Run the Jewels (2013)

Here's yet another example of my most favouritest favourite thing ever for which I somehow failed to get the memo. Specifically I've still been thinking of El-P as the guy from Company Flow and was somehow unaware of the existence of Run the Jewels - now on their fourth fucking album - until a little over a year ago. It's because I'm old and I dislike the internet, music radio, streaming, kids kicking a football against my fence, and most rap magazines seem to be a complete waste of time these days, from what I can tell.

Run the Jewels came as quite a shock when I first heard them, and it's taken me a couple of days to acclimate, having finally bought myself a copy of this, their first album. The production couldn't really be the work of anyone but El-P, and yet the beats, the rhythms, the rapping border on trap music, albeit a more lyrical version; and by trap I mean the slow, low rider bass and hi-hat jittering along like some tweaker with rapid fire lines delivered over the top. It's a long, long way from El-P's roots in semi-abstract agit-prop over a chugging rhythm that always reminded me of Nocturnal Emissions; but on the other hand, he's always been eclectic, always tried new things, and I seem to recall him hanging out with Dizzee Rascal for a while. As an artist who wouldn't want to be a part of any club that would have him, I imagine he got tired of the indie ghetto, the inverted snobbery of the underground; and even with Run the Jewels being the success it has been, if the sound seems less startling on the same playlist as Lil' Yachty, the material is still thematically uncompromising, even if there's nothing quite so hard and harrowing as Patriotism, or Habeas Corpses or For My Upstairs Neighbour.

The more I listen, the more I appreciate the contrast with and contribution from Killer Mike; and the more I recognise the qualities which have rendered the work of El-P so distinctive, so essential: the grinding b-movie synth, the friction and dirt, the paradoxically epic scale invoked in combinations of broken noises, the arrestingly weird images ingeniously wrapped up in unfamiliar rhyme schemes, particularly on Sea Legs.

Trying not to walk crooked while this anchor's dropped,
But I've been out on them choppy waves,
And it's hard to say,
Where this land begins,
And that water stops.

I still don't know what any of it's about beyond that it's taking no prisoners and this time around the shout outs go to Ice Cube and Spice 1 - which is something I never thought I'd hear - and they clearly had a blast making it.

Still boldly going where no man etc. etc.

Bigg Jus - Poor People's Day (2005)

As regular viewers will probably have worked out, most of what you read here turns up because I feel like writing about it rather than through a desire to keep anyone's finger on a pulse of any description. The only reason it's taken me this long to get around to Poor People's Day is because I had assumed I'd already written something about it, but apparently not. The reason I had assumed that I'd already written something about it is because it's an honestly fucking amazing album.

You may recall Bigg Jus as having been one third of Company Flow, which will at least give you some idea of where Poor People's Day is coming from. Musically, it's not entirely unlike what El-P has been doing since Company Flow imploded - that same kind of post-industrial extrapolation of hip-hop fundamentals first drawn up on a couple of decks plugged into a light pole in the park. There's a science-fiction element, maybe a psychedelic tinge to the treatment of some of the samples and a bit more of a melody, but it's that same angry insurrectionary lurch albeit with a reduced sense of claustrophobia.

Lyrically, it further underscores that Company Flow were never just El-P with two other guys, and even titles such as Energy Harvester hint at similar dystopian obsessions; as does the subject matter. Bigg Jus is one of those guys who simply can't be pigeon holed and probably shouldn't be, given how fucking angry he is regarding the state of the world, society, and the machine which has made its business to shit directly upon us to an hourly schedule; and his politics are delivered without any of the conspiracy bullshit which blunts the testimony of many of his contemporaries. Poor People's Day is what we used to refer to as righteous truths, although it eludes even the conscious rap tag through having better things to do than waste half its playing time whining about other rappers letting the side down, which makes for a nice change.

Poor People's Day is one of those rare efforts that transcends its genre through not quite sounding like anyone else out there. It's truth is raw and of such emotional power as to reduce the best of us to tears simply through telling it like it is, for which soul music is as good a term as any. This one is right up there with Funcrusher Plus and I'll Sleep When You're Dead.

Cannibal Ox - The Cold Vein (2001)

Here's yet another one I missed due to it being exactly the sort of thing you would like. The actual thrust of the recommendation was I expect you must be listening to a lot of Cannibal Ox at the moment seeing as that's the shit which those of us with our fingers on the hip-hop pulse presently be banging and all, unless your finger actually isn't on the pulse because you only like commercial rap and the sort of stuff which chavs listen to because you think it's controversial, but that probably isn't the case so, Cannibal Ox - ain't they great!?

Well, that's how it sounded to me.

