Bone Crusher - Free (2007)

 

Free? Free from what? Free from the previous and highly unsatisfactory record contract? Free to record exactly what you want to record? Free from expectations of your releasing an album which isn't complete shite?

Older boys and girls may recall Bone Crusher as part of that new south thing a couple of decades back, and AttenCHUN!, his quietly terrifying debut, meant the new south actually was briefly a thing rather than just David Banner then yet another batch of disposable club twats photocopying Three-6-Mafia out-takes, probably with Jermaine Dupri jumping up and down in the background trying to get your attention, as usual. AttenCHUN! was fight music of the best kind, an angry fat guy losing his shit over pinging drum machines with the sort of growling intensity by which Fiend, Mystikal and Pastor Troy made their reputations. So, ignoring the peculiar fact of the cover resembling a 1986 issue of Smash Hits and the promise of Free featuring Valley High - whatever the hell that is - I snatched this from the shelves without too much umming or ahing.

Unfortunately, sometimes you can judge a book by the cover, and Free sounds about as good as it looks. Some bloke on the internet suggested that it resembles a Gwen Stefani record, which is fair. One thing which it doesn't sound like is AttenCHUN! Bone Crusher doesn't even rap here. Mostly he sings, and while his voice is just about good enough to negate the need for autotune, the customary autotuned vocal sounds conspicuously absent from the plinky-plonky compu-pop over which he sings. Frequent references are made to rock music, apparently proposing that rock music is what we have here, but it's no more a convincing argument than the chorus of Fat Boy Rock Star.

I'm a fat boy rock star.
All I do is play my guitar.

Brilliant, although he doesn't actually play his guitar at all on this album, and what guitar is to be heard on Fat Boy Rock Star - the song specifically quantifying just how much Bone Crusher loves to play his guitar - is patently sampled with no attempt made to disguise the fact. Free sounds like children's music, and maybe our big-boned pal made the album for his kids; which is fine but it would have been nice to have had a bit more warning, at least something beyond just terrible artwork - misleadingly offset by the mention of Rhythm D as producer on the back cover, presumably a different Rhythm D to the psychopath at the desk of MC Ren's thoroughly ruthless Shock of the Hour, unless maybe he fell and hit his head or something.

Free isn't the worst thing I've ever heard, and as synthpop, it probably doesn't suck significantly harder than solo albums recorded by members of Depeche Mode, but coming from the guy who gave us AttenCHUN!, it's a shocker and is therefore going straight back to the store.

Lil' Flip - I Need Mine $$ (2007)

As a disclaimer for the benefit of anyone reading this blog for the first time, I'm nearly a million years old, I write about what I like, and I make no claim to have had my finger on any pulse since around 1997 at the very latest. Barely literate comments along the lines of thiz opinon iz garbage Dogg Pound is tha $hit are pretty much wasted on me, even if you're not actually some little white dude lurking in his mother's basement. By the same token, I picked this one up because it was there and I enjoyed The Leprechaun. Flip could be the most successful rap artist of all time for all I know and you may already be bored shitless of the guy, but I can't really be arsed to do my research and you'll just have to humour Grandpa as he muses about this new fangled Beatles band.

No, I don't know if you're literally expected to pronounce it I Need Mine Dollar Dollar and it probably doesn't matter. The Leprechaun was decent, if not enough so to have me actively hunting down the rest. Nevertheless, this was in the rack and I had the money, so here we are.

Freestyle king or not, I don't recall Flip as being particularly gymnastic in the lyrical department, but here he's come on somewhat since the debut, and not in the direction I expected. Whenever I try to work out what happened to rap since I stopped listening - or at least got too old and too busy to continue giving it my undivided attention - I always seem to find trap music on the end of the line - guys I've never heard of growling out a few pages of bank statements over what sounds like an 808 being rogered by Sonic the Hedgehog, and all recorded on a fucking smartphone. If Lil' Flip ever went down that road, as I felt certain he probably would, there was no sign of it in 2007. Lyrically, if he's not quite Nas, you can tell he's thinking about this shit and putting in the work, developing his own voice beyond being one of those guys who turns up on someone else's CD to remind us that he also finds himself in a financially enviable situation; but two whole discs…

