “Mfs really crashing out over the clip for the 4th time lol. All haters please keep hating we don’t give a fuck and the shit makes my PayPal go crazy every time.” 

phiik:  Honestly, we reaaaally don’t pay any mind to it as far as what the end result is. After a certain point, the discourse almost just becomes word vomit. Tons of people saying the same thing over & over. But at the same time, any press is good press. So I definitely didn’t mind it at all, and if anything it only creates a brand new lane of people who maybe have never heard of us, and those people develop into lifelong fans. Heads who dislike it will hate on it for a week & then move on. But, yeah, it’s absolutely only used as fuel & motivation.

On “Don Quixote,” Lungs raps about how “hip-hop fans from around the world [are] stalking on [his] page,” which seems hard to dispute. He pushes further: “Rappers behind on bills talking shit online in the same stinky Jay’s”—a prognosticator shine to his studio mic. The song ends with a GRIP-led crowd chorus of “HOLD ON A MINUTE, HOLD ON A MINUTE, HOLD ON A MINUTE!” but I couldn’t hold on to a single second in the set. It happened, and I was the better for it. “Read the book, it said Gimme mine,” phiik rapped. I have read the book, and Cervantes writes—and I was thinking to myself—“...with what minuteness they describe everything!”

CHOP THE HEAD:  I’ve never seen Lungs and phiik get that kind of reception—to have a few hundred people screaming the lyrics of those verses is an accomplishment in itself. I laugh every time I watch them live, because it just doesn’t make sense on a virtuosic level. Later that night, my man Q No Rap Name and I hung out with Lungs at his crib and, after meeting him, his music made even more sense to me. From the time we left the venue to the time we left his crib, he didn’t stop talking. He told fifty of the most bugged-out stories I’ve heard, and they all dovetailed off one another. Lungs and phiik are not affecting any part of their output; those dudes are really rapping about how they live and think. 

3.1

August Fanon and Child Actor stood side-by-side on the stage, laptop leaning as they went “back and forth and tr[ied] to surprise each other by playing some very rare unreleased things,” according to Child Actor.  

CHILD ACTOR:  It was Prem that originally pitched the idea of August Fanon and me doing a set together. I had assumed it was because he had heard about us sharing a bill last year (his and my first beat set of any kind), but according to him it was completely unrelated. August and I routinely bounce beats off each other and have been working on a project together, so it couldn’t have been a more serendipitous pairing. I had loosely prepared a longer set, but several days before the event I was notified that he and I were sharing a half hour. I thought it’d be fun if instead of going one after the other, we went back and forth in 2- or 3-minute chunks. That ended up feeling perfect. I didn’t let him send me anything beforehand because I knew it’d be fun to hear everything for the first time onstage. He certainly did not disappoint. I made sure to play only unreleased beats and songs-in-progress. One of them was a song that was mixed at the Greenhouse the day before. It may have been one of the nights with the highest percentage of people in the building that were friends/collaborators of mine. I definitely felt a great deal of support and appreciation—a very fun and fulfilling first NYC beat set for sure!

CHOP THE HEAD:  August Fanon and Child Actor’s friendly beat battle blew my mind several times over. They are both on the razor’s edge of traditionalism and pure experimentation. 

While I listened to a Fanon remix of Biggie’s “Suicidal Thoughts,” Mo Niklz and I stood in the audience chopping it up. I looked around and saw so many familiar faces in the space. Mo noticed it, too.

MO NIKLZ:  The room was packed and about 50% of those attending were artists, which is incredibly uncommon.

I asked Mo a couple questions, and in no time at all I was subject to what Castro calls “The Philosophy of Mo.” He talked about being roommates with Ceschi, meeting woods through PremRock and Willie Green, and making frequent trips down to NYC from Connecticut. “I wanted to let people know I was around,” he said. About once a month, woods would offer his couch to crash. They built a friendship and artistic relationship from there, with Mo functioning as woods’ DJ. Mo had played a crucial role on the New England leg of the Nobody Planning to Leave tour as well.

MO NIKLZ:  The tour actually stayed with me in New Haven on Sunday. They had their day off on Monday, and I booked the show in New Haven that was Tuesday. I bought everyone Sally’s Apizza Monday night and then made everyone an omelet for breakfast on Tuesday. I’ve known Prem and Castro for a while now but just met phiik and Lungs. I always like to think I’m the tour dad, but phiik and Lungs were kidding that I worry these rappers can’t take care of themselves when I’m not around so, sadly, I guess I’m more like a tour mom. The show in Connecticut was great. There were a lot of unfamiliar faces, which was cool. I normally know just about everyone at a CT underground hip-hop show. The tour went to NYC that evening. I just had to bring their merch to the Brooklyn show the following day. I got there for doors and both phiik and Lungs told me they ate well that day. “What will these rappers eat if Mo doesn’t bring them food?” they said to me. Prem helped me bring their merch in but it took him about fifteen minutes to get out the door. He kept running into a bunch of great people congratulating him on the album. We got outside and somebody else congratulated him and left. Prem said, “Did you not know him? That was Swordplay.” I was like, Oh damn, that sucks. I would’ve liked to have said hi. We finally get the merch from the car, and on our way back in, Prem got stopped again by a guy wearing some dope glasses and a Black Moon shirt. Prem said, “Hey, have you two met? Mo this is Doseone,” which was funny because we both turned to each other and said, “Oh man, I was just talking about you.” It was bizarre because Child Actor and I were talking video games a week ago and Doseone had put him on to a game he was enjoying. I said [to Child Actor], “You know he’s like one of the OG indie hip-hop legends I’ve never met.” It was pretty surreal to me. He already knew a lot of my DJ work, my job shipping records for Fake Four, and that I make pickles. Wild because basically nobody in my family has any concept of what I do, but he knew the gravity of it all.

3.11

Mo’s nourishment and maternal nurturing helped contribute to what Prem and Castro would consider their most successful tour yet.

PREMROCK:  I think we started seeing the ripple effect of fan support online translate to a tangible crowd in a realer way this run like we haven’t before. The record had only been out 1.5 weeks so to see the interest it generated so quickly was really encouraging. Touring is difficult financially—that’s been discussed at length—but seeing results and trending upwards makes you feel like it’s a viable path to growth, and nothing kills morale more than a couple duds in a row and fortunately we had none.

CURLY CASTRO:  This tour evoked a grand feeling of support. Other tours have had bigger rooms, other tours have had longer durations, but this one seemed rooted in classic Hip-Hop community. Some very welcome surprises, as to who showed up, along the way. Finally, this was our first time, in some time, we actually toured the record close to its initial release. And since this was/is our best work, then it can be perceived that this was our best tour. But I find us advancing levels with every MadMax jaunt across this wasteland we call ’Murica.

3.2

The Fanon/Child Actor set was immediately followed by Controller 7’s brief set, a prelude to ShrapKnel taking the stage. The order of performers was the subject of some debate during soundcheck. I sort of felt like I was watching Meth and Ghostface argue on the Bullet Train in Japan in The Show when Ghost took umbrage at Meth speaking too much during radio interviews.

PREMROCK:  Castro disagreed with the proposed order at Pub Rex. He thought beats first then phiik & Lungs. Beats/raps/beats/raps with Controller 7 on before us. Makes sense, right? Well, I disagreed. I saw Fanon and Child Actor as an event and not a head-nod lo-fi hangout. phiik and Lungs just before us and Controller 7, in my opinion, dwindled the impact and the inevitable smoke break may have had heads missing their opening set. There’s nothing like immediate decapitation! Crowd is transfixed. There’s the, “Well, where do you go from there?” argument, but I contend… How about two of the greatest producers doing it going cut for cut?! Also, I had exceptions with the late proposal. It would’ve been difficult to audible, and I was exhausted from the road already and high tension at our hometown release show receiving a good dozen texts per hour with dumb questions already, so I may have been terse! But we are brothers and we talk it out and stand our ground and always come to a solution. End of the day, we believe in each other and what we are doing and we will check each other if the math is not mathing. Any collaboration needs to hold space for disagreement. We do it well over here.

Controller 7 was as sheepish-as-ever, letting the crowd know how uncharacteristic it was for him to be standing on a stage playing music. But the crowd was nothing if not supportive, cheering him at every turn. 

CONTROLLER 7:  When I started the set, I ended up talking as an intro. Then I ended up talking through the set, sort of explaining what I was playing. I didn’t intend to do that, but it just kinda worked out that way. I don’t usually think of “me” as being part of the music. I hate being in photos; I’m not trying to be in the spotlight. I just make stuff for people to listen to. Being in front of a group of people staring at me while music plays is not my ideal format, so I think I ended up talking as a way to bridge all of that.

I looked to my left and saw Dose standing in the center of the room. To know, in an epistemological sense, is a strange feeling when you’ve spent so many hours documenting a person’s life and work in words, and then suddenly there they are in the physical—circulatory system, blood, bile, nerves, skeleton frame standing upright. Like seeing a ghost. Like spacetime sealing shut—closed curves appearing in my pathway. My head is a repository of the knowledge I’ve been remembering, acquiring, and word-rendering over the past seven years, so I thought about a story Tommy told me on the phone back in 2019—how he hauled his 4-track over to Dose and Jel’s Berkeley apartment in early 2000, the dawn of a new millennium, and watched Dose record a track for Left Handed Straw from the page of a randomly selected book. I found a pattern within the chaos of a complex system. 

