Tag: hip-hop

Posted on

Talk Your Talk

My dumb face.

I’m on Talk Your Talk with my man Alaska this week. I’m the first guest on this spin off from his usual show, Call Out Culture with Curly Castro and Zilla Rocca, on which I was also the first guest. I did the artwork for their Michael Myers/Nas-themed “Killmatic” episode, too.

In this new one, we talk about my books, new, old, and not-out-yet, as well as a few high-minded social-science theories… and the raps, of course.

You can listen to our brief discussion via the podcasting network of your choice.

Posted on

Charles Mudede Recommends Boogie Down Predictions

Charles Mudede is a senior editor at The Stranger, “Seattle’s Only Newspaper,” and he’s recently started doing a video series called Charles Mudede’s Book Nook. He writes,

Because a big part of the only life I’ll ever have  is devoted to books, the best thing I can offer during this holiday season is a recommendation of five books you can read by a fake fire (like the one in my cottage) or gift those who happen to be close to your life or who you want to be close to your life.

In the third installment of the series, Charles recommends Boogie Down Predictions, a collection of essays edited by me and published by Strange Attractor Press. See the video below:

Many, many thanks to Charles and The Stranger for recommending this book. We worked very hard on it. Find out more and get your own copy.

[Video by Shane Wahlund.]

Posted on

Walk This Way

I was in the tenth grade when Run-DMC’s “Walk This Way” came out. I remember hearing it and feeling like something truly unique was happening. Raw, raucous, and rocking. It brought together fans of both traditional rock n’ roll and rebellious hip-hop.

Recently, I pitched the song to a book series specifically about individual songs, but they didn’t agree on the impact or the import of it. Well, while I was factchecking my memory, I found out there’s already a whole book about it! There’s no doubt it was a special moment in music, a new node in a burgeoning network of sound.

Notebook cover I made from the sleeve of Run-DMC’s Raising Hell (1986).

Aerosmith’s original version of “Walk This Way,” from their 1975 record Toys in the Attic, starts with a few measures of just the beat. It’s just the kind of clean drum beat hip-hop DJs scour recordings to find. With two copies of the record, one can loop it back and forth, providing a seamless backbeat to rap over. Run-DMC’s DJ Jam Master Jay had already been using the record in this manner.

In 1986, Aerosmith was in shambles. Their 1985 reunion record Done With Mirrors had not met the expectations of their fans or their label, and their personal lives were in decline due to persisting drug problems. Starting with singer Steven Tyler, they would all enter rehab over the next couple of years. If not, they knew they were likely over as a band. After rehab and collaborating with Run-DMC on “Walk This Way,” Aerosmith followed the song with a string of multi-platinum albums and Top 40 hits, entering the most successful era of their careers and becoming one of the biggest rock bands of the 1990s. It was a miraculous turnaround.

Though they hated the idea at the time, Run-DMC’s version of “Walk This Way” is a testament to the ear of their producer Rick Rubin. His production style, which he’d already used on previous Run-DMC records, as well as records for T La Rock & Jazzy Jay, the Beastie Boys, and LL Cool J, was credited as “reduction” instead of production. He stripped their sound down to its basic elements: boom-bapping 808 drums, classic-rock guitar riffs, the shouted voices of Reverend Run Simmons and Darryl “DMC” McDaniels, and the nimble cuts and scratches of Jam Master Jay.

As a nascent record label mogul and producer, Rubin was only getting started. The iconic sound he developed with early hits like “It’s Yours,” “Rock the Bells,” “(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (to Party)” and “Walk This Way” keep him in demand to this day. He’s gone on to produce everyone from Public Enemy, Ghetto Boys, Sir Mix-a-Lot, and Kanye West to the Mars Volta, Metallica, Tom Petty, Johnny Cash, Lana Del Rey, and Adele, and he’s redone the reduced style of his early work on everything from Jay-Z’s double-platinum “99 Problems” (2003) to Eminem’s Grammy-nominated “Berzerk” (2013), even appearing in the videos for both songs.

Speaking of, the video for “Walk This Way” was as iconic as the song. It starts as a fight, with Aerosmith practicing loudly in one room, disrupting Run-DMC’s session next door. Run-DMC then turns up the volume on their equipment and launches into their version of “Walk This Way,” confusing the aged rockers. By the chorus, the wall is torn down (inviting more than a few interpretations), and the two groups are ripping through the song together. The video was even parodied in 1994 by the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion on their song “Flavor” which features Beck in the practice space next door.

For better or worse, “Walk This Way” also sparked the further mixture of rap and riffs, giving birth to collaborations between rap groups and rock groups and a start to acts firmly on the fence in between. Public Enemy and Anthrax covered PE’s “Bring the Noise” in 1991. The two groups even toured together that year. I saw them at the University of Alabama at Birmingham in a chocolate-and-peanut-butter package that also included Young Black Teenagers and Primus. In 1993, the infamous Judgement Night soundtrack featured collaborations between Slayer and Ice-T, Sonic Youth and Cypress Hill, and Dinosaur Jr. and Del the Funky Homosapien, among many other embarrassing pairings. And, as if reading “Walk This Way” as a blueprint to success, acts like Limp Bizkit, Linkin Park, and Rage Against the Machine also emerged in the 1990s.

