Looking Back on 2019 (Part 3)

Street art seen in Mexico City, June 2019.

A little delayed in sharing this final look back at some of the things I liked about 2019, but that gave me time to properly soak in the music that dropped later in the year. As always with this blog, my favorite new albums came out of the realm of hip hop in its purest and grimiest form.

We are now nearly a quarter century past the golden era of hip hop and the art form remains alive with a slew of newer artists arising to bring fresh blood and new approaches to a musical tradition whose forefathers they seem to not only respect but spiritually summon and pay homage to. Some established rap gods have also helped bring along the new artists. These phenomena were reflected in some of the albums and artists I dug in 2019. Here are, in no particular order, my favorite albums from last year with a few words about each.

Street Lamps: Hip Hop in the Dark Ages

Mural by Retna.

The Trumpacolyptic Revelations of Amerikkka

Since the Trumpocalypse began, most of the world has been mired in despair, confusion, and uncertainty. The highest office in the land, the most powerful position atop the most powerful country in the world, has been handed over to a capricious billionaire whose most ardent supporters include the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis. To make matters worse, he quickly loaded up his cabinet with all manner of ghoulish racists, white nationalists, and billionaire bankers. The last few months have felt like the scene in Ghostbusters where the prick from the city inspector's office pries open the containment unit opening the floodgates for an overwhelming stream of ghosts and demons. Somehow this is reality.

During this period of darkness, I've found there are very few indulgences that make sense within this context, few things that really feel right. Thomas Pynchon makes sense. So I read Vineland, the paranoid novel inspired by the fearful proto-fascism of Nixon and Reagan. Philip K. Dick makes sense. So I've checked out the new series The Man In the High Castle based on his novel, a bizarre scenario envisioning America if the Nazis and Japan had won World War II.

And, above all: Hip Hop makes sense. Hip Hop feels right during these times.

Not unlike the oddly reassuring Dave Chapelle appearance on SNL immediately after the election, where the message was basically that this latest travesty of hatred and racism is nothing new, I've found myself retreating into Hip Hop (real Hip Hop, not the fake shit) where the message has always been that the system is corrupt, racist, deceitful, and predatory. From the early days of Public Enemy, KRS-One, and Ice Cube on through Wu-Tang, Immortal Technique, Dead Prez, and Mos Def, the message has remained the same. Things didn't change with Obama in office. The drug war persists, the prison industrial complex grows, police brutality worsens, poverty lingers, and black disenfranchisement continues.

Back in 2011, as demonstrations were erupting around the world leading to what became the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street, I wrote a review of the debut album from the late Kevlaar 7, Who Got the Camera?, a scathing sociopolitical wake-up call. I opened by quoting Ezra Pound who said "The artist is the antenna of the race, the barometer and voltmeter" and Marshall McLuhan who saw art "at its most significant, as a DEW line, a Distant Early Warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.” In Trumpocalyptic America, many are wondering who could've seen this coming, how could we have let this happen, how can America (or Amerikkka) really be this racist. Well, the answer is that true artists, in America's case, Hip Hop artists who have their antennas up, have been warning us of this for many years.

Album Reviews: Life Outside the Frame & The Living Daylights

When it comes to art, no matter the medium, what I tend to find most intriguing is the artist's style, their unique fingerprint. Creativity consists of focusing the luminescent energies of imagination through one's personal prism, bending that light into original forms and angles according to the curves of one's distinctive artistic style. In this way, the best artists tend to strike us with a distinguishable spectral pattern, within the defined framework of their medium of course.

Two recent hip hop albums have been in heavy rotation for me during the first half of the year, both featuring lyricists with strikingly unique styles. Ironically, the two artists are also nearly opposite from each other in their approaches. While the albums share some basic similarities---both being of the underground hardcore rap variety and both collaborative works between one emcee and one producer---one lyricist twirls out heavily-worded abstract bars with rapidity while the other utilizes conciseness, internal rhymes, pauses, and other crafty techniques. One album is loaded with no fewer than 17 multiple-verse tracks; the other is practically EP-length, a quick 35 minutes. Both are compelling in their own way.

