2020 Highlights: Hip Hop (R.A.P. Ferreira, Armand Hammer, clipping.)
Can you find the level of difficulty in this? That's what the game is all about. Tough music to endure tough times.
R.A.P. Ferreira - Purple Moonlight Pages
Rory likes words and treats them like peace offerings to a war that never existed. He spreads them around, helplessly but never foolishly (at least not on this project), and hopes they can reach a certain point of consistency and aura that hits just enough that you have to wonder what he just said and if it makes sense. He deepens into the frisky world that is not his mind, but the imaginary relationship between his mind and the rest of the world around him, to see what can pop out this time; what reflection, what mantra, what question. He hops around ideas and central themes to come up with a project that sees him rebirthing himself. No longer Milo, now R.A.P. Ferreira, an incredibly cool name he was already abusing in his lyrics, he frees himself of the burdens that came with his previous work to come out as a completely new artist.
He muses regarding the growth he’s had to go through to realize there are some things beyond his reach that he can’t comprehend or accept, but deals with it in such an academic way, like a child discovering new words and not quite comprehending what they mean. Sometimes he even forgets to flow, and just lets his voice flourish a bunch of words on top of his jazziest instrumentals ever, while never giving them a second thought; once an idea is out, it’s out, and it can’t go back in. That’s one of the things Rory realizes so well on this project, and something he won’t back down from. He realizes those words are something powerful, they’re ideals and beliefs that he thoroughly believes won’t go unnoticed once they’re said. “At the end of the world, we was fightin’ back with brushes and pens”.
There’s a hunger that he admits is privileged to thrive off of, knowing fully well that a lot of his peers won’t, so he does his best to make the most of the new experience he has to get open and free. Like Susan Sontag’s words are uttered halfway through this album, an artist’s job is to invent trophies of experience-but experience is meaningless without memory. Rory has enough memory to drown out a universe, and sometimes that ends up drowning him-but he lets that happen. He’ll acknowledge those forgotten, but he’ll also freely admit to his own vices and his own resentment over the way life turns out-the wrong people get placards, you get a collection of spatulas. In the end, the art made by those who are worthy won’t ever get recognized the way it oughta be-not even this review is making it justice.
But there comes the questioning: what is he doing this for? What is the end game? The answer to that? Joy! It’s reveling in the weird little anecdotes of life and taking in all you can get, in order to let it out in your own, somewhat magical way. “Can you find the level of difficulty in this? Can you find the level of jubilee in this?” He understands he won’t reach out to everyone (which was something he didn’t get as Milo), but he’s willing to put his biases aside to liberate himself through his art and his spirit-in a way that, despite the level of difficulty in his lyrics, even makes this a communal experience, where everyone takes something different out of it. That’s the way he seems to want it.
But of course, Purple Moonlight Pages is not only about him. It’s also about the marvelous Kenny Segal, Mike Parvizi, and Aaron Cormack: The Jefferson Park Boys, who leap Rory forward in terms of his sound with some of the lushest and loungiest jazz semigrooves you’ll hear all year. Instrumentation that evokes that one band at the back of the bar that you don’t notice immediately, but without them, you wouldn’t be able to take the girl home. There’s a sparkly fire somewhere hidden among their magnificent escapades, as they refuse to stay still for too long. Glittery dances with street clothes, removing the classist from the fancy. They’re never dirty, but they’re not quite clean either. They stay in this lane of dirt hidden in their shoes, and they keep the flow going as they move around Rory, almost as if they were paving the road he’s about to cross as he moves along. Without them, this album wouldn’t be as potent and easy to follow and listen to, even if the rapper himself presents a challenge.
But not a challenge without its rewards. All rap is political, and his way to demonstrate that is to challenge the audience who will leave him behind for someone easier to digest and who they don’t have to think too much about (I don’t see him as a man who enjoys memes all that much). Therefore, he sets out to make an album to revindicate the confusers of the world, as they starve to know what’s waiting ahead or what’s keeping them afloat throughout all the adversity. It’s the soul folks; it’s the soul, folks. He hopes to be utilized in service of another’s journey, and Purple Moonlight Pages could very well light the way for those thirsting for knowledge and peace. In the meantime, he’ll continue looking for that aurora himself.