“Walk This Way” was an unavoidable song and an undeniable hit, Run-DMC’s biggest, peaking at #4 on the Billboard chart. It was bigger even than Aerosmith’s original, which just broke the top ten. Run-DMC is one of the core groups of the first recorded era of rap music and hip-hop culture. They were successful and respected before and after this song, but they never saw heights like “Walk This Way.” The song was the nexus of several trajectories and the birth of a hybrid new life form that still stomps around today.

Posted on

wow&flutter

In 1997 I put out a zine called wow&flutter [.pdf]. It was an attempt to merge two of my main musical interests at the time, turntablism and experimental noise. I interviewed DJ QBert, DJ Spooky, John Duncan, and Daniel Menche, and reviewed records from the rapidly expanding releases of ambient, noise, and turntable artists. I lived in Seattle at the time, and there was so much going on in all of these areas. There were regular live events and several specialty stores, and I tried to bring them all together under the banner of sound experimentation.

wow&flutter [.pdf]Download

wow&flutter was intended as part of a series, but the second issue, attack&decay, featuring interviews with Jack Dangers of Meat Beat Manifesto and Warren Defever of His Name is Alive, among others, never made it to press. I still love the idea of noise and hip-hop coming together, and there are others who’ve merged them in the meantime better than I could have imagined (e.g., dälek, clipping., Ho99o9, Death Grips, Cloaks, Justin Broadrick and Kevin Martin, et al.)

It’s been 25 years since its release, but maybe it’s worth another look. Download this .pdf of the first issue, and you’ll see the seeds of my future projects like Dead Precedents and Boogie Down Predictions.

Posted on

Preorder My New Book: Dead Precedents

I am stoked to announce that my new book, Dead Precedents: How Hip-Hop Defines the Future, is now available for preorder! Dead Precedents uses the concerns and conceits of cyberpunk to thoughtfully remap hip-hop’s spread from around the way to around the world. Its central argument is that the cultural practices of hip-hop culture are the blueprint to the 21st century, and that an understanding of its appropriation of language and technology is an understanding of the now. This book is about is the many ways that the foundations of hip-hop appropriation—allusions and creative language use, as well as technology and sampling—inform the new millennium.

Here’s the cover:

Here are some nice words about it:

“Hip-hop has been around for well over forty years now, and in many ways, it has been absorbed into mainstream culture. Roy Christopher argues, however, that its radical practices still contain untapped possibilities. Dead Precedents shows how this cultural movement opens new hope for the future by changing our understanding of the past.” — Steven Shaviro, author of Discognition

“It’s exciting to be quoted so close to the beginning of a book with so much energy and passion in it… a lively screed.”
— Samuel R. Delany, author of Dhalgren

“This book dives into the essential nature of hip-hop re-invention and cyberpunk’s relationship to our web2.0 construct. Roy extracts detail after detail on these two topics and gracefully weaves together a clear and fresh perspective of these genres and their impact on where we are today. Such a refreshing nonstop read!”
— M. Sayyid, Antipop Consortium

“An intellectual hornet’s nest, buzzing with ideas. The canon of hip-hop crit welcomes a bold new entry, calculated to blow the doors off the usual moribund academic fare. Theory finds its own uses for things.” — Mark Dery, author of I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts

Dead Precedents comes out March 19, 2019 on Repeater Books.

Preorder yours now from IndieBound or Amazon!

Thank you!

Posted on

Juice Aleem: Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark

Once a member of the brain-forward UK crew New Flesh for Old, Juice Aleem has long since stepped out on his own. Griff Rollefson writes in his book Flip the Script that on Juice’s first solo record, Jerusalaam Come (Big Dada, 2009), Aleem “recuperates universalism by locating and privileging a pre-Enlightenment performative linguistics” (p. 196). In other words, he uses his lyrics to go back in time in order to envision a better future. His latest record, Voodu StarChild (Gamma Proforma, 2017), continues his quest to create not just better visions of the future but also better futures for real.

Friend and fellow emcee Mike Ladd tells me,

I first met Juice when on the Infesticons tour in the UK in 2001, I think. We didn’t have enough money to bring over the whole band so Juice filled in. Rob Sonic and I were so drunk every show that Juice did all the rapping. Mostly freestyle, I think. Since then, Juice has been a consummate collaborator and best friend. I know few emcees personally who are as introspective thoughtful and as studious as Juice. This man has volumes of knowledge at his disposal and dispenses them with a gentlemanly generosity… Juice will blow your mind on stage as a performer and off stage as a friend. Every time. Without fail.

I’ve been in touch Juice for the past few years, and I concur with Mike Ladd: He has always been genuine, generous, and supportive. Juice’s old crew, New Flesh, did some tracks and shows with the god Rammellzee back in the early 0s, so I had to ask him a bit about that as well.