DOSEONE:  Seeing Controller 7’s metamorphosis and rebirth into the beast he is today made my year.

Tommy played the instrumental portion of the “Many Headed” remix that’s home to Dose’s closing verse. Every fiber of me thought Dose would cut through the crowd and perform it onstage, but alas… A standout moment was hearing Quelle Chris’s evocative voice over an atmosfearik beat—a yet-to-be released “demo” (it sounded finished to my novice ears) with lyrics every bit as unnerving as the production: “The killer’s in the room, / The call is coming from somebody clearly watching what I’m doin’, / You can sense impending doom.” Another unreleased song featured Nappy Nina and Sam Herring/Hemlock Ernst, and it hit like a feel-good and melodic radio friendly unit shifter.

CONTROLLER 7:  I’m not a finger drummer or a live performer; I’m more of an overly anxious obsessive. I tried to find a way to make [my set] something that would be interesting for people and also not super complicated for me. I had to fly out there and I don’t usually perform, so I didn’t know what equipment to bring. I had an SP404, which I’ve never used to make beats, but it came in handy for what I wanted to do. I spent a week or two leading up to the show mapping things out. I knew that our time was short because we had to end at 10:30, so I was just doing a fifteen minute set. I ended up making a handful of new things, shortened a few older things, and made working demos of some unreleased songs I had. I basically made it the way I wanted to hear it and then I just mapped it out over the pads.

4.

“Some of us have children that age!” is what Castro said of Controller 7’s years-long absence from the stage. As he and Prem positioned themselves, arranged mic cords, prepped their mentals, Controller 7 pressed play—like a detonator switch—on the intro to Nobody Planning to Leave (“It worries me…a lot”). Prem invited the crowd in closer: “The moat exists.” He set down the drawbridge and raised the portcullis between performer and assembled people. But, as “Metallo” began, I recognized it takes more than infrastructure to traverse the alligator-infested muddy waters that Prem and Castro put before us.

4.1

The sounds that you’re about to hear shall be devastating to your ear.

—introduction to “Mellow My Man,” The Roots Come Alive (1999)

The hallmark of a ShrapKnel song is the ridiculoid referents. PremRock and Castro present a maximalist vision that is part and parcel to what Secret House Against calls their “b-boy sensibilities.” They’re from an era when, in Castro's words, “white labels [were] like bibles” (“Deep Space 9 Millie Pulled a Pistol”); they're guys who “used to rock all Naughty gear” (“Kaishakunin”). The two deliver a nostalgic notion for anyone that might’ve spent hours flipping through Tommy Boy perforated liner notes in the 90s.

Even an interlude (such as “Bogdan Interlude”) can yield Kemetic symbolism alongside quotidian city dwelling (“Bum a loosie offa Sekhmet”), can twist and turn from Swahili to Chicago hip-hop (“Habari gani, / One day it’ll make sense”), and conclude with a blaxploitation film screening that leaves whitefolks’ eyebrows raised. Curly Castro, a tru master of maximalism In the Ways of the Scales, word to Brother J.

ShrapKnel flex mechanical shells, and Curly Castro is a b-boy fabulist. Rather than eschew surplusage, he welcomes it. He moves maxi- and mega- in what Stefano Ercolino calls the “encyclopedic mode” wherein each song becomes an archive of subcultural signs. On “Metallo,” Castro’s maximalism bends into a barrage of references: Breaking Bad, Killarmy, Darrell Walker, J.R.R. Tolkien, Gordon Ramsay, Raekwon, Outkast, Monta Ellis, AZ, et cetera. His allusions collapse under the weight of each other, resulting in hybrids—mongrels. Mongr-allusions like “Slick Ricky in dah Foxhole” in which rapper Slick Rick and pretty-boy baller Rick Fox become one entity. These hypertrophic lines accumulate bar by bar, and—before long—you’re lost in the deluge. A twenty-first century rendition of what Hugo Ball did in the Dada Manifesto, dated July 14, 1916: “Dada Stendhal. Dada Dalai Lama,” conflating the French novelist and the Tibetan tulku. Tack on Black Thought’s “South Philly, Dalai Lama” slight rewrite for the performance of “The Next Movement” from The Roots Come Alive, and we edge closer to what Castro achieves. El Producto once called them “manimal hybrids” on “End to End Burners.”

Even when ShrapKnel doesn’t explicitly construct the mongr-allusion, it’s implicit. If you’ve done the work, shown and proven yourself worthy, the matrices will materialize right before your very eyes. [Rappers got on colored contacts but they better realize, as a wise intelligent redhead wonce said.] In Prem’s words (from “Dadaism 3”), you’ve got to “read in between the seams of the embroidery.” All of their verses amount to what Ray Bradbury called “fearful puzzles”—and lethargic listeners avoid looking too closely or delving too deeply. The past is present and the future is now, and so when Prem promises to “let a bygone be bygone” only to revoke it (“...even though I won’t”), he suddenly back-slashes to Mase in an utterly different context: 112’s “Only You” (1996) where a girl goes around with thousands in her palms. “Why you can’t let bygones be bygones?” Because nothing is ever gone for ShrapKnel; nothing outmoded, nothing defunct, everything of use.

Prem immediately invokes the “funhouse mirror” on “Metallo”—everything appears in the funhouse mirror, but its reflection is warped. This is another maximalist turn, true to John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse (1968). “For whom is the funhouse fun?” Barth asks. Perhaps it’s fun for the MC who observes that we’ve “been in post-singularity since that AI Georgetown Hoya team.” He’s Hugo Baller. Prem, who has “learned to astral project since quarantine,” adroitly sustains a trisyllabic rhyme scheme [“nightmares deployed in threes,” for the uninitiated] throughout his verse on “Dadaism 3.” His intensive and keen listenings [to the likes of an 89.9 detrimental frequency] over the years have led to a constant state of becoming, of being, of becoming a radiohead. In his own way, he’s the “paranoid android loitering,” absorbing knowledge—be it a Fondle ‘Em 12-inch from 1997, “speaking noxious” like Cage Kennylz; or the debut LP of a quintet from Oxford in 1993, wondering about the “creeping doubt” that “keeps rattling [his] cage” like Thom Yorke—and then he dispenses it to his audience in the form of Aesop fables (“splitting hairs[/hares], slow and steady on my Tortoise speed”) and Wojnarowski scoops (“Otto Porter top-of-market deal”). This process—playing the long game—might have you “forget the words [he] just blurted out,” but he’s gonna continue to get “open till he’s brain-dead, till you’re brain-dead.”

4.11

The Roots Come Alive (1999) begins—not with The Roots—but with Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five traveling through time to hit us “Live from the T-Connection,” nesting one of the earliest hip-hop recordings of a live event within the content of a live recording on the eve of Y2K destruction. Lineage matters, The Roots acknowledge, and these transmitted words are just as relevant to a ShrapKnel performance in 2024:

Now I know this ain’t the best party in the world, but let me explain something to y’all, New York. It ain’t no party unless each and every one of you try to make it a party—you dig what I’m saying? Make each record your best record, and we could rock all night long.

4.111

Supporters came from across the country, from overseas even, to experience the ShrapKnel showcase. “A whole lot of superstars in the house tonight,” Prem said at one point, echoing Rev. Run. Friends and kinfolx from Switzerland, California, Seattle, New Mexico, Texas, Philadelphia, Connecticut… Fuck it, we’ll do it live! Prem shouted to his tourmates standing stage-side—an inside-joke, an O’Reilly parody—but keeping that same passion and energy through “Dadaism 3” and “Steel Pan Labyrinth.” “If anyone ever asks you the question,” the intro to Live Hardcore Worldwide declares, “Who is the number one set and sound? You will quickly reply…”

<whispered>

“ShrapKnel.”

4.2

On “Why Is That?” off Live Hardcore Worldwide, KRS-One breaks down the genealogy of Blackness in the Bible acapella and announces that “the age of the ignorant rapper is done.” That was in the 1-9-9-1. But in the 2-0-2-4, Curly Castro finds himself disillusioned by KRS’s pontifications and panderings to the likes of New York City’s top coprophage, Mayor Adams. “Halcyon Hip-Hop inna Temple, / Membership would Bend, / KRS, of course, would sell the course, / But then the Fun would End.” Let’s all hold hands and hum along to Co Flow’s “Happy Happy Joy Kill,” hmm?

Castro resembles one of Dada’s “honored poets,” in the words of Hugo Ball, “who are always writing with words but never writing the word itself, who are always writing around the actual point.” Castro writes around the actual point, but he’s never pointless. You can listen to his 9mm go bang on the chorus of “Dadaism 3” (Wa da da Dee Dee da da Dee Dee da da Day), and it harmonizes with Ball issuing forth an invocation: “dada m’dada, dada m’dada dada mhm, dada dere dada.”

5.

Before I go on live all my enemies try to contrive

plots to make my whole entire routine take a swan dive.