Paranom & Purpose - Life Outside the Frame
On his debut album, Paranom shines with a sharp voice and mesmerizing flow. His verses are constant streams of elaborate wordplay and surrealist imagery strung together over the polished, crisp yet somehow rugged production of Purpose. This collaborative project is the latest release from the Massachusetts-based Tragic Allies crew (who I've written about before). These guys are purists, dedicated to the golden era format of hip hop as artwork and they've mastered the craft.

The fluid, precise delivery of dexterous rhymes is a noted specialty of the Tragic Allies contingent (such skills are all over last year's Golden Era Musical Sciences album) and newest member Paranom certainly excels at this, but what's most impressive is the vocabulary and surreal imagery in his unique lyrical arsenal. His raps reward repeated listens; honing in on the swiftly delivered lyrics reveals a rich array of obscure terms like "tetramorph" and "vesica piscis" weaved effortlessly in his writing. The verbal imagery is taken to truly hallucinatory heights in the somnolent track-length trips of "Bee Stings (Seraphémme)" which opens with envisioning "Rose petals pouring liquid steel" and my favorite track "Dreamz" where the second verse begins:

"Gettin' faded to explore the universe inside me
dreams confronted with the world crumblin' behind me
underwater with the sharks gnawin' on them bodies
with they teeth fall in speech codes and Hammurabi"

The lyricism alone stands out on Life Outside the Frame but what makes this album so replayable is the full-length production from Purpose. His moody tones and heavy bassliness, occasionally enhanced with DJ scratches, create a cohesive sonic experience. The ostensible leader of the Tragic Allies crew, Purpose is proficient at making others sound good with his lively boom-bap loops. The poet Paranom's endless repertoire of original linguistics thus finds a perfect instrumental canvas to stretch out on and the combo yields potential classics like the mellifluous "Microphone Phenomenal" and the genuinely reflective "Dayz Go By".


Paranom stands out as an artist of limitless potential and talent, if perhaps only underground appeal because of the abstract language of his lyrics. Even if you didn't understand a single word of his verses though, his voice, flow and delivery simply sounds good over beats. Comprehending his words reveals an introspective, poetic intellectual artist who has created an album full of tough, rugged, raw hip hop while hardly uttering a curseword in his verses.

This is the best drop from the Tragic Allies camp thus far, already a personal classic, and Paranom already has a lot to live up to after such an impressive introduction.


Willie the Kid & Bronze Nazareth - The Living Daylights

While I had been aware of Willie the Kid for many years based on his name often popping up alongside his Wu-Tang-affiliated brother La the Darkman, I honestly was never compelled to seek out his work simply because of his generic name. Rappers with the appellation "The Kid" or "Young" or "Lil" are a dime a dozen and often the same can be said about their lyrics. A full collaboration with his fellow Grand Rapids, MI native and certified human factory of dope music, Bronze Nazareth, finally brought his work to my full attention. It became immediately apparent that Willie the Kid is a refreshingly unique and highly entertaining artist.  There's a brief line on "The Blitz" that sums up this effect perfectly:

"My abnormal rapport, my normal nomenclature

rare form for the art form"

A noted minimalist with a catalog full of acclaimed EPs and yet no full albums to date, Willie keeps his portions short, rich, and elegant much like an expensive meal. Appearing on 11 of the 13 tracks on The Living Daylights, he is often limited to one verse and his rhymes even feature lots of short bars.

Conciseness is part of the grand design though, as Willie's writing craft is a sophisticated and intricate one. His clearly enunciated verses are full of finesse and flourish. A true connoisseur of words, he calls himself "a thinking man's rapper" and indeed the thinking man will be satiated not only by Willie's wordsmithery but also by the various subtle techniques he frequently employs in his rhyme structures like internal rhymes, pauses, and enjambments. The last part of his verse on "Avalon" is a good example of some of these tactics:

"I'm brave enough to be creative
but I acclimate like a native
trying to blend in with the cadence,
abide by the rules, fuck the latest
trend, I just came for the accolades
Spend
more time on important shit
self-improvement
it's money, assorted shit"

With his "normal nomenclature" comes the expectation that, like most generically-named rappers, he mostly raps (or brags) about wealth and material things. Indeed, Willie obviously has a taste for the finer things but with his respectable artistic pedigree he's kind of a paradox. He raps plenty about opulence, but he tends to keep it creative and original. An amusing example of this: his verses are littered with food. The listener mentally savors all kinds of exquisite cuisines, not to mention there are tracks called "Bless My Food" and "Breakfast in France". Reeling off the names of exotic locales is another favorite device: "The fly, I'm in Dubai hittin' sand dunes/ or in Japan on the bullet train, Cancun."

