Analog Brothers - Pimp to Eat (2000)

While this one looked a lot like Kool Keith and Ice-T ripping the piss out of the RZA's Bobby Digital, it's proven near impossible to find anything substantial in support of the proposition and even the line about how everyone knows digital blows sounds more like good old fashioned technological fundamentalism. Whoever the target may have been - and I suspect it's more likely suckers as a demographic rather than any specific member of the Wu-Tang Clan - it shares an attitude with much of Kool Keith's back catalogue, namely the suggestion of it being better than everyone else, and knowing itself to be better than everyone else. If this quality is hardly exclusive to Keith in rap terms, he goes one fuck of a lot further than most in proving his point, and so it is with Pimp to Eat.

The Analog Brothers are, or possibly were, mostly lesser known names within Ice-T's Rhyme Syndicate, plus the man himself trading as Ice Oscillator, with er… Keith Korg as the only one who wasn't already in the gang; yet it feels like part of Keith's body of work more than anything, making use of that brooding Diesel Truckers sound - up front beatbox with growling bass and not too much else to clutter the sound; and the full complement of Analog Brothers working with the same lyrical firehose, an uncensored fountain of bewildering surrealism and profanity that's as much challenge as proclamation:

More flow than the average Joe, get off the stamina, Peein' off the top of the Empire State Building, urinate on pedestrians, Walkin' past West 4th Street lesbians, 28th Street flashin' drivin' Dodge dashin' free man, Sport Superman underoos with a six-pack of O'Douls, Move in spark-plugs, come aboard walkin' butt naked with gloves, Throwin feces at celebrities at the Billboard Awards, Make Jerry Springer jump on my balls...

I quote that as a single block so it reads closer to the cumulative effect of listening to this stuff for an hour or so. It approaches information overload, mostly with fucking weird information, that which you may not even want to know - such as that O'Douls is alcohol-free lager, for one example. We're a long way from In da Club, as is probably clear from the cover showing the Brothers picking out their favourite brands of breakfast cereal. In case it isn't obvious from the above, this is pretty much a work of genius, existing at a tangent to the rest of the rap universe at roughly the same angle as the Residents and Flaming Carrot comics to their own respective mediaspheres. We should probably be glad this wasn't a direct potshot taken at anyone specific because I'm not sure many would survive such a blast of concentrated weirdness.

RZA - Bobby Digital in Stereo (1998)

Just to get it out of the way, I vaguely recall the Analog Brothers - featuring Ice-T, Kool Keith and others - as having been some sort of response to the RZA's Bobby Digital, although there doesn't seem to be any obvious reference to anything Wu-Tang on the Analog's Pimp to Eat. In any case, if the Analog name truly flips the bird at the RZA as something lacking - off the top of my head - authenticity or warmth, it seems peculiarly misjudged. Bobby Digital is simply a pun on Robert Diggs yielding a whole set of associations upon which to hang images - the RZA's superhero identity for the duration of the record rather than any sort of technological manifesto set forth as a challenge; and besides, regardless of how it was recorded, the RZA's work seems defiantly organic in composition, making a virtue of all the dirt, the awkward pauses, the mistakes, and the crackle of the old Motown sound back when it was something noisy and dangerous.

The retrofuturism of Bobby Digital in Stereo makes for a strange record, even by Wu standards. It's minimal and understated with the feel of having been recorded on a Playstation in someone's attic, possibly due to the personal, autobiographical, and occasionally nostalgic ambience of the RZA excavating aspects of his own childhood. It's low on hooks, being mostly subdued grooves heard through a haze of either dope or memory, the sort of sound which imprints itself on you during childhood illness, tucked up in bed with a fever. So - if this is making any sense to anyone whatsoever - it's as though the whole record occurs as something not quite seen out of the corner of an eye, or I suppose an ear. Typically it was greeted with a certain quota of indifference when it appeared back in the nineties, which I suppose is inevitable for something so personal. Myself, I'd say it's one of the best things ever to come out of the Wu, right up there with Supreme Clientele, Liquid Swords and so on. I've been listening to it for the last twenty years, and it still does something different every time.