Roy Christopher: Your first solo record, Jerusalaam Come, goes back to a precolonial time in order to imagine a better future. Is there an underlying aim with Voodu StarChild? If so, what’s the story?

Juice Aleem: Yeah, there are several themes and aims within Voodu StarChild. A lot of it is about people being aware of the magic inside themselves and understanding how that is under attack. How that hidden Self is dark, female energy, and it’s questioned at every moment. Our original selves are out of equilibrium in regard the male and female balance, and this album is a play on that. It’s not only a critique, but it has a few answers within on how I address certain parts of this for myself and those around me in regard to things like diet, family, love, and when to go to war.

For years we have been taught that Voodu is a bad thing, when it is our own personal rituals and practices that will do a better job of saving us than the politicians and the religious have done so far. There is nothing to fear in the dark.

N_AvAbu9er0

RC: In your book Afrofutures, you talk about hackers and whistleblowers. What do you see as the connections between them and hip-hop?

JA: To me there are many connections between them all. The hacker is the most obvious though with the wiretap on all the juicy insides of whatever tech is already out there. Using everything from drum pads and samplers to magpie the last few centuries of speeches, music, and commercials and turn them upside-in for the betterment of the practitioner and listener. Hip-hop is hacking.

The whistleblower is also well seen in hip-hop form, from P.E. telling us “Don’t Believe the Hype” to Kanye telling us “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people.” The moments are loads with little between. Hip-hop traditionally has been one of the biggest whistleblowers out there till recent years. I’m sure the new gen can get there too in between the adverts for big Pharma opiates.

RC: You’ve been organizing and hosting festivals and workshops and such. Tell me about those.

JA: Workshops have been a thing on and off since Lord Redeem started the Ghetto Grammar sessions back in the mid-90s. I helped out, then he and myself took it London and UK wide. Since then I’ve worked and tutored in many places including schools, youth centres, Uni’s, and even a few prisons. Even got caught up doing work in France in a prison outside of Paris.

It’s not sumthing I do everyday, but I like to bring it back now and then for certain projects such as my lyric-writing workshop as part of this year’s AfroFlux events within the B-SIDE Hip-Hop Festival here in Birmingham, UK. B-SIDE has been running three years now, and this year had around 10,000 visitors over the weekend in May.

I’m one of the core artistic directors of B-SIDE and the main person behind AfroFlux: It’s a concept where we look to celebrate the Black and brown thinkers and makers who don’t usually get the accolades while also applying hands on practical applications of cultural markers such as Afrofuturism. We have had a few stand-alone events and plan to expand on that with our partners in other parts of the globe.

GPFJqcFpygY

RC: You and I were talking before about Rammellzee. Did his work influence your own?

JA: In a way, but similar to other’s in his kind of cultural echelon, you don’t always realise till looking back, and also seeing that part of the reason you like them and their art so much is due to the parts of self that have a resonance within the artist you look at. Ramm is a perfect mirror for the things you’d never think would be reflected and magnified. There are things I had thought before I ever knew of Ramm, and to see a person not only having a knowledge of things but living them to the full is his real influence on me. Not just on my art but the living of it, being all aspects of my thoughts and creations.

— New Flesh Plus One: The Rammellzee as Crux (the Monk)

RC: You recorded a song with him with your old crew New Flesh for Old. What can you tell me about that session?

JA: We did a few songs, two of which made it to the Understanding album. They were a little out there, ‘cause those were the days of still recording songs in the same studio with people actually being there. So, having these songs come from Ramm rambling down the phone at all hours and us making sense of it was a real new thing. Then he sent tapes over to Part 2, and we edited the pieces we liked best. There was intended to be a whole series of stories from his Cosmic opera. “Mack Facts” was cool ‘cause we had a theme of this whole future arena style thing with us being the gladiators and Ramm as the announcer. Think of an intense episode of that Gwar, Mad Max show starring Sonny Chiba and Sho Kosugi as Nuba warriors on Plutonia. Speaking with him and listening to him so much on those tapes was kinda trippy, and how he’d take any little idea and run with it creating a session’s worth of vocals. This wasn’t your average 16 bars, but reams and reams of classic adventure rasped in an intense style that fully drew you in. We still have a few bits and pieces from those sessions.

RC: What’s coming up?

As per usual there are a lot of things happening. My three main things I’m gearing up for right now are a new festival in Birmingham by the name of High Vis Festival. It’s a bunch of art loving heads such as myself and graffiti writers like Mose, Panda, and Wingy who have decided to put on a festival highlighting comics, Street Art, Graffiti, Zine culture, and other visual movements with a strong ethic in serious Street Culture.

A couple of gigs with the Exile All Stars, which is myself, Mike Ladd and TIE. We have all been friends for a while and have promised to take new music and perform it. This is the promise.

The number three is from even longer ago, and it’s all about new music from Shadowless. We took the passing of one our brothers by the name of Defisis to cement the call for new tunes. Watch this space.