But this ain’t commercialized hip-hop…

—Buck 65 (1999)

“LIVE Element,” but DEATH pervades Nobody Planning to Leave. LIVE in all CAPS—a stylized emphasis on life and living, but O DEATH, none can excel. ShrapKnel refuse & resist! They arrive as a def fresh crew, and like the haintish vocal of Roxanne Shanté echoing across galaxies, they came here tonight to get started, but not to cold act ill in any sense other than she intended. Certainly nothing cellular. No icy hands get ahold of them. Hip-hop, each and every mic check, is Life or Death—you’re breathing the sniper’s breath. DEATH is everywhere on Nobody Planning to Leave, from the David Berman references, quotations, and puns to PremRock’s opening words on the album. Prem spurns DEATH; instead, he will go thou and preach his gospel (Luke 9:60 KJV): “I don’t wanna bury the dead, / Pallbearer for carried dread.” He lifts the gossamer veil so that he “might sneak through” and survive. He knows from Black Thought—in sharing some of the blackest of thoughts—that if you “step into the realm, you’re bound to get caught, / And from this worldly life, you’ll soon depart.” 

Prem knows this region well; he knows the feel of ash beneath foot and the hematic heat against his face. On “Bardo,” the CD-only bonus cut from Load Bearing Crow’s Feet, he grapples with the pre-grief of existential knowing. “See, I’ve been told a lie,” he raps on the chorus, “swans don’t actually sing when they die, / They hit the same note you do when you croak, / No poetic epilogue or even goodbye, / But I be waiting over here on this side.” He’s on the side of the living, of poetic monologues, of greetings and gratitude. The only death rattle he recognizes is the one he hears at the end of a night of performing, his voice ragged. He imagines the walls “stress[ing] the importance of time… / Muttering something ’bout chakras and alignment.” But for his living self, what matters is more material than all that. “I be at the mom and pop shop to drop me off some consignment,” he says. To “get [his] affairs in order” has nothing to do with firming up his estate; it’s about getting paid in full. Equating his music career [Doseone calls “music career” an oxymoron, by the way] with impending death is only one example of the artist qualifying/quantifying life and livelihood—but there’s really no quantizing Death’s drums. On “Nutkracker Blues,” Castro talks about the urgency of having a verse “at the deadline and it’s Gotta be Perfect.”

Conventional thinking insists that there’s a transitory nature, a finitude, to doing what they do, these rappers. In 2002, on “Shrapnel,” Slug said, “I can’t remember who asked me, but someone asked me, / How long I thought that I would be allowed atop this trash heap.” Atmosphere, it just so happens, is the quintessential indie hip-hop success story, touring extensively and endlessly, selling out thousand-seat capacity ballrooms, pavilions, and amphitheaters—even two decades after those words were recorded. But most artists end up with “shards of pulled cards scattered on the carpet” (as Slug raps on “Shrapnel”); as Prem says on “Human Form,” you’re hustling from “bassinet to coffin.” On “Illusions of P,” he cloaks the agony of abbreviation in a clever pun about Royal Tenenbaum (“you fake ill”). The gut punch, though, is realizing “none of this will last forever.” While he can, he continues: “You only pray it will. / Illusions of hunting permanence, you pray still, / Ay still, lay still, lay still.” What’s the worst fate of all? Another dearly departed artist yet to make a dent.

5.1

The monetizing of emotions and songs, the dividends paid or owed, the commodification of life lived, could make it feel like you’ve been dealt a bum hand. “You got all these songs that you never play for anyone,” Prem raps on “Death on the Installment Plan,” and so he goddamns it. Death on the installment plan—a phrase he cribbed from Céline in 2021—has transformed into Nobody Planning to Leave in 2024. NOBODY DEATH-PLANNING, in other words. If we look at the novel itself from 1936, we can find a shred of hope, though. Provided here, context-less, a page from Céline [apply it to Prem and/or Castro, won’t you?]: 

To command his audience… He explained the working of the valves, the guy rope, the barometers, the laws of weight and ballast. Then carried away by his subject, he embarked on other fields, expatiating, ad-libbing without order or plan, about meteorology, mirages, the winds, cyclones… He touched on the planets, the stars… Everything was grist for his mill: the zodiac, Gemini…Saturn…Jupiter…Arcturus and its contours…the moon…Bellegophorus and its relief… He pulled measurements out of his hat… About Mars he could talk at length… He knew it well… It was his favorite planet… He described all the canals, their shape and itinerary! their flora! as if he’d gone swimming in them!… While he was perched up there shooting the shit, spellbinding the masses, I took up a little collection…

I was in Public Records to take up a little collection.

5.11

ShrapKnel spellbinds the masses with everything from superheroes to supervillains to sports figures of legend and little renown. Castro is MC John Corben—Metallo with metal lungs. The fluoroscope reveals the metallic structure of his bones and organs, and he’s got kryptonite in his fuse-box, which is to say he’s got a kind of death totem close at heart. The trouble is, Castro found himself stricken by the sense of green, glowing death that Metallo delivered to Superman. He won’t relinquish his life, though. He refuses the sick-box. He’s riding to Babylon by bus but persevering through every torment or trial, hell or high water. He will lively up himself against all odds. 

5.111

“The bus door opened and I placed my foot upon the step. Quite suddenly, there was music swelling up into my head, as if a choir of angels had boarded the Second Avenue bus directly in front of me. They were singing the last chorus of an old spiritual of hope: Gonna die this death on Cal—va—ryyyyy BUT AIN’T GONNA DIE NO     MORE…! Their voices sweet and powerful over the din of the Second Avenue traffic. I stood transfixed on the lower step of the bus.  “Hey girlie, your fare!” I shook myself and dropped my two coins into the fare-box. The music was still so real I looked around me in amazement as I stumbled to a seat. Almost no one else was in the late-morning bus, and the few people who were there were quite ordinarily occupied and largely silent. Again the angelic orchestration swelled, filling my head with the sharpness and precision of the words; the music was like a surge of strength. It felt rich with hope and a promise of life—more importantly, a new way through or beyond pain. I’ll die this death on Calvary ain’t           gonna       die                no     more! The physical realities of the dingy bus slid away from me.”

—Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982)

5.2

When Curly Castro writes his biomythography, it might well be titled Babylon by Bus. Footnotes might detail the routines of road life, like Warren G vacuuming the tour bus in The Show; early chapters might reflect on the Kris Kross-type innocence of missing a school bus (“And that is something I will never ever ever do again”); he might dispense with rumors and “dickhead logic,” celebrating collaborations like “Babylon by Bus” with woods and Prem; but he most definitely will amalgamate his years of movements and commotions into a totalizing whole. Everything that rises must converge, as Flannery O’Connor says. Bob Marley and the Wailer’s Babylon by Bus will evolve into Mike Ladd’s “Blade Runner” (1997), which in turn becomes “Bladerunners” (1999) with Co Flow featured, but retains the same lyric nonetheless: “As we do babylon by bus straight to Rikers.” See, it’s about building, about building, about bringing more bodies onboard the bus.” The bus stopped with a sudden jerk and shook him from his meditation.

5.21  THE CENTRAL PARK CHAPTER

The biomythography will provide a meta-commentary on ShrapKnel’s arc as a group (just as “LIVE Element” does). The chapter might be titled “Hip-Hop Heaven,” which is what Castro has called the weekend of August 13-15 in 2021. He meant heaven in terms of enthroned deities rather than death, but DEATH determined itself.

The SummerStage performance was headlined by Armand Hammer and The Alchemist. Moor Mother, Kayana, Fielded, and GENG PTP were also on the bill. It was a major booking for ShrapKnel. “We got at least two lives to give tonight,” Prem raps on “Nutkracker Blues,” and though the song sympathizes with Group Home in flashes, the sentiment speaks to the duality of that Central Park performance. “You are what you leave unexhumed,” Prem adds, and so the death knell resonates endlessly, like tinnitus. Leave it all out there on the floor, on the stage. Dig deep; don’t look back.

CURLY CASTRO:  The Central Park show was a level up for an Armand Hammer-led show w/ Backwoodz as support. It was our first time meeting and performing with The Alchemist. Unbeknownst to me, my back and spine was riddled with cancerous Tumors. I was in a good amount of pain; I just didn’t let anyone know, not even Prem. Couldn’t phuck up this opportunity for ShrapKnel and the live premiere of my “Phuck Puff” verse on “Wishing Bad.” So, in essence, it was the last show before I broke my hip a few months later and found out just how sick I actually Was.

PREMROCK:  I don’t think woods could believe it was actually happening while it was either. I watched Backwoodz artists go from horrendous sound at a fifty cap room to this? Truly a sight and testament to what can happen when you stick to your guns. Having Alchemist back us onstage and just before sit in the trailer and tell us stories of hip-hop lore probably made our year at the least. A high point of our career followed briskly by the biggest tribulation. A microcosm of life and dedication on several levels. A day and night we will never forget!

Castro has called that Central Park performance “the last moment of ignorance.” PremRock, presciently, also recorded “Bardo” that same weekend. On “LIVE Element,” Castro cuts through the static: “Central Park show while my Cancer was Raging, / Stage 4 on the Stage for Edutainment.” He enta’d the stage to exhibit to the audience how the Blackman’s in Effect. The performance stage and the stage of his cancer replicating like cells. But no Cell Therapy to speak of. He was backed by Alchemist, a stroke of luck “how the Game Spin,” but the Wheel of Fortune spins centrifugal, spins like the minds of children at the carnival listening to the “carousel calliope, among the hills, piping [Chopin’s] ‘Funeral March’ backwards,” to borrow something from Ray Bradbury. “LIVE Element” refrains from becoming a dirge. 