So impressed by Willie's output, I've yet to touch on Bronze's production (or the album's many guest appearances). Having now produced over a half-dozen front-to-back albums, the beat maestro Bronze Nazareth has gotten to be an expert at making a fully cohesive record and The Living Daylights is just the latest example. A true collaboration which bears the mark of Bronze all over it, there's a nice subtle Wu-Tang feel to the project. It even has a few well-placed kung-fu clips. The tracklist is punctuated by two earth-rattling bangers in "Fucking Blades" and the album's standout "Delirium" which, along with La the Darkman's vicious solo track "Ice Cold Guinness", will make any Wu head nod ecstatically. Beyond those formidable barrages, I've been enamored with the twisted up soul loops on "Coming From" and "Bless My Food".

For such a brief album it has plenty of guest appearances. These range from superb (Roc Marciano on "Avalon"; Sha Stimuli on "Delirium") to forgettable (Sun God on "Wu Babies"; Tekh Togo on "Bless My Food") and the latter is really the only unappealing factor about this project. Listening to the album over and over again, you're left with a hunger for more from Willie the Kid. And the sole rhyming appearance from Bronze on "Coming From" highlights a notably effective and potent contrast between the two lyricists that was evident on past Bronze/Willie collabs "Malcolm X Manuscripts" and "Farewell". Would've been nice to hear Bronze on the mic a little more in lieu of the uninitiated features. As it is though, the burgeoning star Willie the Kid can claim yet another entertaining and rich-in-replay-value record to his name.

Five New Hip Hop Albums Reviewed

Reviewing a handful of records from the first five months of 2013 that have occupied my ears...

The Psychic World of Walter Reed - Killah Priest

A 41-track encyclopedic masterwork from arguably the most gifted lyricist under the Wu-Tang umbrella, PWOWR is Priest's tenth album, a double-CD overflowing with a bewildering variety of mystical/cosmic/occult/street poetics. We get the full range of Priest's writing abilities in this massive collection: intricately weaved story tracks, intensely destructive battle raps, acapella spoken-word poetry psychic trips, certified Wu bangers, cinematic tours through dark electro-dystopian futures and uplifting journeys through the interstellar psycho-spiritual domain of the Wu tribe's articulate shaman.

Wu-Tang Bats All in the Sky

As embarrassing as the pop and glitter music that parades itself as hip hop may be to the true fan of Rhythm And Poetry, and as ubiquitous as that hollow and monotonous commercial sound may be on the corporate airwaves, the essence of real hip hop music remains powerful if not exactly popular. This is especially evident for loyal fans of the Wu-Tang Clan and their endless throng of talented affiliates.

Almost 20 years after their debut upon the music scene, Wu generals like Raekwon and Ghostface Killah are still highly sought-after by both fans and fellow musicians, while The Rza has soared straight past the heights of musical production and film soundtracks into the director's chair for his film debut, The Man with the Iron Fists, starring Russell Crowe and set to be released later this year.

The Wu camp continues to release a steady stream of quality music, staying true to their formula (the original hip hop formula) of sharp lyrics, skillful flows, and sample-based loops with crackling drum breaks while giving birth to another generation of diehard fans (40-year-olds and teenagers alike can be found making the eagle-wings at concerts). This summer was particularly profuse as not only the Wu and their affiliates but even outside artists have delivered offerings in homage to the name of the mighty Shaolin supergroup. Here, I will briefly go over all that we've heard this summer.


Bronze Nazareth - School for the Blindman

First off, and most importantly, the ostensible 21st Century messiah of Wu-Tang, Bronze Nazareth, has finally released his sophomore album, the follow-up to his 2006 debut (one of my favorite albums of all-time) The Great Migration. The Detroit-based emcee/producer is considered the heir to the throne but unlike many of the Wu-Tang affiliates and Killa Bees, he did not simply inherit this title, he earned it. He's not a relative, old buddy/schoolmate, or record label-appointed collaborator, instead he's something of a savant who so impressed European Wu-Tang affiliate Cilvaringz (himself, an important part of Wu-Tang's new breed) back in 2002 that he was given an opportunity to show his work to The Rza who immediately signed him and housed him up in New York for two months to work on The Abbott's new album.

