REVIEW: ‘The Elephant Man’s Bones’ by Roc Marciano & The Alchemist
A few week’s after the initial buzz has died down, exactly how good is the highly anticipated collaboration?
After *years* of reliable hearsay from two of the most iconic figures in underground hip-hop, last month we received a long-awaited gift from Roc Marciano and The Alchemist in the form of The Elephant Man’s Bones, a stacked and polished snarl-fest, perfectly described by Roc’s own manager as “ criminal jazz* ”. The album arrived to an overwhelmingly positive response, feasted on by the loyal fanbases of both artists, who had been salivating over the project’s impending release since long before the completion of the tape was even confirmed. But after the initial buzz has died down, for me the question remains: as a fan, did it meet my (potentially unreasonable) expectations?
2022 is far from an ordinary year for rap music. At times it feels like the culmination of the “underground renaissance,” which - depending on who you ask - kicked off circa 2015/2016. Every week eager rap-addicts (myself included) dive head first into a ubiquitous sea of new releases from all different rap styles, from all different corners of the rap universe, leading to an unavoidable feeling that good NEW rap music is no longer a hope, but an expectation. Being fully aware of that sentiment, I spent the past few weeks checking myself to see how it impacted my early takes on The Elephant Man’s Bones.
What at first seemed like a not-so-out-of-the-ordinary act of mid-verse braggadocio on “The Eye of Whorus” off of Roc Marci’s last solo album, 2020′s Mt. Marci, (”coke up to my elbows / I still own the Elephant Man’s bones / rare stones make my hands look like Thanos”), was gripping enough to fit the bill as a final title for Roc & Uncle Al’s first full length LP as a duo. “The Elephant Man,” known in real life as Joseph Merrick, died in 1890 at the age of 27, after enduring what must have been a life of almost unparalleled suffering. At a very young age, his body began to develop masses of overgrown tissue, eventually leading to enough of a sever deformity that a normal public life was impossible. Infamously dragged through the sideshow carnival life, and treated like an inhuman freak of nature just to make a living, he finally found a home in London Hospital, spending his remaining years in relative peace, leaving a legacy as an intelligent, gentle soul that epitomized the “never judge a book by it’s cover” adage better than almost anyone else in history...
It’s not clear if any of the above factored into the title of this album. What is much more likely an influence, is the rich person’s quest to collect the most rare and expensive trinkets over the course of one’s life, and die with the most toys at your disposal. Some rap artists build a career off of mining such territory, but with the longstanding rumor that Michael Jackson identified with Joseph Merrick and may have even tried to purchase Merrick’s bones, suddenly we have a display of rare exclusivity that stands out from the pack. I suspect that this notion inspired Roc Marciano in the past, and from his perspective, even pieces of Merrick’s own life may have even inspired Roc, who never claimed to fit in to “mainstream” music expectations (but did he ever want to?).
It would not be outrageous to call Roc Marciano one of the most influential MC’s of the past decade. It also wouldn’t be outrageous to consider him one of the most successful independent artists in the history of the genre. There are plenty of moments on The Elephant Man’s Bones that capture that all too well. “Deja Vu” makes for an odd choice as the album’s lead single. It’s far from the concrete-cracking, go-for-the-throat type of joint that people may have expected as the first audio glimpse of this album, but it shows that both artists can dabble in territory that many of their peers cannot. The beat flows woozy, like it was meant to score the opium den hallucination of a cinematic anti-hero, providing just enough canvas for Roc to cruise in and out with confidence (“this is clairvoyance / I brought the stick for the voyage / the crest on the Gucci knit embroidered / in my forties, I’m still looking boyish”).