5.22

In December 2001, Ray Bradbury posted his origin story to his website:

During the Labor Day week of 1932 a favorite uncle of mine died; his funeral was held on the Labor Day Saturday. If he hadn’t died that week, my life might not have changed because, returning from his funeral at noon on that Saturday, I saw a carnival tent down by Lake Michigan. I knew that down there, by the lake, in his special tent, was a magician named Mr. Electrico. Mr. Electrico was a fantastic creator of marvels. He sat in his electric chair every night and was electrocuted in front of all the people, young and old, of Waukegan, Illinois. When the electricity surged through his body he raised a sword and knighted all the kids sitting in the front row below his platform. I had been to see Mr. Electrico the night before. When he reached me, he pointed his sword at my head and touched my brow. The electricity rushed down the sword, inside my skull, made my hair stand up and sparks fly out of my ears. He then shouted at me, “Live forever!”

Castro raps forever on “LIVE Element,” leaving behind any pressure or protocol to limit himself to sixteen bars. He raps endlessly, staving off death. He raps like his life depends on it. He “roam[s] Earth” and will “give [his] Old Bones the Last Word.” He raps “Back & Forth” with Prem like “When the Lox work[ed] with Made Men.” The song was “Tommy’s Theme,” another eerie premonition if we consider the role of one Tommy McMahon (Controller 7). “Something this way Comes Wicked,” Castro raps, inverting inversions. Bradbury’s “Something Wicked This Way Comes,” a 1962 dark fantasy novel inspired by his own carnival experience, forebodes a chilling prospect. Not quite as frigid as Castro’s “Cold Vein back-to-back Liquid Swords Winter,” but as grim as hospital corridors and morgue thermostats nonetheless.

Mr. Dark, Bradbury’s sinister carnival barker, feeds off fears and engenders negative energies from his young audience:

Alive! Mr Dark’s lips licked and savoured. Alive. Come alive. He racheted the switch to the last notch. Live, live! Somewhere, dynamos protested, skirled, shrilled, moaned a bestial energy... Dead dead, thought Will. But live alive! cried machines, cried flame and fire, cried mouths of crowds of livid beasts on illustrated flesh.

Microphones and preamps and 4-tracks and DAWs—these are the machines that make civilization fun. Curly Castro and PremRock wield their own spiritual powers. Prem, according to Castro, “lifts crowds,” but together, they can “open [a] portal on stage,” The Prestige style, and “flip crowds.” Some true Aleister Crowley-type Magick (Elemental Theory); pentacles and penwork. The ShrapKnel lyric booklet is a grimoire. They “crack the codex like a soothsayer,” so says Prem.

5.3

“Sometimes we draw dead and draft failure,” Prem admits. They draw dead crowds, that is—lifeless and disinterested. “The math fails ya” sometimes, and the Supreme Mathematics go stupid-simple. But it’s okay when the ticket sales and rating scales don’t add up, because they “don’t need the accolades,” Prem says defiantly, assuredly. What they share is stronger than those metrics. Prem and Castro shared a phone call with billy woods the night before Castro fell and found himself hospitalized—an ill communication.

Facing uncertain futures, PremRock steadied the shaking stage. “When we got the diagnosis,” he raps, “I didn’t know how to pronounce that, / Plus I was already thinking ’bout the bounceback, / And with every bounced track I know no illness can slow the blade of a determined razor.” Note: when “we” got the diagnosis—the fraternal order of MCs; the die-cast duo; Shrap and the Family Rock; i.e., no one suffers alone. Prem helps them stay afloat with the assonantal buoyancy of “pronounce,” “’bout,” “bounceback,” and “bounced track.” Music will get them there (“every bounced track”). 

And thus we get Castro spitting his verse from Armand Hammer’s “Wishing Bad” on the Center Park SummerStage. We hear his prophetic lyric: “Phuck Puff, / Survivor’s remorse should keep him phucked up!” (“Did any line age better than that one?” Prem asked the crowd at Public Records. “My man knew.”) And thus we hear that very audio clip at the conclusion of “LIVE Element,” a song which chronicles. “Phuck Puff” now immortalized on tour t-shirts available at the ShrapKnel merch table. At Public Records, Castro picked up the last line of Prem’s refrain (“3rd Eye glow like Hiero, / Seen it comin’ like 5-0 at the live show”) and made it a call-and-response. At the live show! AT THE LIVE SHOW! Inspired, Castro cut into an impromptu acapella version of his “Wishing Bad” verse, only to call-and-response the “Phuck Puff / Phucked Up” hook, damning those which need to be damned.

6.

Prem mentions “selling enchantment by the package” on “Steel Pan Labyrinth,” but you can’t commodify craft. He’s not a peddler, anyway—he’s a performer. For one of two solo performances, Prem rapped about how his “human form” is a “uniform” (with that lovely autological bent), something he does, or dons, “to belong.” Is his performing self the authentic version, or is his non-performing self the stock character? Is his uniform a “Uni-4-Orm,” like Canibus in ’97, a hired hand meant to “pulverize MCs and blow up mics, / From street corner cyphers to international websites?” Does raw imply honest? (Funny how Prem’s regular employment is bartender, while on stage he’s also a bar-tender.) The blurry boundary between these opposing selves leaves Prem rudderless: “I’ll admit I’m catatonic, / Chart the pattern of vomit, / Sonnet in the style of Vonnegut, postmodernist.” He spews, minimalistically, like so many bar patrons spinning on stools, but discovers purpose in the identifiable “pattern[s]” and emerging “sonnet[s].” Turns dreck to “Protect Ya Neck”-level compositions. And—even impressiver—he pivots political-cum-analogical to bring us back to the idea of selling one’s self and/or selling one’s wares: “You are who you’re in Congress with, / Closeted moderates post black squares / Then act scared of actual progress ’cause it’s profitless.” But lemme chill…

6.1

“Doseone is in the house,” Castro shouted-out between “Human Form” and “Mescalito.” “If you don’t know, get acclimated. And if you don’t know, you’re stupid.”

6.11

NAHreally:  Some shows really feel like an indie rap convention, and this was definitely one of them. Everywhere you turned was someone you knew or knew of—and the steady stream of special guests onstage only added to that feeling. The way the room erupted when woods came out for a few songs was special. The first time I ever saw (and heard of) PremRock and Castro was at a sparsely attended (perhaps more so poorly promoted) Armand Hammer show in 2018 at The Kingsland in Brooklyn. Castro was an opener and Prem jumped up for some tracks throughout the night. If I remember right, the crowd was probably high single digits. Since then, I’ve seen woods and ELUCID headline some packed rooms, but to get to see ShrapKnel fill up Public Records and bring woods up as a guest felt like a full circle moment. Triumph was definitely in the air at this show—something like a victory lap for putting in the work and staying true.

MO NIKLZ:  woods came out in an Adidas Jamaican-colored jacket I gave him as a present. I bartered pickles for that jacket.

woods performed “Babylon by Bus,” “383 Myrtle,” and crowd favorite “Spongebob.” “Babylon by Bus” required some mic manipulation. “Why you give me the feedback mic though?” woods scoffed. Castro sang woods’ praises (“He has created the greatest label on the planet…”), and woods spread the love right back: “Prem booked my first real tour in this country, and Castro’s been down forever. This is just family.” After a “Spongebob” false start (“My babysitter’s getting 40 dollars an hour…we’re doing this!”), woods gave the crowd—in full darkness—what they wanted to hear. What’s apparent is that the whole operation is no longer under water.

billy woods:  I was just proud and happy to see Castro and Prem have that kind of night. They are my colleagues and co-workers, but they are also my good friends, and great human beings, to boot. Also, I love ShrapKnel's records; I put them out because I love those albums, but I really feel like they are better live than on record, which is not something you can say for a lot of acts right now. So, this was also my first time seeing their new live set, and it’s just the kind of thing that makes you say, Yes, this is it right here. So I was happy for my friends, I was proud of whatever role Backwoodz has been able to play in their ascendancy, and I was really soaking in the music.

7.

Fatboi Sharif got onstage in his capacity as King Geedorah in a pink summer hat and open-chest button down, his magnetism throbbing like gravity beams as he splattered words over a schizzing loop.

FATBOI SHARIF:  [The track’s] not even recorded—I just do it at shows. I had DJ Boogaveli loop the first three seconds of Redman’s “Basically” from Dare Iz a Darkside.

CHOP THE HEAD:  Watching Fatboi Sharif dance and sway his way around the show, laughing and turning people up, and then step on stage to deliver wide-eyed haunting intensity in a huge pink church lady hat… He left my house fifteen minutes ago after an hours-long argument with DRIVEBY about the nature of evil, more specifically about whether Charles Manson is more evil than Popeye’s Chicken. 

7.1

By the time SKECH185 stepped onstage, having already witnessed woods and Sharif before him, I felt like I was watching Brian Robbins’ The Show documentary, and Public Records was transformed into a more modest version of the 32nd Street and Lancaster Avenue Armory on December 10, 1994—wormhole shit. SKECH performed “Up To Speed,” a rafter-rattler I’ve seen him rock on several occasions. Did I go hard enough? he asks a multitude of trusted friends and musicians. The answer is never less than a resounding YES. “You did go hard enough for me,” Prem deadpanned.