When that record, The Birth of a Prince, came out in 2003 there were two beats in particular that shot steam out of my ears and led me to declare that Rza had regained his magical touch production-wise. It wasn't until two years later that I actually thought to look at the album credits and realized it wasn't Rza who had made those beats, it was the debut of someone named Bronze Nazareth.

We eventually got to hear Bronze speak his piece lyrically and it was immediately evident that Wu-Tang had once again uncovered a gem: a gifted poet as well as sublime beat-crafter. His debut album made hip hop heads explode (one particular Amazon user review has always stuck with me) and he subsequently unveiled his own group, The 7 Wisemen, who released two highly-acclaimed albums while Bronze received an increasingly steady stream of production work for Wu affiliates hungry for the vintage chops (more on those in a minute).

The new record, School for the Blindman, was released yesterday amid high anticipation and, speaking for myself at least, it has definitely met the absurdly high expectations I had. The lyrics are mostly pretty heavy though delivered in short aphoristic lines (he indicated in a recent interview that he's prone to work on a verse for days/weeks to make each line strike the right note), his flow has added some new complexities, and the beats are out of this fucking world. Here's one of the album's bonus tracks featuring The Rza:


"Squeeze the page, please / my blood, sweat and tears
drip off my inscription / no minor incisions 
unless you fail to listen"

Go get it!

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Timbo King - From Babylon to Timbuk2

When the Swarm was upon us in the mid-1990s, Timbo King was leading the pack. He was one of the few artists outside of the 9-member Wu-Tang Clan circle who, right from the beginning, proved he could match up with anyone when it came to clutching mics. The notoriously poor business management of the Wu enterprise left him waiting to receive his time in the spotlight though and his blacktop-hardened street personality didn't soften up to the corporate record execs who preferred to call the shots and this mega-skilled emcee found himself black-listed in the industry.

He continued to stay relevant in the ears of listeners by featuring on albums with Rza, Gza, Killah Priest, and being a part of the supergroup Black Market Militia, but it wasn't until this summer, nearly 20 years after he began his career, that he finally released his debut solo album. He put his best work into it and brought plenty of great production to the table, mostly from Bronze Nazareth. I've got a big review of the record covering every track all written up, just need to make some edits and I will post it here soon. It's definitely one of the best albums of the year.

Here's one of my favorite tracks from the record, a clever takedown of all the industry executives who've been ruining the rap industry for the last decade or so.


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Wu-Tang Clan - Legendary Weapons

Earlier this summer the group released this short compilation album, a sequel to 2009's Chamber Music, with live production from The Revelations and features from rap legends like Sean Price and AZ plus some of the Killa Bee affiliates. The production, despite being handled by a live band, was a bit lacking for me and certainly a step below the similar 2009 showcase. As this might be called The Summer of Bronze, the Nazareth man got to step on to a track next to legends Rza, U-God and Cappadonna to outshine all of them ("tempted by Satan, put a bullet in his diaphragm / Walk around, black clouds and quiet violins").

The most important part of this latest effort, though, was the return of fan-favorite Killa Sin. Sin, like Timbo King, had been impressing everybody for years but never got a chance to shine on his own. These last 5 years or so (maybe longer, I'm not sure) he's been in and out of prison and hasn't put out much music at all. This record hails his return as he and his water fountain flow were featured on two tracks, including a solo track.

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Wu-Tang & Jimi Hendrix - Black Gold

Last year a musician named Tom Caruana released a free mash-up album combining the Beatles and Wu-Tang that was absolutely superb. He deftly weaved together Beatles interviews, quotes, instrumentals, songs, and all kinds of Wu chops for a magic musical tour (the mash-up was entitled Enter the Magical Mystery Chambers). It was so good that Rza actually mentioned it in a verse on the aforementioned Legendary Weapons album.

Caruana just recently released another homage to the Wu that's getting plenty of attention, it's a mix of the bass-heavy flavors of Jimi Hendrix with verses from the Wu and friends (Killarmy gets a song on here as well as other lesser known affiliates). I don't like it quite as much as the Beatles mix but it's no slouch either, I highly recommend it.

