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Driving home yesterday I saw a plastic water bottle in the gutter. It was half-full of what looked like piss. Two things struck me. Firstly, it’s not the first time that I’ve seen a bottle of piss on the side of the road. Secondly, there is something inherently depressing about looking at a bottle of piss on the side of the road.

If you asked me who my favourite emcee is I would say Nas. He’s always had it. That combination of street-smarts and a populist sensibility makes him so addictive to listen to. Although Illmatic is not my undisputed favourite hip-hop album it’s easily in my top 3. With hindsight, it is the perfect snapshot of a rapper at the top of his game.

Sadly, a strength of Illmatic is also a weakness of his subsequent career. The millstone of such a classic is audible on every one of his latter albums. He’s still well capable of knocking out a gem or two but a complete album eludes him. His most recent offering suffers from a lack of consistency we’ve all become accustomed to. Part of me wonders if he could just get the all the original peeps back on the boards we might get an album approaching the uninterrupted quality of Illmatic. Perhaps his long-awaited co-lab with Doom will be the panacea.

Nas isn’t alone in his decline. There’s a pantheon of gifted artists who, for various reasons, have lost their way a bit. However, it does seem that hip-hop is acutely afflicted in this respect. So many exceptional emcees have descended into cameos in shit films and advertising fizzy drinks. It seems that artistic integrity is a dirty word in hip-hop. “Thou shalt get paid in full” over-rules all else.

Driving to work today I listened to Nas’ Hip Hop Is Dead. It was half full of what sounded like shit. Two things struck me. Firstly, it’s not the first time that I’ve listened to a Nas album that’s half-full of shit. Secondly, there is something inherently depressing about listening to a Nas album that’s half-full of shit.

Nas - One on One (MP3 from the Streetfighter OST)

Article by MF Hart
Photo by Runs with Scissors

“We should enjoy America as we want to enjoy it” screeched the simian overlord as he stood in the historical shadow of the crumbling twin towers. “Them folks” hate us and everything we stand for. “Go to Disney World” he jabbered.

The administration has offered up myriad PR clangers as fodder for the keener satirist – and satire can come in many forms. El-P’s allusion to this episode in Fantastic Damage’s Dead Disnee certainly wasn’t the lone political point on his first solo long-player. Undeniably a masterpiece of a record, Fantastic Damage helped define El-P as an artist with a clear public persona like none of his previous work. Yet, like the proverbial albatross, it has also left pressure to deliver more quality.

The 20th March approaches – as does the chance for those principled enough not to download a bootleg to finally hear I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead. Mercifully, the big man upped some joints on his MySpace ahead of the release date and all seems pretty promising. The limited output so far suggests a cleaner, more stripped-down sound. The production seems to have a little more clarity – a step back from the “wall of sound” that assaulted you on FanDam and one toward the restraint of his solo instrumental works.

This more austere production seems to avoid his vocals ever being drowned out. Yet if there is any reduction in intensity from the boards, the clarity with which his raps now get over leave the listener assaulted and invigorated in equal measure – just like his previous work. His sound – and doubtless his psyche – has lost none of the urgency, none of the paranoia and (somehow) none of the claustrophobia of his previous output.

This refined approach is aptly echoed in El P’s big literary hero. Philip K. Dick’s best works deal with his recurrent themes through a sharp, attractive narrative. Both VALIS and The Man in the High Castle deal with ideas that the certainties we anchor ourselves to may be false but the latter with an incisiveness that is not consistent throughout his back catalogue. Perhaps we the audience will experience ISWYD as an album that, by virtue of being less sonically crammed, ends up with more lucidity and more power.

Interviews for ISWYD will no doubt allow him to wax lyrically about the higher concepts that underpin this and all his work. His audience demands it and the El-P “brand” requires it. Unashamedly I will join his league of acolytes in hoovering up all this associated flannel, but American culture is doomed to entertain its audience even when saddled with the highest of ideals - and we are all the richer for it. In the torso of ISWYD will be a heart of pure hip-hop. The lyrics will be insightful and incendiary in equal measure, the raps will be fire and the beats will bang. I can’t wait.

Article by MF Hart

Last Monday I joined the shrinking audience of the hand-wringing, the outraged and the desperately-seeking-quality-programming in watching BBC1’s Panorama. In spite of the Corporation’s attempts to obliterate one of a hand-full of shows that justify the legalised extortion of the TV license - 27 minutes of surprisingly decent output still managed to find a voice. Seroxat – Glaxo Smith Kline’s answer to Prozac – was found to have some dramatically detrimental effects on the same young people it was supposed to help.

GSK’s own dangerous in-house clinical trials provided clear evidence that depressed teens faired worse on Seroxat than off it. Suicidal tendencies increased under its influence. The PR and marketing men were called in and quickly sold another slice of their soul in return for bodged articles full of fudged evidence in respected medical journals. Over-extended, over-stressed GPs saw the seals of approval and moved quickly to rid themselves of a growing body of patients fast.

“Come in and sit yourself on the examination table, Katie… and tell me what’s wrong… You’re not sleeping?… What are those cuts on your arms?… You feel like ending it all sometimes?… Take this 3 times a day and come back when you need another prescription”

Yet a similar story had been explained in painful detail by one of our very own. For years, Cage Kennelz told anyone who listened how his bi-polarity was forged in the white heat of the Prozac revolution. Check both “The Death of Chris Palko” and the final, eponymous, album track for nods to his story. He tells of being forcibly restrained for unlawful periods of time whilst drugs were trialled on him. Forgettables and disposables are used much like Nazi Germany used labour camp detainees. Echoes of CIA Project MKULTRA still fresh – I was presented with a question.

Why didn’t Cage’s story get more exposure? His most recent album, Hell’s Winter, is that rarest of things in hip-hop; an album to be listened to as a whole rather than a collection of singles and skits. It’s also rare because it is the work of an emcee dealing with concepts of fallibility and imperfection whilst “in character”. His flow is verbose and detailed enough to not be misunderstood or misinterpreted through ignorance of rap’s lexicon. Granted, his horror-core past could partly overshadow his newer lyrical content, but surely at least one Guardianista may have picked up on this story?

Sadly the chain of events follows a very familiar path:
Ignore rap where possible, distort its message where ignorance becomes unprofitable. Cage and the rest of his new label-mates remain ignored by the mainstream whilst NWA and the Wu remain hardcore or comic-book, the respective pattern adhered to.

Great musicians need a groundswell of popularity to survive - and another well of talent threatens to run as dry as the rest of the musical desert. Shove Hell’s Winter and the story of this exceptional talent’s tortured past down as many throats as you can gain access to.

Article by MF Hart