I'd never heard of Cannibal Ox. I regularly read Hip-Hop Connection and listened to the wireless and browsed the racks at record stores, but I'd never heard of Cannibal Ox because I've generally liked what I've liked without necessarily feeling a need to keep up with the latest sounds for the sake of it; and I'm pretty sure Cannibal Ox were turning heads mainly at the offices of Wire magazine, which has never really been my one-stop shop for beats and rhymes that be rockin' it hot. The Wire seal of approval seemed to suggest rap for people who, when it comes down to it, don't actually like rap, meaning Vast Aire and the other guy were most likely responsible black men with a positive message for the kids on the street and none of those street credibility words, so far as I could tell. Should Cannibal Ox deign to drop their sciences at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, there would at least be no need to quadruple the security arrangements for fear of all their working class friends trying to nick the fixtures or cause a rumpus because, not being racist or nuffink, but well - you know...

Eventually I realised that at least some of the initial fuss had been generated by Cannibal Ox having been produced by El Producto and promoted through his Definitive Jux label; and eventually fifteen years later I pick this up at the local CD Exchange and begin to see the error of my ways.

The Cold Vein takes a few plays before it begins to sink in, but soon reveals itself as right up there with other productions by the same guy. Musically it's ugly, primitive, dirty, and discordant, the spawn of a tornado blowing through a junkyard full of early Nocturnal Emissions albums and accidentally forming an hours worth of beats, and yet the whole has that peculiar, angular beauty of which more or less only El Producto seems capable - a weird, occasionally almost ethereal majesty coming together from God only knows where. The man is a fucking genius. Furthermore, this being production undertaken for somebody else's album, he seems to have reined in some of the weirder excesses you tend to find on his own records, the stuff that sounds like Nurse With Wound in a hoodie holding a spray can; which isn't to say The Cold Vein is smooth, so much as that it's less obviously mutated than Fantastic Damage, hence I suppose why it took a few plays to sink in.

As rappers, I don't find Vast Aire and Vordul Mega quite so listenable as El Producto, although they clearly share common stylistic ground and I can see why they all worked so well together. Lyrically they seem more personal, more realistic, and less prone to disturbing flights of paranoia; which is fine. So okay - I grudgingly admit that I see what all the fuss was about, at long last. It's just a shame the Wire never seemed to bother with all the other stuff over the years which has been just as good as this.

Twiztid - The Green Book (2002)

Whichever way you look at it, Insane Clown Posse are one fuck of a tough sell outside of their admittedly huge core group of fans, not least because they probably should have called it a day with the first Wraith album, quitting whilst they were ahead. Understood by the uninformed to be some sort of Insane Clown Posse tribute act, Twiztid are therefore amongst those groups least likely to ever make it onto the cover of The Wire. That fifty-year old middle-class white guy boldly declaring Public Enemy's It Takes a Nation of Millions... to be the greatest rap album ever recorded, like he's really gone out on a limb, striking against the downpression in stating such a minority view, and partially because it's the only one he's heard - he would never listen to Twiztid, not even if somehow obliged to do so at gunpoint. He'd rather eat his own sphincter sautéed in white wine.

Although it's certainly true that they jump about on stage grabbing their men's bits whilst painted up as zombie variations on ICP's clown make-up for the edification of a grunting multitude of fans of whom less than 40% will ever study philosophy at either Yale or Harvard, the music of Twiztid really needs to be assessed on its own merits, to which end it probably doesn't get much better than The Green Book.

In fact, fuck it - it probably doesn't get much better than The Green Book in the context of albums ever recorded, never mind just the oeuvre of Madrox and Monoxide, as those responsible are identified.

To first dispel a few unfortunate misunderstandings, Twiztid are indeed two white guys doing rap music. White guys doing rap music can often be a bad idea, particularly if they waste too much time going on about being white guys doing rap music, overcompensating either by getting angrier and more dysfunctional than thou - as Eminem has done on occasion - or more self-important than thou as with many of those backpack types, each last one as wearily edumacational as Blue Peter presenters with their caps twisted backwards; and of course, there's also the just plain crap like the Kottonmouth Kings. That said, rap ability is not dependent on racial heritage and for every embarrassing wanker there's usually someone who vaguely knows what they're doing, and occasionally that someone will turn out to have the talent of a Haystak, an El-P, or these two, whose success can be attributed to their recording what they want to hear rather than necessarily what they think we might want to hear.