Not many rappers can manage the double disc thing, and yet Lil' Flip succeeds where other, possibly better publicised artists have fallen on their arses. The key seems to be variety. The standard is already high for this slightly expensive sounding album, with even those beats steering closest to the trap demonstrating a certain wide screen polish elevating them above the usual ringtones. Elsewhere we have tracks recalling the golden age of west coast g-funk and Real Hip Hop which swings across to the other side of the country, and it all blends seamlessly into a genuinely eclectic whole, feeling, if anything, a little like one of the Neptunes era Snoop albums. For someone so firmly rooted in his home soil - Houston, Texas for those unaware - Flip does a great job of covering all bases, in terms of both geography and even era, acknowledging the east coast roots of the culture as well as the usual roll call of greats; and we have guest spots from names similarly diverse as MJG, DJ Squeeky, Scott Storch, Mannie Fresh, Nate Dogg, Three-6-Mafia, Yukmouth and others. There's very little that's not to love about these - holy mother of God - thirty-nine tracks spanning social conscience to good old fashioned boasting, somehow amounting to a surprisingly soulful, feelgood set.

I probably need to have a look and see if he did any others.

Blank Banshee - Blank Banshee 0 (2012)

A couple of months ago, someone mentioned vapourwave to me, specifically wondering aloud whether it should be considered post-music in the sense of Lady Gaga and other ringtone artistes. Because I'm fat and fifty, and because I couldn't give a shit about computer games, incomprehensible Japanese cartoons, Instagram, most social media, or young people in general, I was embarrassed to admit I'd never heard of him, or it, or whatever gramophone records they may have recently sent scurrying to the top of the hit parade, there to dislodge Scott Joplin's Maple Leaf Rag. I was embarrassed because it turns out the thing had been around for at least five years without my having been aware of it even as a name.

Okay, so vapourwave was not only old news but also massive in context of its own self-contained microcosm of 4Chan types and people who post video clips of themselves talking about computer games on YouTube; so there's no reason why I should have heard of it, I suppose. Anyway, Wikipedia has this to say:

Vapourwave is a music genre and art movement that emerged in the early 2010s and spread over the next half of the decade among various internet communities. It is characterised by a nostalgic or surrealist fascination with retro cultural aesthetics (typically that of the late eighties and early nineties), entertainment technology, consumer culture and advertising, and styles of corporate and popular music such as lounge, smooth jazz and elevator music. Sampling is prevalent within the genre, with samples often pitched, layered or altered, sometimes in a classic chopped and screwed style. Central to the style is often a satirical but not necessarily critical preoccupation with consumer capitalism, popular culture, and new-age tropes.

I've also seen it claimed that vapourwave is over, and Blank Banshee is actually seapunk, but I don't care. I'm fifty. Fuck off.

Anyway, it's a file sharing, downloady thing, and I'm yet to sign up with the whole download culture because I much prefer physical objects and I've never owned an iPod - or equivalent device - that worked for longer than three months at a time; and like I say, I'm fat and fifty.

I had a root around on YouTube, it being a source of numerous vapourwave albums uploaded in their entirety. Most of what I heard sounded sort of interesting, if not startlingly unlike anything else I've ever encountered. As a genre it seemed to be making a virtue out of samples of unusually bland material - ringtones, game noises, television station idents, the little tune your computer plays when you boot it up. Some of it was kind of irritating, but some of it seemed to have something, and of all the stuff I browsed, Blank Banshee seemed to have enough of something to warrant a violation of my own personal code; so I threw dollars at the bandcamp page and bagged me some downloads, then immediately burned them to CDR so I could give them a proper listen.

Blank Banshee is supposedly a Canadian by name of Patrick Driscoll, beyond which I know nothing but for the music itself, which I guess is deliberate. It sounds very much like music composed entirely on audio editing software using samples of the general type described, so for the most part there's a weirdly smooth quality which actually makes me think of the blandly utopian seaside resort described by J.G. Ballard in Vermilion Sands. Some of it has the monged-out ambience of new-age motivational tapes, and is almost certainly sampled from something in that direction. Yet, as promised by the hype, there's something weirdly fascinating by this overpowering wash of airbrushed perfection, as though it's laid on so thick it becomes something new.