RC: Is there anything else you’d like to throw in?

JA: Do not be afraid of your own Voodu.

Posted on

St. James Encyclopedia of Hip-Hop Culture

I contributed several entries to the St. James Encyclopedia of Hip-Hop Culture, including ones on Gangsta Rap, Horrorcore, Rap Metal, and 1500 words on the hip-hop scene in my beloved Pacific Northwest, where I first lived from 1993 to 1998 (and three other times after). Here’s an excerpt from the latter:

Underground Hip Hop nationwide saw a resurgence during the mid-to-late 1990s. Having remained primarily underground since its inception, Pacific Northwest Hip Hop soldiered on… Wordsayer (Jonathan Moore, 1969-2017) formed the group Source of Labor in 1989. After moving back to Seattle in 1992, Moore, along with members of Source of Labor and soul group Beyond Reality, formed Jasiri Media group. “The artists in Jasiri forced the Seattle hip hop scene to move from the grandiose, self-aggrandizing rap of Sir Mix-a-Lot to a more educated, meaningful form of musical expression” (Key, 2010, p. 294). Fighting the Teen Dance Ordinance, which had all but killed all-ages events in Seattle since its implementation in 1985, Moore promoted “Sure Shot Sundays” in 1999 to open up possibilities for local youth to experience and perform Hip Hop. He passed away at age 47 in March of 2017 of kidney failure.

Labels like Loose Groove, Do the Math, Impact Entertainment, and Conception Records released definitive compilations showing and proving that the Pacific Northwest’s underground was rife with intriguing and engaging Hip Hop artists in the 1990s. 14 Fathoms Deep: Seattle Hip Hop Compilation (Loose Groove 1997) featured Source of Labor, the Ghetto Children, and Prose and Concepts. Do the Math (Tribal Music, 1998) featured Wordsayer, DJs Topspin, B-Self, and Vitamin D, and three tracks by the Ghetto Children. Classic Elements (Impact Entertainment, 1998) boasted Ghetto Children’s love letter to classic Hip Hop, “Hip Hop Was?” Walkman Rotation (Conception Records, 1998) was a DJ-blended mixtape, a form popular in the underground at the time, mixed by J-Rocc of the Beat Junkies. Other local DJs include Vitamin D, B-Mello, and Topspin.

This massive, 500-page encyclopedia of all-thing hip-hop is out now!

Reference:

Key, Rachel. 2010. From the SEA to the PDX: Northwest Hip Hop in the I-5 Corridor. In Mickey Hess (Ed.), Hip-Hop America: A Regional Guide. Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood Press, pp. 287-314.

Posted on

Intertextual Orientation: The Pop Palimpsest

During my undergraduate days, my friends and I used to play a silly game. Whenever a situation or topic came up and they pointed to me, I would attempt to recite a relevant rap lyric. Sometimes it was a stretch to get Ice-T or the Beastie Boys to fit a late-night Waffle House run, but I was rarely stumped.

As Gorham and Gilligan (2006) put it, “media allusions represent an important way in which audiences make use of the cultural products around them to form relationships with others and build community out of shared media experiences” (p. 3). That is, we determine which texts are appropriate for appropriating and which resonate with the shared beliefs of our community (Linde, 2009). We run around in these collective “textual communities” (Stock, 1983). Members of said communities allude to the same, shared texts in their personal narratives. The shared texts are where we “compare notes” on our collective experiences, as I used to do in college. The fans of a particular cultural artifact (e.g., fans of the band Rush, fans of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, etc.) do not constitute a textual community; textual communities are constituted by their sharing of similar texts in their personal narratives (Linde, 2009). A lot of these texts come from song lyrics.

Christian Marclay: Cyanotype

Sometimes this sharing is called intertextuality, but the term is often misused and abused (Allen, 2000; Irwin, 2004; Orr, 2003; Roudiez, 1980). As originally coined by Julia Kristeva in 1966, the term meant “the transposition of one or more systems of signs into another” (Roudiez, 1980, p. 15; emphasis in original). Therefore, while lyrics, media allusions, and conversational sampling can all be considered intertextual, their intertextuality does not indicate a cohesive system of signs.

Reguardless, intertextuality says there is something outside the text — more texts. Building on Gérard Gennette’s work in art and literature (see Gennette, 1982; 1987; 1994/1997) , The Pop Palimpsest: Intertextuality in Recorded Popular Music (University of Michigan Press, 2018), edited by Lori Burns and Serge Lacasse, aims to explore those texts in popular music. I did my own dissertation research on allusions in rap lyrics, so I immediately gravitated to the chapters on hip-hop: “Rap Gods and Monsters: Words, Music, and Images in the Hip-Hop Intertexts of Eminem, Jay-Z, and Kanye West” by Lori Burns and Alyssa Woods would’ve been invaluable in my earlier research; “Intertextuality and Lineage in The Game’s ‘We Ain’t’ and Kendrick Lamar’s ‘m.A.A.d. City'” by Justin A. Williams also immediately grabbed me; “Mix Tapes, memory, and Nostalogia: An Introduction to Phonographic Analogies” by Serge Lacasse and Andy Bennett overlaps with a couple of new areas of my research.