Another similar project that caught my attention is Shaolin Jazz - The 37th Chamber, a smooth combo of jazz (both old and new) and classic Wu-Tang material. All three of these mash-up homages (the Beatles, Hendrix, and jazz mixes) are totally free and available for download.

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Tragic Allies - Tree of Knowledge of Good & Evil

Tragic Allies is a trio from Massachusetts that has been putting out great new music steadily for a few years now through mixtapes and free internet tracks but they've yet to release an album. As seems to be a common thread with some of the artists I've mentioned, they announced their record a while ago and it suffered a bunch of pushbacks and delays.

Well, finally, the Tragic Allies debut album is coming. It's due September 27th and features Planet Asia, Canibus, Killah Priest, and (yup) Bronze Nazareth. The reason I mention them here next to all the Wu-Tang stuff is that, while they aren't affiliates or associated with Wu-Tang at all, their new record not only features some Wu legends but they bring that similar style of classic 90s-era hip hop. I've felt for a while now that Tragic Allies are making some of the best rap music in the world, period.

Of all the great music I've mentioned, this track stands next to all of it:


Here is the first single off the new album, "God-gifted" featuring Planet Asia.


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Madlib Medicine Show No. 12: Raw Medicine

Lastly, since I've written so much about Madlib and his Medicine Show series, I should mention that Stones Throw just released Part 12 of the series, a 37-track remix album that features a whole crowd of various emcees including Wu-Tang's Inspectah Deck, Ghostface, Raekwon, Cappadonna and a bunch more. I've only just received it so I can tell you that the artwork is as awesome as usual and the sounds are vintage Madlib, that is, dusty old raw hip hop sounds.

Our Greatest Contemporary Poets: Shedding Light on the Underground and Underrated in Hip Hop, Part Two

(Be sure to check out Part One)

I've already mentioned the two newest albums to sprout from the branches of the nutrient-rich Wu-Tang family tree, Children of a Lesser God and Heaven Razah, but there's been plenty more pieces of music leaking up from the underground. Here, we'll go a little bit deeper into the subterranean tunnels of independent, unpromoted, relatively unheard ingenious hip hop music.

These are folks who practice hip hop as an art form in a society that has moved increasingly far away from appreciation for aesthetics towards materialistic commercialism. As such, they are like many other starving artists: extremely talented, diligent in their craft, but not economically wealthy. And not getting nearly enough exposure since the masses aren't led towards true art anymore (except for in the field of cinema).

Aside from the thinkers and writers I enjoy and study the most like James Joyce, Joseph Campbell, Carl Jung, Friedrich Nietzsche who are all long-since dead, these are my favorite writers, poets, musicians that are living. Since it seems to me they don't get nearly the attention or appreciation they deserve, perhaps they are for posterity to realize and appreciate just like we've seen happen for folks like Nietzsche and Joyce.

These are a few of my favorite artists who might be ahead of their time, or perhaps stuck in an unfortunately brainwashed time.

*    *    *

Lord Beatjitzu is one of many names used by a highly talented musician who makes beats primarily on a Roland sampler, one of those technological supertoys that helped hip hop music explode. It's a little console, really not much bigger than an iPad or small laptop and it stores sounds on each of its 12 button pads that can then be played live and turned into a melody over drums. Sounds can also be distorted and tweaked in all sorts of ways and so Roland samplers are often favorites of DJs. Much of Madlib's best work has been on Roland sampling machines and The Rza, along with his students known as the Wu-Elements (Mathematics, 4th Disciple, True Master), relied primarily on a more advanced sampler called the ASR-10 made by Ensoniq.

Beatjitzu has made a name for himself releasing free beat tapes featuring mind-bogglingly polished and melodic beats with a heavy Wu-Tang influence. These tapes usually feature deep or hilarious track names and tons of kung fu film quotes, sounds, themes, and samples weaved in and out and sometimes heavily distorted DJ-style to create a full experience of sound (an example is the moving of sounds from one ear to the next to create depth). He has been known to make such tapes during a span of a single night.

