Weekly Music Writeup #3: Earl Sweatshirt, MIKE, SURF GANG - POMPEII // UTILITY

Welcome back to the Warrens! (Not that anyone was waiting...) Some things have changed since last time: for one, we have a new banner and homepage image, featuring a metal-style logo made by yours truly. Despite how amateurish it is, I have to say I'm sort of proud of it; I might make a future post on metal-style aesthetics and fonts. My pronouns are also sort of in the air right now; I'm going by any/all until further notice, and it may be a while until things change/solidify. Please be patient with me as I navigate what is turning out to be a weird and somewhat disheartening time in my life. Nonetheless, I hope to blog more consistently than I have been (not hard, considering the previous state of the blog), so consider this the first volley! And if I don't make another post for another year, uh, consider it a misfire I guess.

In a recent interview with Pigeons and Planes, Earl Sweatshirt trained his aim on 'real hip-hop' purists. "What is this, like, thing where culture has become solely nostalgic or regurgitative?" he asked. "As if it's not supposed to keep finding itself in different places. Like that 'spirit of hip-hop' or whatever. And we have that!"

I'll admit: I was one of those people who, for many years, lost track of Earl's music. I was a big fan of Earl back in high school: in both Doris and I Don't Like Shit, I Don't Go Outside I found a sound and sensibility—nihilistic but whip-smart, deceptively active, an exhausted predator slink—that, at its best, spoke to me more than pretty much any other hip-hop artist, even my beloved El-P. It certainly helped that Earl was an almost peerless stylist in the classical sense as well, lacing his cynicism with, to use El-P's elegant formulation, "holy-fuck-what-did-he-just-utter?" bars that were like little puzzle boxes to be picked apart and examined and debated over in Rap Genius comment sections. Reviewers compared him to MF Doom and Eminem, which is a much more succinct way of making the above point. He was, in other words, a 'real hip-hop' artist, which is especially notable considering he first gained notoriety as a member of OFWGKTA, among the most iconoclastic rap groups (to say the least) to ever have laid sixteens down over drums.

Given all of the above, I eagerly awaited the release of his 2018 album Some Rap Songs, even ignoring the lead single "nowhere2go", which was the first bit of evidence that we weren't going to be getting a 'traditional' Earl album (whatever that meant). When it came out, I thought it was okay—I could appreciate what Earl was doing, and, if it had come from a different artist, I could even see myself liking it quite a bit. Yet something about the album, with its lo-fi, abstracted beatwork and pithy bars, failed to click with me in the same way that his earlier work did. Whence the bleary-eyed nihilism? Whence the punchlines? I felt like Vince Staples on "Burgundy": "I don't care about what you going through or what you gotta do. I need bars, sixteen of 'em." Speaking of Vince, Earl's tantalizing twenty-second turn on Vince's FM! briefly gave me hope for a return-to-form, but when instead he followed Some Rap Songs up with Feet of Clay, an even gnarlier and gnomic and apocalyptic album laden with Seventh Seal portents, I sort of checked out.

Looking back on my younger and dumber self, I can say that they would have done well to stick around a bit longer—Earl would bring some of the energy back on SICK!, which contains classic Earl bangers like "2010", albeit ones that reflect the growth he had undergone, both as a person and a rapper—but also that they were wrong not to have paid attention. I think my thing back then was that I enjoyed "lyrical" hip-hop, but only when they were talking about typical hip-hop things—flexing, 'sonning' others, the like. The moment things got a little too artsy for me I checked out. Which is weird. I liked artsy, experimental bands like Current 93 and Death Grips, but when an artist brought a similar sensibility to (traditional) hip-hop I recoiled from it. The problem, perhaps, is that I had a caricatured view of the "true hip-hop artist," or what earlier hip-hop heads would have called 'backpackers,' one that maintained that they were all pretentious fart-sniffers smothering their overwrought lyrics in a haze of Hawaiian pot and scorning A$AP Rocky and Schoolboy Q for talking about guns and money. I mean: who could possibly hate A$AP Rocky and Schoolboy Q? Who did these assholes think they were?

You would be right to shout "Who do you think you are??", and don't worry, I'm doing the same. There are a lot of unexamined prejudices here across both gender and race lines (always a risk for non-Black hip-hop fans), and in a moment when I'm revising the very grounds of my gender identity, the idea that my enjoyment of hip-hop came, and to a certain extent still comes, from the fantasy of inflicting emasculation on others is, uh, ripe for examination. Still, I do think that past me identified, albeit accidentally, a real distinction. Despite the overwrought caricature, 'backpack' rap was very much a category with actual practitioners, like, say, Childish Gambino, or (less recently) Jeru the Damaja, who was unforgivingly parodied by the great Abe Beame: "Jeru was emblematic of a genre of hip-hop guy that was prevalent on the east coast in the 90s. This symbolic dude (always a dude) made distinctions between rap and hip-hop, Biggie and Jay-Z were too mainstream due to the materialism in their frivolous bars, he was probably a five percenter, and nothing on this Earth was more important to him than the sanctity of his own very narrow definition of hip-hop. This imagined guy's favorite rapper was Jeru the Damaja."