Armand Hammer - Shrines
-and still, there’s something left, something unspoken, something that the music can’t touch. The ruins are what we walk through here, an obtuse and confusing world where the quiet feel the need to stay quiet and the oppressed don’t stand a chance; if the game was rigged all along, no need to play it. This album’s dynamic sets that tone: 10 guests, and most of them show up for a quick appearance only to go back to whatever hole they feel safest in. Billy Woods and Elucid walk through a land that isn’t theirs but they’re entitled to, and the fear and the disappointment is something that they can’t shake. They’ve been doing their part for years, yet, is this what they get? It’s a lack of support so enthralling it’s a shock to hear them reference R.A.P. Ferreira only for him to show up later on and find himself “in the backwoods, jiggin’ with no remorse”. Armand Hammer have stopped believing in leaders, and even if they realize black communion can happen more likely through trauma bonding than through a more positive outlook on life, they know they can’t be the ones to spread that message-or least, they won’t spread it like this, with a knot in their throat.
It’s difficult to talk about a moment of discontent when the world still suffers, probably because it always will. This duo keeps that in mind as they strut alongside fiends and demons, seeing that “black is beautiful but it ain’t superglue”, they “go left but can’t finish”. A world of half-assed decisions stilted through as the ghosts of their peers pass them through. The music sways around, beaten and forgotten, where the few exaltations you can get feel muted and erased from memory; musically, Shrines is the equivalent of murmuring all the words you were forbidden to say. Armand Hammer are not content with simply pointing out systemic racism, prejudices and biases against their people and their culture-their aspirations are to filter them, enter them and make their words spin as they cascade through the worst kinds of injustice.
Billy Woods is the erratic one, the wildcard, the messy yet vibrant member that feels the haunting of the others as he realizes his words will not be remembered and can’t help but feel that hollowness, that shallowness, passing through his speech. Just about all of American ideologies, symbolisms and power structures have been founded upon black pain and exploitation, and he feels the weight of those before him, as he trespasses through worlds of imagery that range from earthly and weighty to cavernous, subdued, willing to drink as much blood as possible. Elucid is the one with his head in the clouds, the more ethereal one (“I’m all in the sun”), the one with more ideals as he’s felt excluded from black culture for as long as possible, the one most willing to find a higher ground to step on, build new utopias, new worlds, new shrines if you will. He’s yet another mark in the middle of black history, already full of those-”Black fist in moisture”.
Together, they drive each other to see the dark pits of what they’ve been promised and expected to see, as the systems destined to make them fail collapse, and so does everyone else around them; this is an album to recognize what’s been lost and pick it up from scratch. The powerful will “mingle” with the poor, yet the mere idea of them getting what they deserve is something that’s still too far out of reach for these 2, even if it’s not impossible-because if it were impossible, why bring it up? Why rap at all if we’re all doomed? That’s where the power in these lyrics arises. There’s a purpose to call out all the flicks of the wrist that led and still lead so many marginalized black people to their deaths that they can’t shut their mouths about, and they don’t feel like they should-for good reason too. They fight against time in order to make sure they can rap their shit again, to take notice of all the old traditions slipping in again and corrupting the world around them (“Feel it in the air like a Confederate flag”), and they stay thinking the world hasn’t learned shit from all the suffering they caused their ancestors. Nothing can be enough for them, because why would it be? Every win leads to more losses than they can count.
Then again, that’s what Armand Hammer do best. They stay within that nest of rats, they infiltrate it and power through it to at the very least understand the mechanisms, no matter how much it may end up affecting them in the end. They believe in a very unique and true way, and they know that’s not all they can do, so they strive for that level of difficulty that will make them rise in the future. Emancipation occurs when an unprivileged person or party speaks up against systems of injustices, and Billy and Elucid will do their best to stop being considered a minority. All intelligences are equal-
The Koreatown Oddity - Little Dominiques Nosebleed
Stories to tell. That’s what this album’s all about. The personal is political, and The Koreatown Oddity doesn’t stray away from that reality, but instead, he blasts in with a poignant, almost sweet story to tell that’s one of the most reassuring listens of the year. Dominique has a peculiar lyrical and musical sense of humor that translates increasingly well into a listen that’s almost an hour long, yet it passes by like it was nothing. It’s a tribute to the analysis both of the self and of the world around him, a vibrant recounting of events that passed so that, by the end, the main takeaway is that he’s survived them, so maybe we can too.