SKECH185:  I hit [Prem and Castro] up to see if they had booked the bill. I guess they had, but they said they would bring me out for a song. It was my night off, so it was a no-brainer. We all went on tour last year, and I have music with those cats, so it made sense. It was fun. They rocked at my release party last year so it was full circle. I’ve been doing music with Castro going back ten or so years, and Prem and I were co-workers for a time, plus we have music together. Those men are like family.

CHOP THE HEAD:  I’ve never seen anyone rap like SKECH185. Raw conviction. 

“We roll with killahzzzz!” Castro shouted after SKECH put the mic down.

7.11

AJ SUEDE:  We knew about a month or two in advance that I’d be landing in NY (from the UK/EU G’s Us tour) the day before the album release party. I was invited to be a guest and, of course, I couldn’t refuse that. It was great to see everybody I know and meet a couple new people in the process. Since I was in New York, I knew it was only right to play a song from Reoccurring Characters. Everybody featured on the album was in the building. “Tell Me When to van Gogh” always goes crazy in a live setting. The drums!

8.

On “Deep Space 9 Millie Pulled a Pistol” (a title coined by Controller 7, but he must’ve done so while interiorizing a certain ShrapKnel modality, methodology, modus operandi), Prem alludes to not one, but two, El-P classicks: “Deep Space 9mm” and “Last Good Sleep.” He interpolates the latter’s chorus:

At night I cover my ears in tears the man right in front of me drank too many beers. Every dream, every night, I take his life, waiting for my chance to make it right.

Prem’s death-obsessing is externalized elsewhere, onto an [un]worthy subject.

8.1

When El-P performed “Last Good Sleep” at the final Company Flow show (“The Open Casket Show”) on March 28th 2001, he did so through tears. His mother, the subject of the song who was swallowed when she was hollow, stood in the audience. I should’ve been at the Bowery Ballroom that night, bearing witness, but instead I skipped. Maybe because it was a school night and I didn’t have permission; maybe because I was too lazy to buy a ticket; maybe because I was just a fucking dumbass with no sense of historicity. But my friend Omar (the producer The Shah) attended, telling me peace out as he exited his driveway to head to the city while I played ball in the street with his younger brother. I gave him shit for going without me, but the fact is I could’ve gone with him if I’d made the effort. My only consolation was the flyer he brought me back as a memento.

“Worry Doll,” the wobbling, comedown closing track on Nobody Planning to Leave, finds Castro reflecting on the fleeting isolation he felt in college. “Lune TNS warp my anthem on Campus, / While every other dorm blast the Unit with Whoo Kid.” That alienation that invigorates; a specialized sensibility that inspires—John Singleton couldn’t capture that “higher learning turned End to End Burning” to camera. And so it seemed fated that El-P’s face would appear on a tablet, wishing Castro well while he was wheelchair-bound, recovering from his illness. Castro suddenly had the man behind “Bad Touch Example” at his fingertips with touchscreen technology—it was an emotional moment, but also apropos. There was something so psyence fiction about that mode of communication—something so Blade Runner, so 2001: A Space Odyssey, so Deltron 3030, Megaton B-Boy 2000, 5000 Miles West of the Future. It was everything for the man—the MC and producer and godhead of independent rap—to reach out and express his strength and support. Cancer 4 Cure, sure—El had dealt with Camu Tao’s lung carcinoma diagnosis and death, and so too had the underground scene experienced it from the sidelines. The tablet message to Castro essentially said: You should pump this shit like they do in the future.

9.

Before the closing number, Prem told the audience that they “wanted to build a night that you wouldn’t see anywhere else,” and that objective was achieved. Castro and Prem then literally leaned on each other as they performed “Running Rebel Swordplay” to end their hour-long set. 

9.1

Lights went up. The crowd thinned out. I straggled, wall-flowered, wondering, What’s next? I eventually exited the main space and found all those same recognizable faces from the show lined up in the trellised tunnel leading to the street. Controller 7, lugging his box of gear, Curly Castro, and PremRock all emerged from the venue and exited through that corridor. Friends on either side cheered them lovingly. Mo Niklz unfurled a folding table on the sidewalk and displayed a small pyramid of pickle tupperwares. 

9.11

Oh shit, now here’s a cypher…

—Curly Castro, “Sadatay”

As AKAI SOLO and his TASE GRIP contingent exited the tunnel, AKAI—feeling the thrum—began to elucidate all the things that are hip-hop, which is to say, everything. “Brooklyn is…HIP-HOP, the dark sky is…HIP-HOP, my people are…HIP-HOP!...” There was a particular cadence and rhythm to his speech, which could be easily misconstrued as rapping, and that was all Doseone needed to set it off. I’d seen him on the sidewalk, like a predator tracking the bloodscent, his broad shoulders hunched as he dragged on a cigarette. As AKAI and his crew turned curbside, Dose stepped into the street and began freestyling. A circle spontaneously closed around him. I maneuvered with the quickness to the outer perimeter and pressed record on my Dictaphone, positioning myself to Dose’s left.

Doseone, that rough beast slouching toward Butler Street, that clutcher of a thousand skulls, expectorated a string of freestyled words:

I find myself turning science into gutting an entire abdomen of a cheetah, When I work harder, it goes world of words, hearth-beater. I’m out here looking for yourself, Conceiver of entire men out of mud, What he did, what he did with these rappers was duds, and I exploded like a whole lot of love lava.

I could tell from the expressions on faces that only about half the crowd gathered knew who Dose was, and even fewer computed what was unfolding. But those in the know knew what time it was. Dose spit another few bars (“Bleeding possibly with a tourniquet, / I go at it, and I burn ’em once again, / Resurrect ’em and pull up by the sternum and pull they chest out”), and then the beatbox joined in (courtesy of Q No Rap Name, with later contributions from Wavy Bagels). Castro, possessed with the same cypher-sense as Dose, entered the circle and rapped with a hesitant flow:

Do things as we flip ’em, get ’em, Flying over ya head like a gryphon, forgiven,  You can’t even believe me, I made it out the system, The Matrix ain’t got four parts, you better listen.

Castro passed to SKECH185: “Similar to devils, like to hell, breaking heaven down, / It don’t matter, the bread leavens, and everybody moves around.”

[fragments, because transcriptions are no substitute for being there]

Doseone:  “I disappear and then I reappear again wearing your very favoritest rappers’ skins…” AKAI SOLO:  “I’m armed with just bravado and still bend the metal…” Castro: “Let me catch wreck, / Commercial’s ITT Tech…” Doseone: “Rappers need everything and their mothers to hug ’em…” AJ Suede:  “The world keeps spinning on its own time…” Castro:  “We underground, under rap, under earth, under term, / And if you need something, get under, get burnt…” Doseone: “Every bath I take is completely red…” SKECH: “High-tops made out of human skin…”

CHOP THE HEAD:  I watched ShrapKnel body that set, Curly leaving everything on the stage, and then walk up to SKECH outside and say, We rhymin’? SKECH started beatboxing and started up the cypher. When SKECH wanted to rap, my man Q No Rap Name held the beat down for them. He told me later he had no clue Doseone was there until that happened, and he had been a huge fan of his for years. That moment showed me everything I needed to know about those artists. Are we rhyming, or what?

DUNCECAP:  The cypher outside was magical and reminded me why I love hip-hop. Seeing Legends commingling with Future Legends.

Q NO RAP NAME:  That cypher was crazy. Fuckin’ Doseone was there spittin’—I couldn’t believe it. 

SKECH185:  It was cool but relatively uneventful as cyphers go. I was mad my voice was going out. Doseone is one of my heroes, so it was cool to freestyle with him. Castro and I usually freestyle together when we are in the same place. It reminded me that freestyle cyphers rarely happen nowadays (as you could tell by the lack of beatboxers), but it was refreshing and much needed. Dose talked to me about starting a cypher earlier in the evening.

DOSEONE:  I truly feel perfectly lucked to have experienced a creative competitive healthy hardcore group of people who push themselves to make outstanding rap as art!

9.111

I [re-]introduced myself to Dose, having not spoken to him since our marathon phone calls a few years ago for the aforementioned Anticon book. This was my first time seeing him in-person in 22 years. I last saw him in Tribeca at the Knitting Factory in 2002 performing alongside Jel and Alias—a night I documented as well (on 8mm video). He thanked me and expressed his appreciation for the work I’ve been doing, which felt good, especially considering I don’t think he really has any concept of how exhaustive the Anticon book is going to be. To be speaking to him at a Backwoodz event, rhyming beside artists that have rekindled my interest and engendered this indie rap renaissance, was yet another symbol of convergence. He told me had been at Dove’s the day before with Tommy, Scott Matelic, and Fatboi Sharif. Sharif, I said, was a seeker. (He knew.) Moments later, I saw woods and Dose huddled together in hushed conversation. Someone put out the call for a group photograph, and everybody gathered in the middle of Butler Street for a Gordon Parks “Great Day”-style flick. “FREE PALESTINE on three,” AKAI shouted. One, two, three…

9.2

“Just peep the words of my agnostic prayer,” Open Mike Eagle raps on “Dadaism 3.” Every word I write isn’t 25-to-life, but if all goes well, each paragraph will be received as an agnostic prayer. On his most recent solo effort, Another Triumph of Ghetto Engineering (2023), OME told the world, “We got people though.” Two tracks—“We Should Have Made Otherground a Thing” and “Dave Said These Are the Liner Notes”—speak to the power of our scenes and communities, which, truly, is a single unified community. (It’s an acknowledgement that Slug made in songform in 2000 with Atmosphere’s dewy-eyed “Travel,” a B-side on the Ford Two 12-inch—like OME, Slug was “calling all heads of the Earth.”) The underground—or otherground—has been building (steam with a grain of salt) for approximately thirty years. Back when many of us started in this in the late 90s and early aughts, we had no elders (I spoke to NAHreally about this while posted up in Public Rex). We were just a room full, or message board full, of teenagers and heads in their early twenties. We didn’t know shit. Aceyalone might’ve called us Knownots. But now we’ve got representation across generations—we have mentors from the pre-millennium, youngbloods learning the way of the subterranean walk, and whoever else falls between.