Boldy James, another frequent Alchemist partner in crime, comes through on “Trillion Cut” to bless the album with another one of the best verses on the album, and then Roc sticks the landing with “my pops had tracks in his arms from heroin / this is rap meets Gil Scott-Heron / Black Bugatti Veyron / the leather in the car was eggnog / vest I wore was kevlar / the scarf was a gift from Pablo Escobar / these ain't no regular old bars, this a five star restaurant - Marci...” Like many of his top shelf peers - JAY-Z, Rae & Ghost, Jadakiss, Nas, Ka - Roc Marciano understands better than most how word choice and attention to detail are some of the key traits that can elevate a rap artist from passable to being considered an elite lyricist. Ironically, Roc pens some of the album’s strongest bars towards the very end of the album, on songs like “Stigmata”, “Think Big” and on the special-edition-only cut “Macaroni”, stating “I’m an enigma - I’m still dealin with trauma from back when I was a drifter / Used to crash at Kim’s, she was my bottom-bitch, sometimes I miss her / in particular / But thank God I know how to pick em / everything in the Garden ain’t to be bitten”.
Meanwhile, behind the boards The Alchemist holds court throughout Bones providing cozy backdrops for Roc to flash his craft. One of the biggest differences between early 00′s Alchemist production and his work today is that he understands that not even the greatest MC’s can coast on darkness for forty minutes. Here he thoroughly embraces the use of piano keys (harkening back to that “criminal jazz” reference from earlier), ranging from sinister to breezy, never really flaunting his uniqueness as a producer, just assured that the subtle choices he weaves over his loops and chops shine through in the end. While it doesn’t touch his flex of versatility on his union with Armand Hammer on Haram, or his blunt-force boom-bap that he brings to the table on his joint ventures with Boldy James, there’s no shortage of high points on the production side. For many fans, “Rubber Hand Grip”, “Quantum Leap”, “Bubble Bath”, and “JJ Flash” represent exactly what they came here expecting, but while I enjoy all of those tracks, it’s the unexpected aesthetic choices he makes on songs like “Daddy Kane” that showcase the ceiling-less potential of a Roc and Al union (I don’t know if any of us expected something as uniquely funky as “Daddy Kane” to come from this album). At it’s best, Uncle Al’s work on The Elephant Man’s Bones champions his sublime chemistry with a longtime collaborator; at it’s worst, it’s a solid addition to his catalogue, albeit one that might not have a beat selection that matches the lofty expectations for this project.
The title track features some of the album’s more memorable lyrics, but I don’t think it matches Roc Marci’s past moments of clarity. Again, like many of his peers in the rap game that I mentioned earlier who often write from under a “rose growing out of concrete” pretense, Roc’s flashes of sensitivity and internal reflection loom large due to how suddenly and infrequently he reveals his softer side. But many of his stand-out quotes from “The Elephant Man’s Bones” sound like they’re mined from ground that he explored in the past, and on sharper songs. While lines like “the pen got pain in it / I came in the entertainment business with this / can't trust no bitch, she just tryna bang her favorite musician / like I ain't got feelings” are solid bars, coming from an established MC that has casually dropped some of the coldest pimp talk in rap history, it’s hard to feel this sentiment as more than just a "okay I guess I should have one of those more personal records here?” moment. When compared to past references from Roc reconciling with his heart being all too human (“if you love me, then buy me a V / was never love, why would I be naive / my team we got it out the mud, y’all n*ggas got y'all money clean” on Rosebudd Revenge 2′s stellar “Soul Power”, for example), it feels like Roc mostly has his pen set to stun instead of kill. Bar vs. bar this is all a relatively minor grievance, but when thoughts of “been there, done that before - but better” arise multiple times across an album, if Roc is guilty of any mistake it’s that he’s at the mercy of his own high bar with the snootier fans (of which I am one, for what it’s worth!).
Like Prodigy before him, The Alchemist’s chemistry with Roc yields some of the best slick mafioso rap since the Wu’s hay day, but I don’t actually believe darkness is what Roc does best. Yes, the gangster bravado has always been a part of his rep, but it’s his ability to take the fodder of harsh street life - guns, drugs, prostitution - and sew it all together seamlessly with splashes of darkness, humor, soul, swagger and some experimentation here and there to keep things fresh, that has always made him a MC’s favorite MC.