It’s not all rap lyrics and samples though: Everything from French Vaudville and Neil Young to Genesis, E.L.O., and Eurythmics get a spin. And it’s not all just research either: The Pop Palimpsest is that rare academic collection that’s exhaustively researched and meticulously assembled, but also damn fun to read. The book has inspired dueling desires: I wish it had not only come out earlier but also that I could have contributed.

References:

Allen, Graham. (2000). Intertextuality: The New Critical Idiom. New York: Routledge.

Genette, Gérard. (1982/1997). Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.

Genette, Gérard. (1987/1997). Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Genette, Gérard. (1994/1997). The Work of Art: Immanence and Transcendence. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Gorham, B. W. & Gilligan, E. N. (1997, May). And now for something completely different: Media allusions, language, and the practice of everyday life. A paper presented to the Language and Social Interaction division, ICA, Montreal.

Gorham, B. W. & Gilligan, E. N. (2006, June). Are you talkin’ to ME? The reasons for and use of media allusions. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Communication Association, Dresden International Congress Centre, Dresden, Germany.

Irwin, William. (2004, October). Against Intertextuality. Philosophy and Literature. Volume 28, Number 2, pp. 227-242. The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Linde, Charlotte. (2009). Working the Past: Narrative and Institutional Memory. New York: Oxford University Press.

Orr, Mary. (2003). Intertextuality: Debates and Contexts. Cambridge: Polity.

Roudiez, L. S. (1980). Introduction. In J. Kristeva, Desire in language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 1-20.

Stock, B. (1983). The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Posted on

The Alterity of Cool

William Melvin Kelley’s debut novel, A Different Drummer (Doubleday, 1962), imagines a different America, one where a slave revolt reconfigured the civil war and the nation thereafter. Three weeks before its release, Kelley flipped the term “woke” into its current common parlance in a New York Times Op-Ed piece. His central point was that the African Diaspora was responsible for the cool, “beatnik” slang of the time. One could say the same for hip-hop slang now. Some of it stays in predominantly hip-hop contexts, but quite a lot of it has traveled the wider world at large. As Biggie once rapped, “You never thought that hip-hop would take it this far.”

Say word.

I dare say it’s gone farther than Big could’ve imagined. In Muslim Cool: Race, Religion, and Hip-Hop in the United States (NYU Press, 2016), Su’ad Abdul Khabeer traces the elusive cool to Africa, arguing that it’s “not the sole purview of U.S. Black American expressive cultures,” but that it is “fundamentally Diasporic” (p. 140). Cool requires detachment. Alterity is inherent in Muslim cool. Raised as a Muslim in the U.S., Khabeer operates as an anthropologist, enabling to both cross boundaries and remain of her subjects. Embedded and embodied, she nonetheless recognizes how these factors mediate her work, writing, “…simply being Muslim was never enough. In fact, my race and ethnicity (Black and Latina), my gender (female), and my regional identity (reppin’ Brooklyn, New York!) as well as my religious community affiliations and my performance of Muslimness mediated my access–how I was seen in the field, what was said to me, and what was kept from me–as well as my own interpretations of my field site” (p. 20). Just being “cool” ain’t always so cool. Sometimes it’s about standing out. Sometimes it’s about fitting in. The diasporic distinction of cool is one of the many things Paul Gilroy points out in The Black Atlantic (1995): History without a consideration of race and place is not history at all. In her ethnographic approach, Khabeer maintains attention to both and then some.

As Gilroy himself puts it, “the old U.S. cultural copyrights on hip-hop have expired.” Along with the rest of the globe, Europe is in the house. Some of the best at it are based over there. Dizzee Rascal is a native and a hip-hop veteran. Fellow East-Coast emcees M. Sayyid and Mike Ladd relocated separately to Paris years ago. Ex-New Flesh for Old emcee Juice Aleem also holds it down in the UK, among countless others. There’s an entire chapter on Aleem in J. Griffith Rollefson’s Flip the Script: European Hip-hop and the Politics of Postcoloniality (University of Chicago Press, 2017). Sometimes to move ahead, you’ve gotta step back first. Rollefson investigates Aleem’s postcolonialism via pre-Enlightenment performative linguistics. It’s an Afrofuturist alternative history via precolonial tricks and tropes, not unlike Kelley’s reimagining in A Different Drummer. Aleem’s signifyin’ is one of many examples of Rollefson’s arguments regarding the postcoloniality of hip-hop.

“Hip-hop has come full circle at present,” South African emcee, Mr. Fat (R.I.P.) once said. “Emcees are like the storytellers of the tribe, graffiti is cave paintings, and the drums of Africa are like turntables: This is our ideology.” (quoted in Neate, 2004, p. 120). Indeed, as hip-hop has moved from around the way to around the world, mapping it requires a deft hand, a def mind, an understanding of the alterity of cool, and a handle on histories other than those in the history books.