Master P - Mama's Bad Boy (1992)

I have a facebook friend called Melissa-Jane. She's one of those facebook friends you have as a facebook friend because she's your friend on facebook. She works at some kind of community yoots place in my old hood, and thus occasionally posts slightly demonstrative status updates about hanging out with da mans dem and the most bangingest dubstep producer being a fourteen-year old member of her yoots group. I'm sure she's listened to a fucking shitload of dubstep in her time, so she should know. Her other notable facebook posts have included a few house exchanges, people with names like Toby and Jemima, owners of a cottage in the Lake District very keen to swap for a few weeks if anyone has anything around the Dordogne; and some crowing over Jay-Z speaking out against overuse of the word bitch, because it's sexist to call a lady a bitch and that's bad. He's probably read my blog post, she snorted brayingly, because she had written a blog post about Jay-Z's sexist song 99 Problems. How can he say bitch, she probably asked in the blog post, when he is married to Beyoncé who is a lady and bitch is a word for lady? I say probably because I only remember the general thrust of it, most of which was qualified by Melissa-Jane explaining how she herself only listens to real rap, like that nice J-Live dude. Apparently J-Live has a significantly more respectful attitude to bitches than Jay-Z. I tried pointing out that Jay-Z nicked 99 Problems from Ice-T, but she didn't seem particularly interested; so I unfollowed her because 1) I don't really like excessively middle-class people, particularly not those who bang on about being down with the kids, 2) J-Live is rubbish, 3) no good ever came of knowing someone named Melissa-Jane, and 4) bitches ain't shit but hoes and tricks.

Anyway, to get to the point, if we imagine some sort of metaphysical realness sphere - for want of a better term - the kind of thing Plato might have envisaged had he grown up around Bedford-Stuyvesant, then this Master P album would be at the exact opposite pole of our hypothetical sphere to Melissa-Jane, everything she stands for, all her treasured J-Live twelves, and everyone she's ever known or met. Mama's Bad Boy be some surprisingly ig'nant shit, and that's why it's a classic. It might of course be argued that I'm just some ageing cracker getting his anthropological jollies from things which scare middle-class people, but none of y'all bitches be sayin' that shit to my face, and Mama's Bad Boy is still a great album.

As the millionaire entrepreneur behind No Limit Records, Master P should require no introduction, but Mama's Bad Boy dates from way back when he very much did require an introduction. Musically it's a bit rough around the edges compared to later No Limit productions - your basic north California variation on the g-funk of the day - although the bass is nice and it has a warm studio feel, predating beats written inside a silicon chip and all that; but it works because that stuff still sounds great, a touch jazzy, summery with a nice low boom-bap contrasting hard against the lyrics. Master P has never been the world's greatest lyricist, but he sounded reasonably decent back in 1992, although to be fair there was less competition back then, and as always he makes up for what he lacks with personality - and of course the enduring magic of ig'nant.

It's poverty, shootings, waiting on that bubble up and the usual. Women tend to divide into those conducive to sucking a dick and those from whom one catches a venereal disease; and I'm awarding extra points for the creative retooling of We are the World:

We are the world,
We are the dealers,
We are the ones that sell crack-cocaine,
So let's start selling...

It doesn't even rhyme! That's how much of a fuck Master P doesn't give on this album. We're a long, long way from Arrested Development.

We need the ig'nant shit because sometimes life can be so crap that it's the only thing which makes any sense and which doesn't sound like bullshit; and yes, there's a certain aroma of celebration in some of the judicious beatings and shootings described here, and it's very irresponsible, and I'm sure Melissa-Jane would give Master P a piece of her mind should he wander into a certain yoots club; but if it bothers anyone, there's a heapin' helpin' of context at the end when our man - I'm guessing about eighteen years of age when he dropped this record - shouts out to everyone he knew at school who didn't live to appreciate his success, and it's one hell of a long list. So as with most ig'nant rap, yes it's funny because this is the sound of kids entertaining their friends and making them laugh; and it's funny that the term ig'nant will probably upset those who feel we should know better; and maybe it isn't Shakespeare or Chaucer or Common or Doseone or any of those boring wankers; but unfortunately it is real, at least on its own terms. Mama's Bad Boy is what happens when you cram people into run-down housing between a liquor store and a gun shop, so just be thankful that one good thing came out of it on this occasion.