Here's an example of his early work (from about three years ago) that first turned me on to his music:


After not coming out with anything new for a few months, he recently put out two brand new tapes of 9 tracks each and it may be his best work yet.

His sound consists of extremely heavy hard drums played at neck-snapping, head-cracking tempos and mixed with unbelievably mellifluous smooth-sounding sample music.

Here's a taste of the new stuff, this beat is called "Shaolin Dragon," beware of heavy sound effects:


And here's another one of my favorites, this one named "Smoke Bomb Specialist." Notice the diametrically opposed tempos of the drums and the sample music and yet he's brought them together into a perfect harmonious piece of musical art:


One of these days, soon, I will present a post exploring the works of this young master more closely but for now I will share with you his two newest tapes which are completely free. You can download them here and here. Consider it a double-feature of classic kung fu flicks. Only it's music.

I will continue to heavily endorse this gifted producer and his unheralded art work until he is properly recognized as one of the best recent artists to spring from the Wu-Tang influence (even though his is an indirect and unofficial influence) because he has been carrying this style on into the future as well as anybody else currently making music. Better than most, in fact.

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Another highly talented music maker has released a new mixtape of great material for free.

I first heard of Purpose and his group Tragic Allies a few years ago when I came across some astounding sounds off of the "Soul Purpose Mixtape" (hosted by Wu-Tang legend Killah Priest) which I subsequently acquired and listened to repeatedly for months. If you enjoy rap music, I urge you to seek that mixtape and absorb it.

Here's one of that tape's best songs, probably one of the best rap songs of the last five years and probably only a couple thousand people (max) have even heard it:
Well the same guy, Purpose, released another new mixtape entitled "Better Than Your Album," a title which seems excessively smug until you realize that it really is probably better than 95% of the cds in the "Hip Hop/Rap" section of your nearest Best Buy. You can download the album here and I'll share with you a few of its best tracks:

"City of Sin"


"Hypnotize"

(if your brain cells don't tingle on this one then you shouldn't be wasting your time on this post)

And here's a personal classic; for me, this is a modern embodiment of the tragic emotion as Stephen Dedalus discusses in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. By Tragic Allies (Estee Nack and Purpose) it's called "Visual":

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A Man Called Relik is a young spoken-word poet/hip hop emcee I've recently discovered and been amazed by. I had first heard him on a mixtape compilation for a group out of Indiana called Ironworkers Guild. This was one of A Man Called Relik's solo tracks that appeared on that mixtape:



"The Darkest Hour" produced by Kevlaar 7

This guy is overflowing with talent. I'm drawing attention to these artists because I believe they, despite their lack of any sort of mass attention, are among the great artists of our time. They practice a craft (pure hip hop) that is condemned and suppressed, not only by mainstream society but even by the music industry, and especially the hip hop music industry. The executives and suits in charge of big record labels don't want to give people intelligent material, especially not through the cries of oppressed poor people, however poetically eloquent and musically gifted they may be.

We are in age in which the disparity between the rich and the poor is greater than it's ever been in recorded history. And so it follows that the ones on the bottom, especially the artists of that segment of society, will be the ones speaking most passionately as a cry for change and with a condemnation of this decrepit era. Our society and our nation has evolved towards an unrelenting reach for material wealth, an attitude which even seeped into our arts (example: The Decline of Rap Music), and now the edifice of Material Greed (aka Capitalism) is collapsing, we're in recession, and the ones at the bottom are the first to be struck by the crumples of "shattered glass and toppling masonry." And this is the kind of art they're creating:



That track is called "Fire (Reprise)" and is produced by the resident gifted beatsmith of the Ironworkers Guild, Woodenchainz.

Here's another track from this camp, very creative writing here, each verse is written in sequences using the letters B & C. The track is called "BC 2 Me" and, since they've just released a video I'll share that with you. Observe closely the 2nd verse, that's A Man Called Relik. Apprehend the absurd combination of intellect and emotion:
A Man Called Relik recently released a full album of spoken-word poetry rap over some very good beats and, if you like what you've heard from him here I highly recommend it; Stone Messiah, who produced the track in the video above, recently released an album; and Woodenchainz has just released his first real album, an EP entitled "A Beautiful View" which has some very good stuff on it. You can listen to a sampler of free tracks featuring all of these guys here on YouTube.