References:

Gilroy, Paul. (1995). The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Kelley, William. (1962). A Different Drummer. New York: Doubleday.

Khabeer, Su’ad Abdul. (2016). Muslim Cool: Race, Religion, and Hip-Hop in the United States New York: NYU Press.

Neate, Patrick. (2004). Where You’re At: Notes from the Frontline of a Hip-Hop Planet. New York: Bloomsbury.

Rollefson, J. Griffith. (2017). Flip the Script: European Hip-hop and the Politics of Postcoloniality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Schulz, Katheryn. (2018, January 29). The Lost Giant of American Literature. The New Yorker.

Wallace, Christopher. (1994). Juicy. On Ready to Die [LP]. New York: Bad Boy/Arista.

Posted on

Top Records, 2017

This has been another year of change for me. I’m finding more and more difficult to see how others stagnate as they age. Maybe others see me some kind of way, but one place that tendency is evident is in the music we listen to: I am constantly finding new and exciting sounds. Whether it’s seeing Street Sects open for my dudes dälek at Beat Kitchen in Chicago, or EMA, Sleaford Mods, Moor Mother, and Sturgill Simpson making me rethink the very concept of genre, there’s always someone pushing things one way or another.

One thing about this list you might notice: There’s a lot less metal this year. Though I did see Nails at the Bottom Lounge in April, my several-years-long metal kick somehow finally lost momentum early in the year. My in-between phases are kind of all over the place, but maybe you’ll find something in here you like. At the very least, this year’s list is more diverse than it has been in a while.

The clear label winner for 2017 is The Flenser. We were definitely riding the same waves this year.

As always, I’ve included links to Bandcamp where available. I’m not in cahoots with them, I’m just a fan of their platform. Without further fuckery, here are my top however-many records from 2017 and some leftovers from last year.

Shabazz Palaces Quazarz: Born on a Gangster Star and Quazarz vs. The Jealous Machines (Sub Pop): With little-to-no warning, Shabazz Palaces dropped a double smartbomb on the summer of 2017. I mean, I interviewed Ish Butler in January, and he didn’t even mention the imminent releases. To attempt to describe this double release is to participate in folly. It will be a long time before anyone is able to place this greatness.

EMA Exile in the Outer Ring (City Slang): Erika M. Anderson claims not to be making science fiction records, but each time she says it, her voice grows fainter due to her distance from Earth. Exile in the Outer Ring‘s sounds are more spacey, its textures more other-worldly. This is EMA from the farthest out yet.

Planning for Burial Below the House (The Flenser): Over the past few years, Planning for Burial has slowly become one of my absolute favorite bands, and stunning records like Below the House are the reason. I’ve listened to its opener, “Whiskey and Wine,” more times than any other song this year.

dälek Endangered Philosophies (Ipecac): On their second record after a lengthy hiatus, dälek has already outpaced the momentum that made them the pioneers of this sound. Every song is a weapon against complacency, a bomb in your brain. The result is fucking devastating.

Kendrick Lamar DAMN. (TDE): He’s not hailed as the best doing it for nothing. If untitled unmastered proved how good he is when left to himself, DAMN. only adds to that power. The polish is in the right places, and the rest is left jagged, rugged, and raw.

Joey Bada$$ All-Amerikkkan Bada$$ (Pro Era/Cinematic): The ongoing debates regarding who’s the best right now seem to always be between Kendrick Lamar, J. Cole, and Drake. Why Joey Bada$$ is excluded is baffling. All-Amerikkkan Bada$$ is easily one of the best records of 2017 — in any genre, much less hip-hop. And if I hear one more person say that the “industry changed him,” whatever the fuck that means, I will duct-tape headphones to their head and make them listen to Enta Da Stage until further notice. Bada$$ is a badass.

Wand Plum (Drag City): Despite the cloud on the cover, Plum is not quite as thick and hazy as Wand’s previous outings. From the contagious psych-groove of “White Cat” to the dreamy jam-out of “Blue Cloud,” Wand has the soundtrack to your synesthesia right here.

Playboi Carti s/t (AWGE/Interscope): Before Playboi Carti’s self-titled debut came out, I read an interview with him in which he talked about not being in a hurry to get it finished. He was taking his time. His diligence and patience paid off. A couple of weeks after I’d last listened to this record, I heard “wokeuplikethis*” blaring out of a boutique on Milwaukee Ave in Chicago. I still have it stuck in my head. Infectious A.F.

Street Sects Rat Jacket (The Flenser): Street Sects is back with all their previous industrial rage plus guitars! These four songs pack more power than most bands’ full-length records. See them live for the full effect.

Godflesh Post Self (Avalanche Recordings): Also regaining their momentum after a lengthy hiatus, Godflesh is back with a monster slab of riffs and beats. Post Self sounds more like a confident continuation than a comeback, and more than 2014’s A World Lit Only by Fire, it picks up where 2001’s Hymns left off. Brutal grooves.