On the other hand, the music might not work so well were it purely as I've described, that also being more or less how Floral Shoppe by Macintosh Plus sounds to me, and which is why I didn't bother downloading it despite it apparently being the Never Mind the Bollocks of vapourwave. Blank Banshee works by taking the form somewhere else, bringing in material lifted from the crunkier end of southern rap - notably those crunchy handclaps and finger clicks - and this influence seems also to mold the music into something significantly funkier than whoever it was nicked from - possibly excepting Flash's The Message which is the only sample I've been able to identify. Regardless of sources, Blank Banshee 0 ends up as something new in its own right - nothing longer than your average television commercial and adding up to just over half an hour of what feels like a continuous piece, and one which definitely exerts a strange influence on the place you're in, cerebrally speaking. It invokes in passing certain quieter moments of Nine Inch Nails, Anne Dudley's Art of Noise, and Three-6-Mafia, but also a fairly substantial dose of Yellow Magic Orchestra.

I'm still not a fan of downloads, but this cost me a dollar and is pretty darned wonderful; and more than anything it's really nice to know that in terms of new things, music isn't quite over. This kind of thing may even be the first wave of whatever happens next.

Blank Banshee 1 from 2014 is also fucking great by the way, and apparently he has a new one out even as I write this.

Dr. Dre - Compton (2015)

I have this theory which I've been developing over the last couple of years; well, not so much a theory as a classification, and one which I'm trying hard to convince myself is completely different to representatives of my father's generation sniffily insisting that the Sex Pistols weren't music. The theory is that at some point during the last decade, or maybe a little before, music bifurcated into two distinct families with very little in common beyond mutual transmission by means of sound waves, the families being that which we already understand as encompassed by the term music, and the new thing which I'll call post-music; and yes I am aware how closely this resembles those Dizzy Rasclaats you listen to, that's just noise.

Music, as we already understand it is, for the sake of argument, immersive - we go to the gig or we sit listening to the record and reading the cover as it plays. These are broad generalisations, but the core point is that the individual engages fairly directly with whatever they are listening to, at least some of the time, regardless of what it sounds like or what its constituent elements may be. Post-music is generally anything released since about 1995 which makes you feel either old, or like grabbing the monosyllabic little fuckers responsible by the scruff of their necks and rubbing their noses in it so they know not to do it again. Post-music is often easily identified by a ton of autotune, arcade game sounds, a certain ravey quality synonymous with music which could only have been composed by moving waveforms around on a screen, a general sentiment amounting to awesome, dude, and compositions equating to weird flavours beloved of small children which don't actually occur anywhere in nature, bubble-gum ice cream and so on. There's also a certain inability to distinguish quality from shite leading to disastrous results when combined with a weird view of nostalgia as positive in and of itself, hence fifteen-year old laptop prodigies synthesising Elton John or the dynamic of the Electric Light Orchestra.

The thing is, to be fair, post-music isn't really about the music so much as a projected memeplex of which the music is just one minor component. Post-music is for playing on your phone through a shitty speaker, not so much for your direct enjoyment as for the pleasure you may take from visibly associating yourself with the music as others pass by; in other words it may as well be a t-shirt with an awesome logo. The music is unimportant outside what it says about you to others. Similarly, the music will, without exception, have a video accompaniment, and the video accompaniment and that which it communicates will be at least as important as the song, and often more so.

Post-music artists include, I would suggest, LMFAO, Lady Gaga whoever shat out that Cha Cha Slide shit, We Are Young by Fun, and about a million others I can't bear to think about. It isn't that it's all a big pile of useless shite, but that it isn't music by terms I recognise even if music is an element; and this is why anything involving autotune is nearly always bollocks.

Okay, maybe not always, but I'll come back to that.

I've lost track of what happened to Detox, the long-awaited and never to arrive follow up to Dre's 2001 album. I gather a load of the tracks have turned up here and there but the man himself was never really happy with it and so called it a day and just popped this one out on the spur of the moment, almost certainly inspired by all that was stirred up during the making of the film Straight Outta Compton, at least if the intensely reflective lyrical content is anything to go by. It's paid off too, in so much as this sounds like a record which someone enjoyed making, or at least enjoyed making presumably more than he enjoyed wittling away at Detox for the last fifteen years.