Psychopathics from Outer Space (2000)

I'm cycling on the Tobin Trail just past Los Patios when I pass a young boy and his father. The boy looks to be about eight or nine, wears a red baseball cap, shorts, and there's something weird going on with his t-shirt. The precise detail only register a split second before I pass him. He has a cardboard sign hung around his neck by a piece of string. The sign reads I'M A LIAR in block capitals. The man I presume to be his father walks about ten feet behind, a fat shithead walrus-moustache type. What the fuck? explodes from my mouth quite loudly, but I'm already past the Walrus and his publicly shamed kid. I really want to turn back and point out that we're not living in Saudi Arabia, and that maybe the Walrus could have resolved the situation by actually talking to the kid, because I'm damn sure I'M A LIAR isn't going to make it better, and - aside from anything else - I kind of resent being made party to this mediaeval public shaming of a small boy who, let's face it, probably didn't rob a bank, commit a murder, or anything of that magnitude.

But I don't turn back, which is possibly for the best because no doubt even if I managed to say the exact right thing to aid the Walrus in understanding the full extent of his own shitheaded stupidity, it probably wouldn't help the kid; and the guy is clearly a bully so probably wouldn't be above kicking my ass.

Also, it seems peculiarly significant that I'm listening to Insane Clown Posse as I cycle, and as I pass the Walrus and his kid.

Insane Clown Posse are, for anyone who didn't know, a generally shunned rap act - at least so far as the mainstream media is concerned. They're a couple of white guys in clown paint performing novelty toilet humour raps about horror movies operating on roughly the same level as an episode of South Park. They will almost certainly never get to work with Sting, or be asked to drop guest verses on albums by Common, Lauryn Hill, or J-Live. They're not even a proper rap group because they weren't hanging in the park with Kool Herc in 1977, and their freestyles are fucking terrible, and all of their fans are white trash crackers; and white trash crackers don't count. That's most of the traditional criticisms, should you be unaware of any of them.

Personally, my only problem is that it feels like they've been treading water since The Wraith, besides which most of the criticism can be negated by simply bothering to listen to the music. They're not the greatest rappers in the world, but they're often genuinely funny, wringing every last drop of potential from what ability they have, and frankly I've heard worse; and the beats - at least when supplied by Mike Clark - were fucking great, fat and funky, as good as anything ever cooked up in a New York basement. The hypothetical crime therefore seems to be their enduring appeal to massive swarms of dispossessed white trash, so it's basically an issue of class - your traditional demonisation of anyone too poor, unsavoury, uneducated, or just plain stupid, the stratum below even those who at least look good in moody black and white photographs illustrating articles on either poverty or outsider art in culturally prestigious media.

This compilation assembles tracks from both Insane Clown Posse and their protégés, Twiztid - who occupy much the same territory albeit with a sharper, more lyrical edge. Specifically Psychopathics from Outer Space is a dubiously official bootleg assembling tracks burdened with uncleared samples and the like, but crucially this material derives mostly from a time at which both groups were at the height of their powers. What this means to you depends upon how much you enjoy axe murder gags mixed in with your fart jokes, which in turn spins upon the possibility that you may not be the target audience, and that this stuff simply may not be for you. You could probably argue that it's all terribly sexist and at least as homophobic as your average episode of South Park, but to do so would miss one important point, namely that delving below all the cartoon gore and the blow jobs, there's a surprisingly progressive morality to all this shit. The victims in these tales of comic horror are almost always bullies, shitheads, racists, rednecks, wife-beating drunkards, and other overprivileged types, and the underlying message of be ye not a fucking douche is delivered without a hint of sermonising, and most significantly it's delivered to massive swarms of dispossessed white trash, the people arguably most vulnerable to exploitation by forces with vested interests in their acting like bullies, shitheads, racists, rednecks, and wife-beating drunkards.

Anyway, on top of that, the disc rocks like nobody's business, and we even get Ice-T on one track. $50 Bucks alone might be worth the cover price - a peculiar combination of wistful country rock and fat-ass swagger that renders all those other shitty rap-rock crossover acts completely redundant; and then there's Twiztid's She Ain't Afraid which must easily rank amongst the most raucously pornographic tracks ever laid down, sort of like Smell & Quim without having to stick your fingers either in your ears or down your throat; and all with the sneer and frisson of a funky Sex Pistols. Of all the bands you need at your side when you've had a shitty day, there's something really cathartic about this bunch, which is probably aided by the music offering more than just straight nihilism.

So some of this was in my thoughts as I cycled past the Walrus, because the world needs less of his kind; and because - to paraphrase some conservative sociopath or other - either raise your kids the right way, or the music they listen to will end up raising them for you, although in the case of Insane Clown Posse and Twiztid, that may not be such a terrible thing after all.