Spirit. Convergence.

10.

MO NIKLZ:  After the show, a group of about twenty of us started heading out to another bar. Controller 7 asked me, “Is this normal?” I said, “It depends on the group and performer, but with PremRock, it’s very common, yes.” We ended up closing out the next bar we went to. Doseone had the nicest conversation with me saying, “Keep up the good work and especially all the shipping for Fake Four—it’s so important for the kids,” which I hadn’t even really thought about in a long time. I told him how happy I was to meet him and how there’s such a short list of people I’d actually want to meet, and he did not disappoint. He agreed saying, “Yeah, don’t meet your heroes.”

10.1

We were at the Brooklyn Inn. I ended my night like I began it—in conversation with Controller 7, Scott Matelic, and Emynd. Tommy was clearly elated with how things had gone. He awkwardly gripped vinyl to his chest as he sipped his beer and smiled ear to ear. Castro hopped in a car after the cypher, but Prem, the eternal nighthawk, reveled in his post-show glow, holding barside conversations with peers aplenty. Dose, too, was making the rounds, affable as he is, and he eventually joined our conversation. Ever the hip-hop historian, he entertained us with an invented—though no doubt veracious—account of one Parrish Smith arriving at Power Play Studios for the Business As Usual sessions in 1990, only to describe the premise of “Mr. Bozack” to one Erick Sermon. “And you’re going to play the part of my dick!”

11. CODA

The next night, I was privileged to see ShrapKnel perform in North Jersey. Soldato Books in Rutherford sells both books and records, but it’s housed in the Williams Center, which functions as an arts center and movie theater as well—and just steps from the former residence of William Carlos Williams. The Jersey tour stop was more sparsely attended (I counted about 25 heads, many of which were family, friends, and fellow performers) and suffered from some pretty significant technical difficulties. The soundsystem was little more than a PA, and the acoustics left much to be desired, especially in the shadow of what we all experienced just 24 hours prior at Pub Rex. The performance space was essentially a mezzanine with couches and balcony access. Roper Williams and Sharif were posted up outside, hopefully brainstorming and mindfucking the basis for their Something About Shirley follow-up. NAHreally endeared the crowd with his didactic raps, a consummate performer with a comedian’s sense of timing and poise. He passed out bookmarks advertising his album with The Expert, BLIP. (I took two.)  DRIVEBY went to work for a short but potent beat set. OneShotOnce got on the mic and ripped. Sharif went shirtless for a raucous rendition of “Fly Pelican,” his vocals lovingly distorted. The only performer who was lucky enough to evade sound trouble was L.I.F.E. Long. The performance of his “Battle for Asgard” verse nearly split the atom. 

PREMROCK:  L.I.F.E. Long is a person that truly embodies hip-hop. He is also a beacon of positivity who seemingly never ages! I vividly remember him watching me at an open mic in Bed-Stuy in ’08. I would scour the web for any opportunities that looked like I could get up there to get my reps in. This one was definitely on the lower rung of quality, but I showed out for sure. It was shortly after my song or two that L.I.F.E. walked up to me and said, “You killed it! You’re too nice to be at this one—you should come to mine,” and handed me a flyer for a Newark mic he ran every Saturday. I looked at the flyer and realized who he was. Can Ox!? Stronghold!? I was very aware and it really energized me, and I didn’t miss any of those shows for a while. We went on to do a few things together and become fast friends. I would say his advice and belief in me was a big factor in my development. Time and life (no pun) has a way of losing touch, but I’ll always give props and try to let him know his importance. I hope I am to others what he was for me. There’s importance in paying things forward. Nobody is going to look out for us if we don’t. To quote Onyx, ALL WE GOT IZ US!

phiik and Lungs negotiated the microphone feedback through their set as best they could, but it made me long for the chorus of TASE GRIP voices that were present to support them the night before. Prem and Castro seemed demoralized when they took the stage, which wasn’t a stage. They, like phiik and Lungs before them, chose to perform from behind a makeshift bar on the mezzanine. The bar top served as merch table during the performances, and Castro began by leaning forward and asking the audience, “What can I do for you?” He later went hat-backwards and stood precariously on a folding chair for “LIVE Element.” He left his arm frozen in the air at the end of his verse—a rapper in the Rodin exhibit—holding it there until Prem spit his line about the “bounceback.” They weren’t demoralized, I realized—they were just performing in a more suitable register to the space.

PREMROCK:  We are from the open mic era. Ten MCs, one mic, fighting for space to be heard. Imperfect sound is nothing when we think of what we’ve dealt with in the past, and we’re also blessed with good voices that can cut through the bullshit. Hiccups are always going to occur—shit soundperson, unexpected detour, less than ideal sleeping conditions, etc. Malleability is extremely important. To aspiring touring artists: there ain’t no glory out there, but there is truth! And the truth shall set you free!

12.  THE CHOIR OF ANGELS BOARD THE SECOND AVENUE BUS TO BABYLON

phiik:  Shout out to jesse The Tree. Was intro’d to him by Prem & Castro, and we just hit it off with him immediately. One of the funniest dudes. We had gotten this weed syrup from the Cookies store in Massachusetts, and it just had all of us rolling. But especially Castro, man—he was at the point of tears because of Jesse + the syrup combo. Mind you too, Prem said it was the highest he’s ever seen Castro, and they’ve been kickin’ it for a while. That experience definitely bonded us all right then & there. Can’t wait to get back on the road with everybody again soon.

AUGUST FANON:  [It] was like a family reunion of sorts. All the performers have worked together and the listening community that came out to the show felt like they come to all the shows. I’m just getting to NYC and this was my third show as August Fanon, so it’s all new and beautiful to me.

WAVY BAGELS:  The ShrapKnel show was magnetic. They ripped the stage as well as everyone that got on. Controller 7 wowed the crowd with his beat set, August Fanon and Child Actor kept the heads nodding with their B2B set, and Lungs & phiik looked comfortable being back home after being on the road. It was also great to run into so many familiar faces and those I finally got to meet in person (Marcus Pinn, AJ Suede, Fanon). Overall an event to remember.

HEIGHT KEECH:  This show was inspiring to me as an NYC transplant that’s trying to get my head around the live music landscape. When I saw the Brooklyn stop on Shrapknel’s tour the year before, the crowd was a little light and I thought that their spirits seemed to be a little bit down. It was quite an exciting contrast to see them receiving a massive hero’s welcome like this. Towards the end of their set, I took out my phone to snap a quick picture, only to realize I had been pocket-dialing ten different people since I walked in. I got a few texts like, “Come on, Height,” but Lord Grunge of Grand Buffet had stayed on the line to peep my pocket-dial (while at his job as a Pittsburgh paramedic) and checked the rhymes. He responded with, “New York Flows? Fire.”

STEEL TIPPED DOVE:  The buzz is building. I had the pleasure of fully mixing the new ShrapKnel album. Controller 7 sent beat stems and the guys came to my studio to record it all, so I was recording engineer too. I think it’s amazing how packed the show was and who was in attendance too—lots of indie rap legends, for real. People literally traveled from across the country and one guy from Europe. And the album itself is so good. I think that’s proven by the continuing growth of the group.

E. FORTSON:  I had a brief conversation with Nosaj at the bar in between sets. At one point, he looked around the room and said, “We built this community.” After the show, when I had a moment to reflect on the night, I realized that the heartbeat of this community is Fatboi Sharif. He’s connected to so many people in this beautiful collective that Nosaj described, and I don’t think that’s a happy accident. He’s deeply invested in this community, in this culture, and people can feel that energy. Seriously, he’s the best hype man out there, and the support he shows his peers, particularly at live events, is incredibly genuine. I don’t know who I watched more at the ShrapKnel release party: the MCS and producers onstage or Fatboi Sharif. If he wasn’t dancing or shouting a “WOOOO!”, he was rapping along to every song. It made the show that much more special for me, and I’m sure that was the case for everyone in that room.

FATBOI SHARIF:  It was certainly the feeling and energy that you hope and pray for when you come to a hip-hop show—from the beat sets, to the special guests, to the outside freestyle cypher after the show. I hadn’t experienced all that at one show in some years.

NOAH ANTHONY MEZZACAPPA:  Castro and PremRock are great showmen and MCs and clearly put a lot of effort not only into their own performances but into the whole bill. Seeing guys like August Fanon, Child Actor, and Controller 7 and knowing it was a line-up unique to that show was really cool. Like Prem said, he wanted to give the fans something they wouldn’t get anywhere else.