That opening paragraph may sound a tad too pompous and self-important, but that’s only to make up for the fact that Little Dominiques Nosebleed is anything but-it’s a casual, genuinely fun listen, a look into detailed experiences that don’t shy away from some harsh truths. The album’s main focus points are already given away in the cover art: the 2 serious car accidents that would change the rest of his life. The first one, a ride to the babysitter with his mom as the other car refuses to take responsibility for the accident, and leaves Dominique with a permanent ache in his nose; the second, him coming back from the ice cream truck, looking left and right, up until a car almost breaks his leg. Both events that shape him not physically, but mentally: out of them comes a man who realizes if he’s still alive, it’s got to be for a reason, and he’s going to find that reason no matter what. “Chase the spirit”, as one of the tracks say. Therefore, he looks to the world around him and doesn’t shy away from both criticizing its flaws and tribulations-especially when he criticizes the double standards that lead to black men in prison for no reason, like on “Weed in LA”, or when he sees gentrification knocking on his neighborhood’s door and letting itself in like on “Kimchi”, 2 tracks that still allow themselves to be humorous and playful-but also being able to enjoy the little things and thriving off of his world of video games, weed and idealization of winning a Grammy just to piss off the white folks.
That’s the thing: Dominique is still clearly affected by those life changing events, as anxiety still lingers with him; but it’s not the kind of anxiety that’s going to let him get to pursuing what he loves. The hook of “No Llores”, a melancholic yet campy tune says so. “Sometimes I wanna cry but I can’t though/I gotta stay strong and get more dough”. Sure, partially it’s a critique on how black men are supposed to hold their feelings and must be the ones to provide for others-but on the other hand, it’s a standard he believes can be healthy in moderation, and will continue to pursue in his own way. He considers being alive an achievement in its own right, and he’s not about to listen to anyone who tells him otherwise. He may end up being a tad judgemental when it comes to the way others around him live their lives (“Attention Challenge” is by far the low of the album), and that may end up hurting him in the end. But taking that into consideration, he’s a man who’s glad to be alive and will do whatever it takes to stay alive.
It’s also worth noting that the entire album is produced by him too! And what a producer he is! Taking into account all the experiences he has to tell lyrically, the sonics do their job as well and don’t just stay in their jazzy mold to do nothing. They don’t stay still, they move around along with Dominique to the point where they may be telling the story in more detail than he is. Soothing grooves that give you a false sense of comfort before their very essence is torn away for something harsher and crueler, but never to the point of being inaccessible; they’re always gonna find a way to bring you back on board. You can take a song like “A Bitch Once Told Me”, one of the centerpieces of the album, that takes its time to unfold an instrumental with more gravitas and steadiness than the ones before it, or the switches on both of “Little Dominiques Nosebleed”’s, especially the second one, where it seems as though a barricade of horns are announcing the events soon to come. The winner in that sense might be “The World’s Smallest Violin”, a borderline trip hop beat that seems unwilling to find its own pace until it unveils a section that signals hope for whatever’s to come. But there’s honestly no instrumental that goes by (or should go by) unnoticed; everything’s magical here.
One of the main mantras of the album, the one that contextualizes the title, is “You don’t know nothin ‘bout little Dominique’s nosebleed”. And the truth is, we don’t! We absolutely don’t. Even after listening to this painstakingly detailed album, there’s still so much left uncovered, things that we may never know. But what the album’s telling us is that it doesn’t have to matter, we don’t have to know the whole story in order to realize its significance. We can grasp parts of it, the parts that end up being relevant to the world around us, and guide ourselves from there. This may be a very personal album in many ways, an irrepetible one, but it’s also an example of how what happens to one person can impact millions, as everyone can learn from each other. Dominique has, and if you pay close attention, you will too.
Open Mike Eagle - Anime, Trauma and Divorce
Aren’t we all tired? Shouldn’t now be the time to start resting, start picking ourselves up, start building our lives back again? But why does that responsibility have to rely on us? Why must we always be the masters of our fate, when the world is destined to make us fall? From the get go, something gets to us, and from then on, it’s all about trying to recuperate what we had before that one thing came along and drove us all astray, and with every move forward, we gain something but we also lose something. Open Mike Eagle lost his wife, in the middle of a divorce that he deliberately decides not to discuss openly, because as much as this album is called Anime, Trauma and Divorce, it’s not really about any of those things, but rather, it’s about what happens after those things; after the storm, after the defeat, after the wallowing, after the loss of the self in products and ideas that go nowhere. Sufjan asked just a couple weeks earlier, “What now?”. This is the answer, and it’s not a pleasant one.