Open City Open City (self-released): Boasting ex-members of Lifetime, Ceremony, Kid Dynamite, Armalite, and Ted Leo & the Pharmacists, among several others, it’s difficult to imagine Open City being anything other than awesome. They deliver on the promises of their collective past with a core that’s rock hard and a sophistication that only comes with years of honing it.

White Suns Psychic Drift (The Flenser): Since abandoning their guitars, White Suns have only gotten louder, harsher, and more interesting. Psychic Drift is as abrasive as it is subversive, as textured as it is layered, and as hot as it is bright.

Vince Staples Big Fish Theory (ARTium/Blacksmith/Def Jam): It’s difficult to pin down exactly what Vince Staples is doing on Big Fish Theory, but it’s good, and dude is definitely growing. From the laid-back bass-fuzz of “Yeah Right” (with Kendrick) to the rumbling flow of “BagBak,” Staples is up there with the best of his contemporaries.

Aesop Rock Bushwick Soundtrack (Lakeshore): It’s not just tracks without the raps, though there are a few on here that are begging for the man’s multisyllables. Aes’s Bushwick score has been some of my favorite work music this year. Put it on, bob the head, and tear into the task. Energetic, eerie, and emotive.

Metz Strange Peace (Sub Pop): In the mid-1990s, there emerged a genre-less sound somewhere between punk and metal, but totally different from what their merging conjures. Think Barkmarket, Jesus Lizard, or Jawbox. Metz brings that sound bludgeoning back with a brutal update. It’s never been clearer than on their third, Strange Peace. Play loud or not at all.

Heinali and Matt Finney How We Lived  (The Flenser): A pairing made somewhere south of heaven, Heinali and Matt Finney are back with another dark, droney collection of beautiful bedtime stories. There’s absolutely nothing like it anywhere else.

Ride Weather Diaries (Wichita): I once went on a year-long kick during which all I listened to was Ride. There’s something about their harmonies beset by droning feedback rhythms that just hooks me. Weather Diaries is a welcome return to that lovely, lulling sound.

Wolves in the Throne Room Thrice Woven (Artemisia): As much as I was off metal for most of the year, I had to check the new Wolves in the Throne Room. Thrice Woven is a return to their Cascadian transcendental black metal roots, real roots you can feel like fingers deep in the dirt.

Sean Price Imperius Rex (Duck Down): He’s still my favorite, so of course I love this posthumous release. Imperius Rex would be better if he were still around. Sean is a monster emcee, growling from the grave. r.i.P!

Exit Order Seed of Hysteria (Deathwish, Inc.): With all the indecisive genre bending going on these days, it’s refreshing to hear a band hit one right down the middle. Exit Order is good ol’ punk rock: fast, ferocious, and ready for anything. Frontwoman Anna Cataldo surfs their bundle of angry energy like a pro.

Words Hurt Soul Music for the Soulless (self-released): With Hangar 18 alumnus Alaska on the mic and his dude Lang Vo on the beats, Words Hurt is on the rampage on their second full-length. Alaska’s been busy all year dropping a track a month with his Atoms Fam homie Cryptic One (as IT), so the lyrical skills are as sharp as ever.

Kicking Giant This Being the Ballad of Kicking Giant, Halo: NYC​/​Olympia 1989 – 1993 (Drawing Room): Kicking Giant has always been about juxtaposition, the angles at which the worlds of Rachel Carns and Tae Won Yu meet. As Tae writes, “On one hand, there was the derangement of living in urban squalor and on the other, a predilection for simple harmonies and unpretentious purity.” This collection is a welcome return to that place in between. It’s also quite a beautiful package.

Drab Majesty The Demonstration (Dais): Where some just rehash and revive, Drab Majesty is one of the few bands to transcend their sound’s lineage. What could’ve been just throwback Gothic pop is instead a dark celebration of now as much as then. The Demonstration is as original as it is honorary, as catchy as it is cathartic.

Arca s/t (XL): Don’t let the cover scare you, Arca’s third record is the stuff of dreams. It’s his first with vocals, and you’ll wonder why as his voice carries most of these songs. It’s all great, but hang in there: The slower, later tracks “Desafío” and “Miel” are the best.

Jlin Black Origami (Planet Mu): Perhaps more frenetic than her last outing, Black Origami shows Jlin sharpening her set and sound. If 2015’s Dark Energy (also on Mike Paradinas’ Planet Mu label) is a knife, this is its very edge. Footwork from the future.

Eluvium Shuffle Drones (Temporary Residence): As the song list reads, “Simply put, the suggested manner of listening to this work is to isolate the collection and to randomize the play pattern on infinite repeat — thus creating a shuffling drone orchestration — the intent is to create a body of work specifically designed for and in disruption of modern listening habits and to suggest something peaceful, complex, unique, and ever-changing. Thank you.” It’s all of that and more.

Cloakroom Time Well (Relapse): There’s something so cozy about the landlocked, fly-over doom-pop of Cloakroom. They’re like an earthbound Hum, a rock-stanced Jesu, or Swervedriver on the wrong speed.