Q NO RAP NAME:  ShrapKnel is one of one. Their chemistry is unmatched, and it works for them in real life and on record. I had never seen SKECH185 live before—that was mind-blowing. It was very ill to meet some of these folks who I only ever usually hear on record and learn that they are solid individuals in real life. The underground is like that, and I love it.

DUNCECAP:  That night felt like a family reunion. It felt like a couple different facets of the same diamond coming together. It was really special. Lots of love and respect in that room.

NOSAJ:

THE POWER OF SYNERGY

MASTER SPECIALIST

SOUNDTRACK FOR THE MOVIE TAKING PLACE IN THE ROOM THAT EVENING 

A STEP FORWARD FOR THE GENRE

PRIDE

CHOP THE HEAD:  The show felt like all the heads coming together to celebrate each other, and all these rappers that we recognize are pushing themselves and musical boundaries forward and really getting their due in a proper venue. I’ve seen Armand Hammer in big rooms before, but that bill was 100% killers—everybody knew everybody. The sound was perfect. The speakers were big as fuck. ShrapKnel absolutely burnt it down. As a duo they play off each other so well, and this was mid-tour so their set felt effortless and intense. Curly Castro is a tremendously gifted rapper. In his own terms, he is a master bladesmith and swordsman. 

MO NIKLZ:  The whole event was definitely something of an NYC indie rap family reunion/networking spot in a lot of ways and hasn’t really existed since Uncommon Nasa and woods stopped doing Yule Prog.

billy woods:  It was dope to see all those different energies being exchanged in one place. That sense of community and camaraderie was palpable. There were a lot of great artists in the audience, or jumping on stage to play supporting roles for ShrapKnel and phiik & Lungs, but there was also an August Fanon + Child Actor beat set!!!

DOSEONE:  That evening, it meant a lot to me. Most importantly, witnessing underground rap thriving and reforming in the hands of the Backwoodz humans—it’s endlessly important to me. Seeing impeccably written and produced and rapped rap be received entirely and adored is a beautiful thing. Every rapper and producer up there gave perfectly unique artistry in rap form as dictated by their individuality and creativity—FUK YES to that. That competitive collaborative creative energy they are harnessing is so similar yet different to what burned behind anticon as it first formed. And I am really lucky to have experienced that twice in one life.

CONTROLLER 7:  It kinda feels like the people that were there maybe just enjoyed it and it was what it was, nobody really reposted for clout or anything, it was just something we all shared that night.

13.

So, nah: I’m not a spiritual person, but I can be inspired—inspired by the expansion of the underground hip-hop canon and rap pantheon. Bigg Jus’s voice reverberates: A hot wire, like the third rail, is live. I can, and did, thrum with the collective breath of those present on these two nights in June. Forevermore, I’ll expect more from june. No death in June. Life is real, word to the Mighty Mos and Roy Ayers Ubiquity. My life, my life, my life, my life. Reporting live for you suckers.

ShrapKnel setlist at Public Records

“Metallo” “Dadaism 3” “Steel Pan Labyrinth” “LIVE Element” “Human Form” “Mescalito” “Babylon by Bus” (billy woods) “383 Myrtle” (billy woods) “Spongebob” (billy woods) “Bogdan Interlude” “[untitled]” (Fatboi Sharif) “Bardo” “Illusions of P” “Up To Speed” (SKECH185) “Dreadlocs Falling” “Tell Me When to van Gogh” (AJ Suede) “Deep Space 9 Millie Pulled a Pistol” “Night of the Living Analogue” “Running Rebel Swordplay”

Performance photos from Public Records courtesy of E. Fortson

[caltropspress]

RAPS + CRAFTS #28: Height Keech

1. Introduce yourself. Past projects? Current projects?

I’m Height Keech from Baltimore, MD. I’m currently living in NYC. I put out my first solo album in 2000 and have been steadily dropping albums and touring since then. I began producing for other artists around 2016. My current project is Wave Generators with Nosaj from New Kingdom. We’ve got a new album out called After The End on Fused Arrow Records.

2. Where do you write? Do you have a routine time you write? Do you discipline yourself, or just let the words come when they will? Do you typically write on a daily basis?

I definitely do not write every day. I make beats every day though. That feels like the most important area to apply discipline, for me. It seems like no project I take on can really take shape until I have my dream beats, or at least some rough sketches of my dream beats, and getting those dream beats made just takes so much time. No matter what, there’s always a lot of trial and error, and a lot of weeding out material that ends up being in the “close, but no cigar” category. On the other hand, the rhymes tend to feel like they just fall into place once the beats are there.

3. What’s your medium—pen and paper, laptop, on your phone? Or do you compose a verse in your head and keep it there until it’s time to record?

Notebooks are my personal preference, but keeping the contents of these notebooks organized gets hectic. My wife and I have a million notebooks lying around the house, and it’s a pain in the ass to go digging through these pages trying to find these random lines. One thing I like about writing on the laptop is that you can think, "What was that rhyme I had about grapes?" and just type "grapes" into the search bar, and it’s all there, without fumbling around.

4. Do you write in bars, or is it more disorganized than that?

The first thing that usually jumps out at me is a rhythm and a cadence, rather than the actual words. I would say maybe half the people I work with are like that. We get an idea of how the entire verse should sound before we know what we’re going to say. I think an easy example of this is how the Beatles were saying "scrambled eggs" before they settled on "yesterday." 

5. How long into writing a verse or a song do you know it’s not working out the way you had in mind? Do you trash the material forever, or do you keep the discarded material to be reworked later?

Almost every idea starts as another idea, and it never goes exactly the way I had in mind when I started. If I end up with something underwhelming, I try to ask myself why. Maybe the rhymes just don’t really come alive on the beat I’m using, and I need to switch the beat up. Maybe the rhymes are nothing special, but there’s one potent line that becomes the first line of a new rhyme. If I find myself doing something that falls flat, I try not to panic or throw the baby out with the bathwater. There’s usually a reason I was compelled to write these words or chop up these samples, and if they’re not coming together the way I hoped, I just need to rethink it and try again.

6. Have you engaged with any other type of writing, whether presently or in the past? Fiction? Poetry? Playwriting? If so, how has that mode influenced your songwriting?

I’ve kept tour journals over the years, and I’m always playing around with the idea of editing them into a book of some kind. I think I’m pretty good at putting it all together, but I get stuck on “What would make someone actually pick this up and read this?” I feel like I need an angle to tie it together if I was to actually try and release any of this to the public.

I had a screenplay idea I was having fun with as well. That stuff is cool to work on, but knowing what an uphill battle it is to just get music out there (even multiple decades in), taking on the task of getting any other writing out into the world seems insane. I haven’t done any of that other writing enough for it to affect my music one way or the other.

7. How much editing do you do after initially writing a verse/song? Do you labor over verses, working on them over a long period of time, or do you start and finish a piece in a quick burst?

If there’s a specific bar or word that doesn’t sit quite right, I tend to notice it immediately and fix it in my initial burst of writing, rather than let it live and be not right. I think that makes me write slightly slower than other people. Sometimes I just get stuck on bar 11 for quite a while, where other people like to breeze past whatever issue they’re having with a specific bar and deal with it later. I look at the editing process as the time to edit the song, rather than the time to edit the verses. If the actual verses have a bunch of wack shit left in them, it feels pointless to try and work them into a song. 

8. Do you write to a beat, or do you adjust and tweak lyrics to fit a beat?

I would say any set of lyrics I use will end up having been tried over multiple beats, and it usually takes some trial and error to find a combination that actually clicks and means something to me. The only exception would be when I’m invited to guest on someone else’s album and there’s a clear direction like, “Your verse starts right when the drums come in.”

9. What dictates the direction of your lyrics? Are you led by an idea or topic you have in mind beforehand? Is it stream-of-consciousness? Is what you come up with determined by the constraint of the rhymes?

It’s all about feeling. I have a feeling and it comes out in the form of a sound or a rhythm or phrases. I don’t usually sit down and say, “Today, I’m going to write a song about Ancient Greece.” Most of my music just isn’t like that, but when I do tackle straightforward topics or stories, it’s more that the feeling (from the beat, but also just from life) pulls me toward that subject as I go, and I learn what I’m writing about as it’s happening. 

10. Do you like to experiment with different forms and rhyme schemes, or do you keep your bars free and flexible?

I don’t go in with plans like that, so I guess it’s always flexible. I definitely have a few familiar patterns I fall into, whether I mean to or not. I do only simple things, because that’s what I want to hear. I learned a long time ago that I don’t want to be re-inventing the wheel, and reaching for some undiscovered pattern or scheme. The way I see it is that when it comes to the mechanics of rap, the greats gave us all the building blocks that exist (more or less) and now it’s up to us to rearrange them or break them apart, in whatever way feels right. If you try to outgreat the greats, you end up being like the guy at your local Guitar Center trying to shred one millisecond faster than Yngwie Malmsteen. It’s like, "You missed the boat, buddy. We’re all over here now."

11. What’s a verse you’re particularly proud of, one where you met the vision for what you desire to do with your lyrics? This is from “The Joy You’ve Made Will Never Fade.”