Most of the album is a quiet haze, like foggy shadows that are thick enough to hide the truth yet thin enough to be see-through, like seeing what’s about to go down without having the power to do anything to stop it. Vocal samples filtered through mazes of synthesizers that try and fail to cover up a loose Mike that constantly switches places even as he stays in his introverted, close-to-his-chest persona. He has all the will in the world to get away from the trauma cycle he’s been a part of, for the sake of his ex-wife and his son, and the music knows that-there’s a quiet pulse to songs like “Death Parade” and “Asa’s Bop” that work very well with the more hushed and steady songs like “Bucciaratti”, minimalist in their soul but always knowing that the depth to fall apart is close to the touch, where Mike stumbles through stretched halls. Even a song like “Sweatpants Spiderman” that tries to create a calmer vibe, as Mike begins new routines can’t help but second guess itself as the notion of mortality and the future giving him enough worries to fall apart.
The pressure is hard to take in for Mike, and the more it weighs on him as the album goes on. He can compare himself to anime characters as much as he wants, but at the end of the day, he’s still himself, and that’s something he can’t seem to bear. He’s ready to throw a tantrum anytime, but knowing that his son is literally right next to him, he’s willing to find other ways to cope with his loneliness and lack of confidence, as everything can’t help but fall apart as he touches it. It’s almost like he’s putting on a show, like trying to balance out pouring out his feelings of alienation and loneliness but also making it something his kid can hear and understand; the language and the references are simpler to follow through than on previous albums, and this might just be his most immediate album to date, given the length and the framing of most of these songs. A man who constantly tries to avoid a midlife crisis until he finds himself in one without even realizing.
The centerpiece of the album, the 3 track run of “The Edge of New Clothes”, “Everything Ends Last Year” and “The Black Mirror Episode”, is one of the most cutting and direct runs of music Open Mike Eagle has ever done. The beats get more hazed out, even more unstable, more isolated and harsher, and Mike’s vocabulary becomes more cutting and dangerous-more references to moving, being tied into whatever’s hanging him together, and the comedy that characterizes him leaves him to find a broken man not afraid to admit he’s eager to let go of his responsibilities, because why wouldn’t he? Most of his accomplishments have been taken away from him-his marriage, his group, his TV show. He carries on because of course he does, that’s just who he is, but it’s an ache to pass by everything he’s done to forget it and move on to the next thing. Sure, everything ends, but why did it have to end at the time it did, the way it did? That’s going to haunt him forever, and he very well knows the Black Mirror episode didn’t “ruin his marriage”, but he’s going to blame it anyway-who broke whose heart is anybody’s guess, all he knows is he’s hurting, so fuck the rest.
The worst part is he still needs to move on. Songs like “Wtf Is Self Care?” and “Airplane Boneyard” bring back the less intense mood of the beginning of the album, but that’s not enough for him. He’s looking for ways to put himself back together, and they sometimes work, he’s not going to dismiss anything out of hand, but he’ll always approach it with a tad of skepticism, of doubt, of not getting why he’s doing it. One thing he does change is his approach to one of his comfort foods, anime. By the start of the album, it’s a way for him to self-deprecate openly and and freely, the Shinji idiot who’ll never get to save the world and only bring the end of times with him. Yet by the end of “I’m a Joestar (Black Power Fantasy)”, he now finds himself to be empowered by it, a way for him to recollect his fantasies and his world in a healthy way. It’s not something that brings him pain anymore, it’s a world that he can reshape to his own will, and he has the imagination and the power to do so. That’s progress right there, and in under 30 minutes too.
The album ends with “Fifteen Twenty Feet Ocean Nah”, a song live from the Joco Cruise featuring his son, the “Infamous Ase”. By all means, the song’s bad and unrehearsed, but it’s charming and as a closer, it’s fitting like few things are. It works as a bit of a metaphor-a snorkeling trip gone wrong, as both father and son become terrified of the ocean. But even then, Open Mike Eagle takes the role of the father willing to be there for his son, no matter how much it frightens him. And Lord knows he’s frightened of spending his life alone, and not doing well by his son, or leading him into cycles of trauma that will hurt him greatly into his life-and neither the album nor the song end up clarifying or erasing those fears. They just leave them be, because they know answers rarely come by over here, because they’re not important-they just have to keep on going. It’s a vague and even bleak and incomplete message, but Mike’s not ready or even interested in anything more than that.
clipping. - Visions of Bodies Being Burned
At their core, clipping. are intensely, immensely, understatedly human. They run on horror tactics that some might deem as cheap (maybe because they’re too skeptical to give in to what’s really going on), but what they do is explore the cost and the root of said fears, what comes out of them, what propels them to the status of the uncanny, what makes us all unite in our quest to either get rid of said fear or spread it to others. Empathy and cruelty are one and the same over here, and that’s what makes their music so human. This album, the siamese twin to their previous offering, There Existed an Addiction to Blood, takes them on a harder journey than ever before, because they’ve purged away their stories of gore, injustice and pain-now what’s left is noise, and the ghosts of those left behind. The best thing to do about that? Make them explode.