Most surprising I suppose is that it doesn't sound anything like the Dre with which we are familiar, or at least it doesn't until the initial shock passes and you notice it's actually not a million sonic miles away from some of the Eminem records he's produced in recent years. I suppose the surprise comes from my assuming those records sounded as they did because of Eminem rather than his producer. Then again, Dr. Dre's success is probably in the dramatic evolution of his sound, and it's a tough call thinking of anyone else in the music business who has endured so well, advanced so much, and yet remained pretty much true to himself. I mean The Chronic was twenty-three years ago. Can you believe that?

Compton is Dre doing what I've come to regard as post-music, and showing that actually you can pull that shit off if you just make the effort. It's not only the autotune, but the whole dynamic, arcade blips and subsonic bass, crunk snare, and For the Love of Money which could almost be Three-6-Mafia; but somehow it's done with a certain light touch which elevates it way above mere ringtone status, and then the more you listen, the more you notice the old school touches, and just how soulful this record is; and he's made Snoop sound amazing again, and Cold 187um and Xzibit are back; and even the Game and he's not just reading out a list of his fave albums for once...

Compton is an incredible album. In case anyone ever doubted it, the guy is a genius, not least for snatching that rinky-dink ringtone crap back from the kids and making it work as something real.

Three-6-Mafia - Mystic Stylez (1995)

Some years ago I happened upon a day time chat show in which one of those Jesusy evangelical backmasking obsessives confronted the lead singer of Venom - or possibly some other Venom personage.

'You record backwards subliminal messages on your records in order to warp young minds and turn them to Satan,' he blustered, apparently believing he'd just exposed the truth of a major conspiracy.

'Yes,' the Venom bloke agreed helpfully. 'Yes, we do!'

Three-6-Mafia seem to be coming from that same place, or at least they were in 1995, which I notice is now, rather terrifyingly, as long ago as was Jailhouse Rock when I myself first started listening to music. Anyway, whatever terrible claim you may have heard of that there rapper's music, Three-6-Mafia do that shit with brass knobs on and a big fuckin' smile on their faces; or, they used to. I'm not sure quite what they're up to these days as I drifted away when Gangsta Boo jumped the increasingly blingy ship. What recent stuff I've heard has a bit more of a club vibe, all squeaky synths, crunk juice and riding spinners. It's okay in so much as it does it's job, but I much prefer their earlier, more conspicuously evil incarnation.

Mystic Stylez was recorded back when the cost of those ice-grill vampire fangs imposed a fairly low budget on the recording of this, their first and best album. At least that's how it appears - gas-powered samplers creaking away, cracked casings, masking tape, distorted effects through what sounds like a vintage spring line reverb, and an album that may originally have been issued as a series of 78s, judging by the sound quality. It's the same basic griminess which is always attributed to the Wu-Tang Clan, but Three-6-Mafia did it better, underpinning the whole with a bass so deep that most of the time it's a feeling rather than notes; and compositionally it's nothing like the music of those Staten Island kung fu obsessives. Agonisingly slow beats invoke the more pants-wettingly terrifying John Carpenter soundtracks, contrasting with the staccato flow of triple time galloping raps wherein Juicy J and the gang do their best to scare the living shit out of you; and they succeed with a vertigo inducing sound akin to being knifed through a cough syrup haze. The science, so to speak, may not be lyrical by the terms of J-Live or related worthies, but it's exactly as lyrical as it needs to be.