This place was a dead mess, till those punks cleared a path they ran wires through the wall, and ran water to the bath and they put up those posters, and they took people in With the thinking that the loser would be later to win But when the shows all ended and the building got sold It was filled with beer bottles, blood stains and black mold and those punks that had the spark, they were back to square one left to pick up those pieces, starting where they’d begun but the spirit they fostered, it reverberates round in every corner of the city, from the northernmost down and it may be cold comfort and the future may sting But a voice gave to the voiceless is an unending thing Now the singer sits broken, and his voice box is blown He gunned it till he saw smoke, now he’s resting those bones And his daytimes are bleak, and his nighttimes are cold but your spirit keeps floating through the river of soul Cause I got your first album, back when I was just a kid Now that I’m grown it means more than back then it did And when I put on that music, I’m fifty feet tall I feel my heartbeat start racing, feel my defenses fall And we drive through that darkness, on a west Texas night Those songs that you sang are my one lantern light

12. Can you pick a favorite bar of yours and describe the genesis of it?

This is from me and Darko The Super’s song called "My Are Bend Back": I can’t stand at a standstill Tom MacDonald CD’s landing all in a landfill When it’s time to rock the damn bill We don’t need Skull Snaps, Rapper Dapper or Mandrill I wrote this verse on a hot summer day, stuck in a traffic jam for hours in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. It felt like the right beat to have on loop in the van, and I was just having fun, playing around with words. I always liked the redundancy of the line, “I shot him with the shotty, then I jetted on the jet,” from Special Ed’s "The Mission." Dipset would do the same thing with the seemingly unnecessary repetition of words. It’s like the opposite of what we’re told good lyricism is supposed to be. 

As for the Tom MacDonald diss, I remember my friend that ran my first label saying CDs are junk now, and they’re all just the future contents of a landfill. Maybe that’s true, but I think that Tom Macdonald CDs might as well be put in a landfill right now, and even his fans sort of agree, on some level. 

The last part is a play on the outro of Ultramagnetic MC’s "Checkin’ My Style," where Kool Keith says, “We don’t need Chic, / We don’t need Sister Sledge.” That part always intrigued me. I only half understand why he said that. Didn’t they kind of need to sample all the groups they sampled, to do what they did? I came to think of it as maybe a message about not being overly deferential to these public domain hip-hop reference points. I guess in that sense, if they don’t need Sister Sledge, we don’t need Skull Snaps either. (But we sort of do? I don’t know.)

13. Do you feel strongly one way or another about punch-ins? Will you whittle a bar down in order to account for breath control, or are you comfortable punching-in so you don’t have to sacrifice any words?

I’m a recovering punch-in fiend. It all began at age 14 when my friend Gregg let me borrow his Dad’s Tascam four-track. I started writing songs by coming up with one line at a time, recording it, rewinding the tape back, writing one more line, arming the other track and recording again. I always liked rappers that would play around with that setup and get crazy with it, so that it sounds like there’s two or three different versions of them hanging out together in the studio. (Example: almost every song on the second ODB album.)

The downside was realizing that you can’t really recreate that at a show. You don’t want to end up like the guy Ghostface was talking about when he said, “Trying to spit his darts and can’t even spit 'em.” I always loved how Boogie Down Productions would take a line that could be a punch-in but then have somebody else say it, and then split the lines up that exact same way when they rock live. (Peep the version of "Jack Of Spades" from Live Hardcore Worldwide, as an example.) I think that’s a cool idea, but I’m trying to do stuff like that less now, in that it just becomes one more thing that whoever’s onstage with you has to think about.

14. What non-hiphop material do you turn to for inspiration? What non-music has influenced your work recently?

I find myself so immersed in rap that I don’t even go out of my way to listen to it as much as I go out of my way to listen to everything else. Here’s a few things I’ve been stuck on recently: Dead Moon, The One Way Street, Linda Smith, La Dusseldorf, Elton Britt, Stompin’ Tom Connors, Ted Taylor, Jimmy McCracklin. Outside of music, I think the biggest thing influencing me (by far) in the last couple years has been living in a new city, after living in one place for 40 years.

15. Writers are often saddled with self-doubt. Do you struggle to like your own shit, or does it all sound dope to you?

I think the general idea is to be loose and wild while you’re jotting ideas down, and then be more critical when you’re in editing mode. I think I’m good at jumping back and forth between those two modes, and if I find myself doubting the material when I’m editing, it just means I should leave it on the cutting room floor and try again. The only debilitating doubt I feel has less to do with my music and more about “How are any of us ever going to make money to live?” Those kinds of questions are a whole separate issue, obviously.

16. Who’s a rapper you listen to with such a distinguishable style that you need to resist the urge to imitate them?

This might be hard to imagine now, but when I was in high school, my rap style was a blatant Ghostface impersonation. I didn’t even realize that’s what I was doing at first. There used to be a radio show in Baltimore called The Cypher where you could call in and battle other callers over the phone. I called in once and taped my appearance. When I played the tape back and heard how blatant the GFK influence was, I knew I had a problem. It took a while to strip that influence away and build my own voice up. Some voices are so unique and idiosyncratic that you can’t work in too much of their flavor without sounding like you’re doing a Saturday Night Live impression of them.

17. Do you have an agenda as an artist? Are there overarching concerns you want to communicate to the listener?

I think the agenda is to try and create big feelings and big experiences for people, like the ones I’ve felt as a listener and as a live audience member. I think I’m acting on the same impulse I felt when I was going to shows at age 12. I would listen to albums and go to shows, and want to join in on the fun. I’d imagine it was me up there doing it, and that I’d have my own way of doing it, and that I’d find a way to keep doing it forever. I don’t really think of it as expressing concerns, if only because I probably have the same concerns as everybody else.

RAPS + CRAFTS is a series of questions posed to rappers about their craft and process. It is designed to give respect and credit to their engagement with the art of songwriting. The format is inspired, in part, by Rob McLennan’s 12 or 20 interview series.

Photo credit: Bryan Lackner

[caltropspress]

RAPS + CRAFTS #27: Nosaj from New Kingdom

1. Introduce yourself. Past projects? Current projects?

Hello. My name is Jason Furlow and I’m professionally known as Nosaj from New Kingdom.

2. Where do you write? Do you have a routine time you write? Do you discipline yourself, or just let the words come when they will? Do you typically write on a daily basis?

I write in airports & empty bars.

I write drunk & edit sober.

I think about writing on a daily basis.

3. What’s your medium—pen and paper, laptop, on your phone? Or do you compose a verse in your head and keep it there until it’s time to record?

All of the above as well as napkins, cardboard, envelopes. 

I’ll treasure hunt my writings/cut & paste them until I locate what I wasn’t looking for and then when I’m walking my dog I’ll continuously simplify it in my head until it feels like a conversation.

4. Do you write in bars, or is it more disorganized than that?

From my disorganization my bars grow.

5. How long into writing a verse or a song do you know it’s not working out the way you had in mind? Do you trash the material forever, or do you keep the discarded material to be reworked later?

Immediately. Both.

6. Have you engaged with any other type of writing, whether presently or in the past? Fiction? Poetry? Playwriting? If so, how has that mode influenced your songwriting?

It’s all one continuous essay.

7. How much editing do you do after initially writing a verse/song? Do you labor over verses, working on them over a long period of time, or do you start and finish a piece in a quick burst?

I live to edit. 

I eat sleep & piss over verses until it feels right.

If the devil is in the room I can turn out a verse in flashes.

8. Do you write to a beat, or do you adjust and tweak lyrics to fit a beat?

Both. I write to instrumentals of songs I love.

9. What dictates the direction of your lyrics? Are you led by an idea or topic you have in mind beforehand? Is it stream-of-consciousness? Is what you come up with determined by the constraint of the rhymes?

All of the above and none of the above. 

I’m a leach/thief. I’ll snatch shit from anywhere.

10. Do you like to experiment with different forms and rhyme schemes, or do you keep your bars free and flexible?

It’s all an experiment.

11. What’s a verse you’re particularly proud of, one where you met the vision for what you desire to do with your lyrics?

Each and every verse. I don’t publish anything that doesn’t completely turn me out.

12. Can you pick a favorite bar of yours and describe the genesis of it?

"Modern Man”:

My city ain’t my city anymore  These buildings and these streets I don’t recall  And where did this man in my mirror come from That’s not the face I knew when I was young 

I was walking around NYC feeling like a tourist in my own town and an outsider in my own body. Time waits for no man.

13. Do you feel strongly one way or another about punch-ins? Will you whittle a bar down in order to account for breath control, or are you comfortable punching-in so you don’t have to sacrifice any words?

I punch my demos.

14. What non-hiphop material do you turn to for inspiration? What non-music has influenced your work recently?

Dark Magus-era Miles Davis. Mark Knopfler's "Madame Geneva’s."

My children.

15. Writers are often saddled with self-doubt. Do you struggle to like your own shit, or does it all sound dope to you?

All of it sounds fucking dope to me!

16. Who’s a rapper you listen to with such a distinguishable style that you need to resist the urge to imitate them?

Greg Nice and I don’t resist.

17. Do you have an agenda as an artist? Are there overarching concerns you want to communicate to the listener?

Freedom.

RAPS + CRAFTS is a series of questions posed to rappers about their craft and process. It is designed to give respect and credit to their engagement with the art of songwriting. The format is inspired, in part, by Rob McLennan’s 12 or 20 interview series.

Photo credit: Bryan Lackner