Above all else, it’s the experimentation that’s missing here. Both Roc and Al have enough great work to their credit, so they can more than afford to take some risks. Roc took some risks with the sound of Mt. Marci (some outside the box production choices which I appreciated, although some of it felt half-baked), but it was on his Rosebudd’s Revenge series when everything came together perfectly for Roc Marci. At his peak as a writer, he could ride "C.V.S.”’s mysterious, gurgling beat (courtesy of the very dope Don Cee), or zombie-level creep of “The Sauce”, and succeed with songs that were bound to be embraced by some and questioned by others. It showed not only the confidence in crafting his sound, but in continuing to push his boundaries. Delivery wise, Roc also came across as much more limber on those aforementioned projects than he has over the past few year. The challenge for Roc and other rappers that set foot in his lane is that amongst the “quieter” MCs, absences in variety loom larger over time. He has yet to pleasantly surprise me with his flow choices like he has on the Rosebudd series, but what I think this all just all amounts to is a surprisingly safe, relatively risk-free album in The Elephant Man’s Bones.
For some time now, I have believed that Roc was becoming more infatuated with producing than emceeing (work with Stove God, Flee Lord, Bronze Nazareth and others in recent years only confirms that direction). That would only make sense, since he is very much a strong producer in his own right, and it’s in his production that it does seem like he is the most open to stepping out of his comfort zone. I felt like he sounded bored over parts of Mt. Marci, and while he sounds considerably stronger on Bones, there are still moments where I feel like he’s freestyling and occasionally stumbling into sharp bars rather than meticulously shaping a strong verse. The running joke over the years is that he has as many sons in this game (an apt reference to the many other underground artists that are making a living today off of similar flow-patterns to Marciano, serving at best as a successful homage, but rarely as ear-grabbing as their father figure)....well, it’s 2022 and plenty of his sons have grown, but he should still be standing out from them. Dated references to gettin’ by like Talib Kweli, hittin’ em up like Blu Cantrell, Dylan, Dylan, Dylan, and Fonzworth Bentley only serve to make Roc sound like a throwback, which he hasn’t been since 2010, and doesn’t need be, whenever he wants to focus on his pen game.
At one point hungry fans might have considered The Elephant Man’s Bones an underground devotee’s Detox, but while Detox remains an abstract idea or symbol of “what might have been”, an Roc Marciano album with The Alchemist was always believed to be only a matter of time. Should this project have happened sooner? Maybe, but it’s hard to say that equally about both artists. Since 2011′s Greneberg brought us the first joining of Alchemist and Roc Marciano within a rap project, Roc went on to inspire a generation of indy artists and Al became the definitive “go to” producer, recommended by underground heads across the globe whenever they unite to snarkily question a rapper’s beat selection (at some point post-2010, the “they should do an album produced entirely by _____!” sentiment pivoted from DJ Premier being the assumed blank-filler, to the now famous Alc).
When compared to their early outputs both have matured so much as artists over the years, but one fact remains in the same: creatively speaking, neither Roc Marciano or The Alchemist need each other. In an age where Hip-Hop Twitter does everything it can to fast-track MC’s to The Alchemist early and often, Roc Marciano is actually the last MC that needs Uncle Al to set his beat selection straight. His own skill set aside, Roc has no shortage of resources to call upon whenever he decides to crank out a project (DJ Muggs, Animoss, Don Cee, Element, Q-Tip - to name a few). However, I don’t think The Elephant Man’s Bones was ever meant to be like any ol’ Roc project. If anything, it’s a victory lap, a celebration that these two prolific artists have been workhorses in rap music for decades, with little to no signs of rust. The heavily hyped Roc Marciano and The Alchemist album was stamped a winner by their fans before it left the gate, and it’s a well-deserved toast to the underground rap renaissance we are currently basking in.
Since “Roc Marcy” first began hanging out with the Flipmode Squad and The Alchemist first began messing with Muggs, Buc Fifty, Dilated Peoples and the late great Prodigy, we have seen their experimentation turn into new lanes for today’s artists to thrive in, continuing to foster creativity and push the boundaries of what is considered the standard for rap fans in 2022 and beyond. Neither Roc Marciano or The Alchemist have actually reached the King of Pop’s “capable of purchasing the Elephant Man’s bones” level of influence, but they’re the undisputed kings of their own sound, and fans wouldn’t want it any other way.
*https://twitter.com/DubCityRoller/status/1560804097883774977?s=20&t=vk5U33GX8bksjJQMK0GS6g
https://rocmarci.com/