Just to bang on about this one for the umpteenth time, the most misunderstood aspect of this kind of rap is not so much that it encourages or glorifies violence, that it's sexist or homophobic, or that it's lacking in redemptive qualities; the most misunderstood aspect is that it necessarily requires either the approval or endorsement of anyone still getting misty eyed over the era of De La Soul and socially responsible messages heard over a coffee shop tannoy system. This reduces to the notion that rap by definition must do only one thing, subject to the approval of people who don't actually like much rap when it comes down to it. Three-6-Mafia were always more Eazy E than anything else, with that same amoral glee taken in whatever it is that will piss you off the most; and because not only are these records done for themselves, for their friends, and for anyone else who wants to hear them - as opposed to anthems of moral guidance for the greater good of humanity - but because, sometimes smash it up is as legitimate an argument as anything with more syllables and a friendlier smile. So not only do they commit all the supposed cardinal sins as defined by rap's most vocal critics, but they added a few of their own on this album, Venom-style showbiz Satanism and cannibalism to name but two. In any other genre, this may have come across as faintly ridiculous, but here it not only works, but it's fucking chilling - an hour or so of cold funky sweats and adrenaline rushes which place the listener directly at the centre of the robbery, the street shooting, and the raw terror; and if you really need it to, yes - at least some of this can be considered a metaphor for the horror film of daily existence in one of the more frequently shat upon demographics.

As I've almost certainly said elsewhere, Mystic Stylez is why I find it difficult to take all those power electronics clowns seriously. It's not so much that Three-6-Mafia necessarily ever did any of the stuff described here for real, but they're almost certainly closer to some of it than William Bennett or even Michael Gira ever were, and they're not stood in an art gallery handing out tastefully shocking limited edition prints of it. Mystic Stylez sounds like no other album ever recorded, even in the context of the Three-6-Mafia's own catalogue. It's probably one of the darkest records ever made, and possibly one of the finest; and Break Da Law is still the greatest inducement to the dispensation of good old fashioned pissed-off get back since Straight Outta Compton.

NATAS - Wicket World Wide.Com (1999)

Excepting possibly Whodini's Haunted House of Rock from 1983, rap as a genre rarely dipped its toe into any vaguely gothic waters until the nineties when certain artists apparently concluded that the only way to take it any place beyond Straight Outta Compton was to just go all out and get with the man downstairs. It's still an odd mix, served best by Three-6-Mafia in the south, and probably NATAS from Detroit in the north. NATAS was formed around Esham, sometimes Esham the Unholy, who released his first solo album at the age of sixteen and pretty much invented Detroit rap. Specifically he termed it acid rap, drawing inspiration and imagery from the weirder, more theatrical end of rock and metal, returning again and again to dark, supposedly Satanic images as metaphors for the shittier aspects of human existence, and possibly because it pisses people off. The short version is that there probably would never have been an Eminem or an Insane Clown Posse were it not for Esham. He did it first and best where this sort of psychologically warped stuff is concerned.

NATAS - standing for Nation Ahead of Time And Space - comprises Esham, Mastamind, and TNT, the man with enough game to make the Virgin Mary suck dick and stash cocaine, it says here. They're part of the reason why I can no longer take so many of those power electronics acts seriously. Stood next to NATAS or Three-6-Mafia - both of whom it should be noted transmit their horror by means of toe-tapping beats and tunes that even the most musically inept milkman could whistle with ease - Whitehouse and their kind sound like some testy art gallery installation, everyone stood around sipping fizz and congratulating each other on how shocking are their t-shirts. Stuck in a room with Whitehouse, one is left with a bit of a headache and the faint nausea of having scoffed too many vol-au-vents. Stuck in a room with NATAS, there's always the nagging fear that they might actually mean it. Even if it's all naughty words and exaggeration and comedic bragging amounting to a nutcase waving a gun in your face, and a gun that is quite clearly only a water pistol, the threat is voiced with such force that whether the weapon is real or not is probably the least of your worries. NATAS is fucking crazy; but in a good way, possibly.

Which brings us to Wicket World Wide.Com - wicket here being wicked shit as the term referring to acid rap or whatever you want to call it, as distinct from anything to do with cricket, or for that matter musical theatre, vodka-based alcopops, or the hearty endorsement of Sophie Aldred. I'm not sure if this is the best NATAS album, but it's the best I've heard, and it's difficult to imagine one better. Musically it has its own sound, existing at a sort of tangent to the rest of hip-hop, a crisp electronic production invoking the likes of Front 242 as much as any of the more obvious sources of inspiration. The rhythms feel like knives sharpened, contrasting neatly with a deep, warm bass and the sort of virtual arrangements that don't quite exist in nature, or at least didn't when this came out; and it rocks like anything recorded by the Rollins Band without much in the way of guitar or even anything resembling the dynamics of six-strings and an overdrive pedal. Also, it's convincingly terrifying for the most part, at least up until the last few tracks which begin to take a less screw-faced tone, coming as something of a relief after the first somewhat intense hour; and the nutcase with a water pistol factor described above means that even minor instances of dating - Cyberkill, WWW.COM and others which no doubt seemed pretty fucking futuristic in 1999 - retain their menace regardless.