This time, the “visions of bodies being burned” are exactly what they say they are: visions. Flashes, thoughts, ideas, problems unsolved, images raw enough that you can’t get them out of your head, but so instantaneous that they end up leaving the premise once they’re done. This may be a 50 minute long album, but it’s a quick affair for the most part, it’s just a more dense listen than most of their previous offerings. The noise is harsher, the lyrics are more direct than ever, the atmosphere looks less towards the crippling life of the streets than ever before to look for something more profound, the terror both within one’s world, and the terror beyond ours. The Candyman becomes more than a jumpscare to frame a picture of social abandonment and the effects of slavery continuing to affect black folks, like a distant ghost on “Say the Name”. Literal ghosts appear to strike revenge on those who took away their lives and their freedom in order for power hierarchies to remain-but they can only remain in our plane of existence, not theirs, on “Pain Everyday”, as the track melts into a breakbeat section that crushes the atmosphere the more it goes on. Even further, every dead being resurfaces as the ground shivers into a tribal arrangement that breaks through the cracks of the track on “Something Underneath”, as Daveed Diggs spins his words round and round-he’s not running alongside the other mortals, he raps as if he’s looking from above, away from what can be saved.
The lyricism here is more carnal than before, to the point where it stops being gore and it almost becomes biological, like humans’ need to understand the workings of the body and the mind. Diggs looks at his characters with a dash of curiosity, of realizing he’s beyond all of this, but could easily become one of his own creations if he’s not too careful. That may be why he lets his characters speak like on “‘96 Neve Campbell”, featuring Cam & China who pull up 2 outstanding guest verses, deviating from Diggs’ omnipresence. That may be why on “Check the Lock”, about a gangster consumed by his own fear of dying and being backstabbed, he kills him off in such an abrupt away-that fear is beginning to reach our main narrator. Not to the point where he becomes unreliable, he’s still very much in control-but he’s nowhere near as cautious as he once used to be. The decay slowly creeps in.
That decay is also present in the colorings of this album, the squeaky hues and hushes that haunt this record from the start until the end. Every morbid picture painted by Daveed is framed excellently by William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes, the kind of sound designers to die for. It’s almost redundant to describe these soundscapes, as they match exactly what Daveed portrays-the earth lifting off the ground on “Something Underneath”, the sheer numbness and coldness of the rumbles of “Eaten Alive” where each step is a misstep and a step further into the broken (take note too of guitarist Jeff Parker and drummer Ted Byrnes’ contributions, as they make the swamp turn into black squiggly lines in a blank sheet of paper), the power electronics of “Make Them Dead” that plush their way into a non-groove (static by way of static, if you will), or the drip that pulses the more it goes by as the camera reaches closer to the 3 police deaths described on the forever tense “Body for the Pile”. The closer “Enlacing” too, a moment that takes us out of the ghost-haunted streets and takes us deep into a fancy party as one individual might take control of the entire festivity, become everything that surrounds him, through a long forgotten ritual from voices we weren’t meant to hear, the indirect words becoming one with the nothingness of what awaits him, as if that party contained the entire universe… until he decides to blow it all to the winds. Let it be gone. The midnight train has left the station.
That resignation to oblivion leaves clipping. in a peculiar position. In many ways, it’s time to move on, yet the stories seem to never end. It leaves them in an odd conundrum; they’ve carved themselves a way out, but we don’t know where that leads, nor do they seem to. Then again, the final piece, a Yoko Ono piece, does give place for a rebirth-maybe something more small scale, more tempting to look at instead of shutting your eyes. Then again, clipping. have never been an apocalyptic group-all they do is shine a light on the horror that is reality, especially for the marginalized black folks who can have their life robbed in a second. With this album, they give them one final opportunity to strike back, and the ghosts decide to make it all vanish. Who are we to deny them that right?