Going back to the golden age of ICP, we have The Amazing Jeckel Brothers which I've come to regard over time as the It Takes a Nation of Millions... of its subgenre. Some will dispute the possibility of there having been a golden age of ICP, but probably not anyone who bothered to listen to an album all the way though. ICP's most vocal critics are, or at least were, mostly persons obsessed with authenticity in rap from what I could tell, usually old white men working their way through a list of one hundred rap albums you must own from one of those magazines which feels as though it should have Sting on the cover even though it doesn't; but honestly, if you can't tell the difference between ICP and the Kottonmouth Kings, then you're an idiot. They've been on the cover of Murder Dog twice, Chuck D is a fan, and the prosecution rests, m'lud.
This was the album they hoped would break them through to the mainstream. They pulled out all the stops, made the best record they could make, and even had ODB and Snoop Dogg guesting on a couple of tracks. It made number four on the Billboard charts despite a predictably universal slagging from the music press. It elevated their profile, and yet ICP's stock ultimately remained the same only moreso. This is because there's a lot of stupid people who just don't get it, and who probably won't ever get it.
It's neither rap metal, Beavis & Butthead set to a beat, nor novelty music, because while these may be mere strings on ICP's proverbial bow, its one big fucking bow with a lot more going on than you may realise, and the fact of one of them having just tried to shove it up your bumhole shouldn't detract from the power of this deeply stupid and yet emotionally profound album. Of course the clown paint and the werewolf zingers are metaphors for outsider status, or feeling like an outsider - as is inevitable if you're blessed with a working brain in society as it currently stands - but it's populism that actually communicates stuff besides how popular it is, which is rare, essentially dividing the potential audience into the Juggalo adjacent and those considering themselves too good to appreciate a knob gag. The music here is pitch perfect, maybe Mike E. Clark's finest work, rewiring fairground jingles as a distant cousin to Cypress Hill within a broadly cinematic whole which manages to sound expensive while keeping those giant clown shoes nailed firmly and gruesomely to the streets and the music from which it was born. This is ICP's secret weapon, the point that always seems to be missed - the union of opposites with the crudest of gut-busting belly laughs woven seamlessly into what might be termed the music of the spheres, even if the illusion wobbles a little once we realise how those spheres smell and where they're hanging. Another Love Song, which famously borrows from Dylan via Beck's Jack-Ass and somehow sounds at least as sincere if not more so in its lament for love either lost or otherwise doomed, brings us:
I could love you and treat you with class,
And have babies falling all out your ass,
But thinking about that...
I feel I'd rather kill you.
It's funny then horrifying, strangely tender, and even heartbreaking all at the same time; and the whole album does this - righteous truths as we hear on Terrible surfing along on slapstick violence and bags of dog poo set ablaze on your doorstep, and once the laughter has subsided, it somehow feels as though we've been reading Céline.
Maybe you remember how the best art used to do more than just one thing?
No comments:
Post a Comment