All of this Wicket World Wide.Com does without sounding too much like anyone else, inspiring any skips towards the next track in line, or whilst standing in an art gallery wearing leather trousers and screaming. You've gotta kill us to stop us, they promise on Metropolis - the song that Godflesh probably would have recorded had they been young black males growing up in Detroit - and this album, exhausting and addictive as it is, leaves you in no doubt of the fact.

Micall Parknsun - The Working Class Dad (2005)

For roughly a decade of my life I listened to rap music almost to the exclusion of everything else, which was partially to do with circumstances. I was working at Royal Mail as a postman which, regardless of what you may have heard, is one tough fucking job day after day with the early starts, heavy weights, climbing stairs, and having complete strangers calling you a cunt more often than you would like. I needed something to drown out the jangly indie-guitar toss of the crap station to which the sorting office radio would invariably be tuned, and because a lot of the younger guys liked their rap, it rubbed off on me in a big way; so that was what I'd have on my walkman for four or five hours a day, because it just seemed to work in a way that nothing else did; and the more I listened to rap, the weaker and more mannered everything else began to sound.

Stand them next to UGK or Three-6-Mafia in their heyday, and even the most violently offensive power electronics act will look like an art gallery installation with everyone mincing around sipping red wine and scoffing cheese footballs; and after you've been listening to rap for a while, even the most profoundly sensitive guitar-strumming artist of the last few generations becomes a sulky poet eating his ice cream in front of a velvet curtain, because there is a certain kind of blue collar bad day during which that knob from Razorlight telling you that everything's gonna be all raaaaaht just doesn't make you feel any better.

Of course, now that my life has become somewhat less shite, I am once again able to appreciate other genres without becoming irritable, but rap really does something unique and special. I think it's down to the lyrical content and the relation of artist to image - as in how they come across - all of which vaguely ties in to that stuff about keeping it real as opposed to keeping it overwrought and solitary in an empty room clutching a single rose like Coldplay man or Bonzo from U2. Rap has one hell of a lot of words and as such can often amount to a hell of a lot of content compared to other forms of music, content as in material delivered to your ears rather than simply interpreted by the listener. This means a rap record that's doing its job provides a good visceral kick in addition to a mammoth pile of issues upon which one may choose to cogitate, and will tend to reward repeated listening because there's so much to take in, certainly more than most can digest in one sitting.

Quite aside from the minor stroke of genius of naming himself after a long-running English chat show host, Micall Parknsun makes rap records that do their job - pissed off and quite vocal about the fact for all sorts of reasons without that being his entire schtick, and without quite fitting neatly into any existing rap demographic. English MCing at least for a while seems to have been of a surprisingly high lyrical standard, with even the also-rans quite capable of holding their own against artists who would be hailed as worldbeating in the States. I'm not sure Micall Parknsun is even that big a name in the UK let alone anywhere else, and yet he ranks effortlessly alongside recognised lyrical greats from over this side of the pond, and I'm pretty sure this isn't just my being swayed by references to Blankety Blank and Les Dawson, lest it seem like I'm reliving those months during which Roots Manuva's greatest talent was apparently the ability to mention cheese on toast in a song, at least according to the music press of the time. The production is similarly spot-on, mostly falling somewhere within the general area of UK hip-hop as it stood around 2005, maybe a distant DJ Premier influence mixed up with 1960s film soundtracks, but better than that probably sounds and with some great deep bass. The Working Class Dad is eight years old now, which seems incredible, so I guess if the guy was ever going to be massive then maybe it would have happened already; still, I guess it's never too late, and he's definitely deserving.