Importantly, this was a category that a good portion of the underground did not belong to. MF Doom was as comfortable with Ghostface Killah as he was with Madlib, and Company Flow's (and later El-P's) music was indebted to pulpy sci-fi and comic books as much as William Burroughs and was studded with vulgar flexes. ("I'll ignore you selling crack, killing people, and keeping it real/But disrespect me and my adopted fam and die young like veal.") All proof, if proof was needed, that you could keep hold of what was fun in hip-hop without succumbing either to frivolity or consumption on one hand and pretentiousness on the other; to use the language of architecture, this style worked via an operation of "double coding," making art that provided both intellectual and visceral pleasures. El-P and Killer Mike would later go on to take this double-coded style and make it big and accessible enough to soundtrack Marvel movies (something we greet with mixed feelings, for sure, but it proved that the style had legs outside of the narrow purview of indie rap).

Unbeknownst to me, a loose conglomeration of rappers were creating just this type of hip-hop beneath the mainstream. Earl, Boldy James, MIKE, ELUCID, Billy Woods, bbymutha, Medhane: all artists who could rattle trunks as well as they could deliver introspective, thoughtful bars. Some of these artists have been around for a long time, even longer than Earl (Woods and Boldy come to mind), but I wasn't tapped into the right channels to hear them, and many of these artists would find their greatest success starting in the late 2010s, during the first (cries) Donald Trump administration. It was Armand Hammer—the rap group consisting of ELUCID and Woods—who really brought me back into the fold: they could expound on history and theory and put belt to ass, often at the same time: "Your crew fragile as the Caucasus, as the Balkans is/It's one n**** who nice, the rest sausages." ("Chicharrones") But it's Earl and MIKE who, with their collaboration with SURF GANG POMPEII // UTILITY, delivers the coup de grace.

What is there to say about this album? Earl and MIKE are both in top form here, but they're also loose, obviously having fun with things, taking joy in their language and delivery (which on both sides of the album varies quite a bit from song to song) even at their darkest. At times it almost feels like a challenge they've issued to themselves: how nimble can we continue to be while utilizing the same (or very similar) flow over much of the album's runtime? Very, as it turns out! MIKE: "I'mma free my brothers from them shackles, the Django/Any system out here get dismantled, the bankroll." Earl: "That shit made us giggle, I'll give you that/I usually pay to watch n***** act." These are classic bars, snappy and literate, but smeared like jam over flows that wouldn't sound out of place on a SoundCloud release, and over beats whose mix of dreamy synthesized soundscapes and concussive drumwork, courtesy of SURF GANG (whose other stuff I definitely have to check out) marks this as being a distinctly contemporary affar, hooked up into the same vast electrical system as rappers like LAZER DIM 700 or even Playboi Carti—rappers, in other words, who are often used as examples of the declining state of hip-hop by disgruntled elder statesmen. This album is an unbelievable joy to listen to, and honestly feels half as long as its hour-long runtime: that's more than enough on its own, and in a year with releases from folks like Miserere Luminis and Nondi_ and Xylitol and Namitape, this is more than enough to make it my album of the year (so far). But for me at least it's also remarkable as an album-length rebuke to those very people who see trap and rage as hip-hop's antichrists, who cringe when they hear a Pi'erre Bourne producer tag, who ensconce themselves in an inpenetrable wall of Wu-Tang records and incense. Look at Earl in the video for El Cousteau's "Words2LiveBy"—y'know, the song where he drops the immortal lines "Free Gaza/We in the corner like Israelites." Does this look like a man who's worried about the state of the genre? Who obsesses over some imagined "spirit of hip hop?" Calm the fuck down, dude. Have a beer. Dance a little bit; throw some ass; pour some glitter on yourself.¹ You can have your cake and eat it, too.

Other recs:

• Honorable mention for AOTY is this album by Miserere Luminis, the most beautiful metal album I've heard since Sunken's Lykke.
• Komische-inspired bangers, like Cluster by way of Kemet Crew.
• People who follow the vocaloid tag on Bandcamp stay winning
• Sweet, hazy, pretty footwork from a prolific netlabel producer.
• My AOTY from last year, which, between this and Umamusume, was the real year of the horse.

Next time on Warrens of Honk: Adventures in Gender!! (Maybe? Possibly? I don't know I'm just writing this so that I have something to hold me accountable. Not that that's ever stopped me in the past.)

^{1. Metaphorically speaking. I actually have a weird irrational fear of glitter in real life: just the sight of it is enough to make me squirm in my seat, and seeing it tossed around actually gets me to cry out. Don't ask me why; that's a question for a psychoanalyst.↩}