Twiztid extend toes across that rap-rock divide from time to time, probably because they feel like it, but they're at their strongest with this kind of thing which, for the sake of trying to stuff it all into a single sentence, is sort of like Mellow Gold-era Beck off his tits on some fairly nasty hallucinogenics and going nuts with the Halloween dressing up box, but funnier and a lot scarier. It's hard to believe that something which works so hard at taking a steady stream of custard pies in the face could sound quite this intense, but even interspersed with the gobbets of the sort of drivel that kept Beavis & Butthead gurgling along, there are parts of The Green Book which make Joy Division sound positively breezy. This probably isn't what you would expect from rap that spends quite so much time lost in talk of weed and boobs, but judge ye not...

I was recently annoyed on facebook by a person responding to the incident of twenty people stabbed at a Pennsylvania High School with the crowing observation of how much worse it would have been had the individual concerned owned a gun. So in other words, now even tragedies with no firearm involved may be legitimately used to score points by advocates of gun control as opposed to - just off the top of my head - acknowledging the possibility that such incidents might be a mental health issue relating more to the kind of carnivorous capitalist society America has become than simply because there are guns involved. Similarly, whilst it may be all very well to inform black clad teenagers that they're not living in Rwanda and therefore, by some definition, have it relatively easy, this doesn't really address the problem any more than the impossible dream of banning guns and somehow implementing such a ban. What might be helpful, I tentatively suggest, is for our society to at least try to have some sort of dialogue with itself as opposed to overloading everyone with unrealistic and even undesirable expectations; because - to get to the point - at least one side of that dialogue, or a significant voice therein, probably sounds like this album. The World is Hell and Marsh Lagoon, for two examples, cut far deeper than any of the usual whining emo stuff, not least for the sharp contrast of sarcasm and slapstick black humour even before we come to the weirdly empowering Fat Kidz which is as good and riotous an argument as I've ever heard for the more generously built to keep sight of their self-esteem.

Off the chain, off the scale, I ain't watching no weight,
I'm at the barbecue, high as hell, fixing a plate,
XX to the XL, hit me three times,
Come correct with my burger and fries, they're king-size.

The Green Book really needs to be heard. The lyricism is fucking exceptional, it sounds like no other album, and there's far too much here to describe in a couple of paragraphs. The associations with ICP, or its being too far removed in spirit from some record that came out thirty years ago will be too great an obstacle for some, but mostly people who wouldn't understand and therefore don't really matter. Its authenticity, for those who believe they have an understanding of such things, should be clear from guest appearances by E-40, Esham, Layzie Bone, and Tech N9ne, and from the quality of their respective verses going some way beyond mere rap for hire. I don't care how stupid it sounds on paper, this is one of the greatest albums ever recorded, a genuine classic.

El-P - I'll Sleep When You're Dead (2007)

Although the situation may have changed since I became a fat old man insisting that although some of these youngsters may be able to knock out the odd tune, Tears for Fears and Red Box pretty much remain the unchallenged gold standard for contemporary rock and pop excellence - hip-hop was once fiercely bifurcated into two major schools, and may well still be for all I know. These schools, as seen through my own particular postman-tinted spectacles, were backpack and everything else.

The latter category incorporates all the stuff with the swearing and some guy telling you he's going to cut off your face and use it to wipe his arse, plus a lot of stuff that doesn't do that, or even anything like it, and as such serves to indicate how deeply pointless is any attempt to draw up categories for such an eclectic and wide-ranging musical bracket. Backpack on the other hand tends to entail high-minded rap gentlemen telling you how to play chess without recourse to rude or disrespectful words, talking about lentils and whole food in the assumption that if you're not on the team then you're probably a bit of a tosser and thus in need of a particularly condescending form of education.

El-P has on occasion been lumped in with this latter category by association, which has always struck me as a little unfair given that his talents go some way beyond repeating the words wisdom and understanding over and over as though mere reference to such qualities instils intellectual depth; and politically he takes a blunt instrument stance, as opposed to just sort of standing there sneering at you for eating a sausage. Lyrically his barrage of words is often overwhelming, but it somehow works like a Burroughs novel, random assault by imagery; and it's powerful in the way that a dose of epsom salts can be powerful.

Musically, El Producto doesn't sound quite like anyone else, with the peculiar exception of early Nocturnal Emissions albums, at least in terms of the aesthetic and touches such as rhythm used as effect rather than as rhythm in the traditional sense. I'll Sleep When You're Dead is broken bits of sound welded together, even hammered into shape when they don't quite fit, and is as such the least digital thing I've heard in a long time.

The sum of these parts resembles nothing else, a gritty hybrid of  raw anger and science-fiction narrative which leaves no target unscathed by its razor-edged wit. In theory it should make for very uneasy listening - and it should be noted Habeas Corpses is probably one of the most harrowing narratives you'll ever hear on a rap record - but somehow this is one album that just glues itself into the CD player and refuses to budge.