Uniform Wake in Fright (Sacred Bones): The nastiest of the now, Uniform noise it up not-so-nicely. There’s something really satisfying about the precision of parts of this and the sloppiness of others. It’s like being sliced up with a scalpel and bludgeoned over the head at the same time.

Steven Wilson To the Bone (Caroline): I’ve been a fan of Steven Wilson’s work since Porcupine Tree’s Fear of a Blank Planet, but I had lost interest in his solo work since his work with Mikael Åkerfeldt and his own Grace for Drowning (2011). I checked in again with this one, and everything I liked is here: the grand arrangements, the soaring choruses, the catchy quirkiness. Like early Eno, Wilson works with and around the conventions of progressive pop to great effect.

Björk Utopia (One Little Indian): No matter the era, Björk has always been one of the most compelling artists in the world. The last time she sounded this overtly in-love was perhaps on “Hit,” from her last record with The Sugarcubes nearly 30 years ago.

Sleaford Mods English Tapas (Rough Trade): Staggering between the stilted pop of The Fall to the electronic claustrophobia of Suicide to the whitey alt-hip-hop of Soul Coughing, these blokes have stumbled upon something awesome. With Andrew Fearn helming the laptop and Jason Williamson ranting along, English Tapas is so weirdly catchy, you’ll want to listen to it all the time.

Dizzee Rascal Raskit (Island): Staying out ahead of everyone else for over a decade, Dizzee Rascal has been building a body of work average emcees can only aspire to. Raskit is no exception. This is dude’s sixth record! Please stop sleeping on the Brexit brethren.

Last Year’s Leftovers:

Sometimes it takes a minute. Here are the one’s that either missed last year’s list or just deserve continued attention regardless.

Radiohead A Moon Shaped Pool (XL): While it missed my list last year, it’s one of the best of 2016. It took a long time for this record to unfold for me, but now I can’t stop listening to it. “Decks Dark” alone is one of my all-time favorite Radiohead tracks.

Choke Chains s/t (Slovenly): Choke Chains deliver heaps of nasty fun on their 2016 self-titled LP. It’s energetic and dirty like buried cables. Don’t call first. Just dig right in.

Moor Mother Fetish Bones (Black Quantum Futurism/Afrofuturist Affair): The best thing I heard all year came out last year. Though I’d read quite a bit by Moor Mother, I had yet to hear her music — a mistake I hope you won’t repeat. If you like your hip-hop noisy, your noise groovy, and both angry as fuck, then you’ll love the righteous rage of Moor Mother Goddess.

M. Sayyid Error Tape 1 (self-released): There’s simply no one like M. Sayyid. Antipop Consortium’s resident storyteller is back on his solo game. The best thing out of that camp for a minute, Error Tape 1 is M. Sayyid at his best yet.

Sturgill Simpson A Sailor’s Guide to Earth (Atlantic): Written as letters from a seaward father to his young son, A Sailor’s Guide to Earth is easily Simpson’s most personal record, an area he hasn’t necessarily avoided in the past. A Sailor’s Guide… places him somewhere between the cowpunk country of Dwight Yoakam and the haunting twang of Chris Isaak. It leans toward the latter.

Youth Code Commitment to Complications (Dais): As soon as someone declares a style dead, it comes raging back with a fury unforeseen. Youth Code is one of several recent outfits resurrecting danceable but deadly industrial music.

Danny Brown Atrocity Exhibition (Warp): Damn… Worthy of both its nominal forebears, Atrocity Exhibition is rap at its artistic peak. Really doe.

Minor Victories s/t (Fat Possum): What happens when Stuart from Mogwai and Rachel from Slowdive are in the same band? A victory more than minor.

Tim Hecker Love Streams (4AD): Love Streams is an odd mix of old and new, organic and synthetic. According to the 4AD site, “Hecker admits to thinking about ideas like ‘liturgical aesthetics after Yeezus‘ and the ‘transcendental voice in the age of auto-tune’ during its creation.” Hear it in there.

Jenny Hval Blood Bitch (Sacred Bones): Comparing Jenny Hval to Kate Bush and Laurie Anderson are easy, but if Julie Cruise were slightly pissed, a little more aggro, she might sound like Jenny Hval. Blood Bitch is beautifully unsettling, simmering with a rage barely contained.

Clipping. Splendor & Misery (Sub Pop): According to clipping., “Splendor & Misery is an Afrofuturist, dystopian concept album that follows the sole survivor of a slave uprising on an interstellar cargo ship, and the onboard computer that falls in love with him. Thinking he is alone and lost in space, the character discovers music in the ship’s shuddering hull and chirping instrument panels.” I mean, it was nominated for a Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form — and deservedly so. It’s dope.

Roly Porter Third Law (Tri-Angle): From the booming bounce of “Mass” to the scraping majesty of “High Places,” Third Law shows Roly Porter in full command of his craft.

Aesop Rock The Impossible Kid (Rhymesayers): It must be added that The Kid’s last record soundtracked a lot of my 2017, as it did my 2016.