I’ll preface this with a disclaimer: I’m far from an authority on hip-hop. To contextualize—I’m currently sitting at my desk listening to my dad’s copy of U2’s War on vinyl with Kenneth Branagh’s 1996 “Hamlet” adaptation playing in the background. In the reductive language of stereotypes and essentialism, I am currently the whitest man alive.
Whether or not that actually has any real sway on my opinions (my mother still hates it even when me and my brother bump Kanye’s feminist, anti-materialist anthem “All Falls Down” because she’s certain it’s misogynistic “gangsta” propaganda, so who knows), the fact remains that I wasn’t a big hip-hop guy until my little brother started playing Del the Funky Homosapien and MF Doom songs for me maybe three or four years ago. And even then I never really developed the same reverence/worship for the oldies like I’ve been told I should have.
At heart I’ve always been a man who likes thunder behind his music; some clamor, some distortion. That’s not to say that there aren’t bangers in the rap canon (The Beastie Boys’ hardcore roots brought out some of the best hip-hop around in what remains a largely unexplained miracle, and who could forget 2 Chainz’ entire catalog?) but they’ve never really satiated my parched ears. Maybe that’s why I’ve been so into the recent trend toward the merger of hip-hop with noise—a burgeoning scene that’s both baffled and offended in equal measure.
But just because it’s on the rise doesn’t mean it’s by any means new. Wikipedia tells me that industrial hip-hop’s been around since at least the early ’80s when a ton of Einsturzende Neubauten post-disco copycats started throwing some of the old mechanical pummel on their beats and calling it hip-hop. I like tying the scene back to Public Enemy’s manic, snarling musical collage instead, personally.
Skipping ahead decades (and probably other countless other critical bands—I told you I’m not an authority) we come to my entrance point; the continually confounding duo dalek. Not to be confused with Doctor Who’s goofy and adorably hateable baddies, MC dalek and producer Oktopus’ music is equal parts menace and malaise. I got into the project through their 2004 album, Absence, specifically opening song “Distorted Prose.” Dalek raps with a deep throated snarl similar to Cannibal Ox’s El-P and ducks and dives between waves of huge guitar swells and screeching feedback—I was hooked instantly.
It was only a short while after I started listening to dalek that Death Grips started blowing up through their bizarre and terrifying viral videos popping up across the web, and I fell for them just as fast as everyone else. Last year in a review of The Money Store I playfully described lead vocalist MC Ride as a “terrifying urban Rasputin,” and, though I now think Aleister Crowley might have been an even better reference point, the image still works.
Ride is large, frightening, obsessed with the brutal and the occult and self-deifying to boot (“I seize my torch and burn it/I am the beast I worship”). His presence and his monstrous bark are the perfect complement to drummer Zach Hill’s (formerly of basically every band ever) volcanic, apocalyptic production. They were on a major label for a little while, but then they screwed it up by being too punk to conform to Epic Records’ basically singular rule of “don’t leak your own album.” It was fun while it lasted, though.
From Death Grips’s maximalist pummel there was only one real logical progression. When Mclusky and the Jesus Lizard just don’t cut it anymore, what do you do? You start listening to some Whitehouse or some Merzbow. That’s right; you go harsh-noise.
It’s kind of hard to imagine how you’d ever reconcile that with hip-hop, though. After all, harsh noise is just a wall of sound: beatless, melodyless, barely even music in the conventional sense. Clipping found a way, though. Their debut album Midcity (which dropped last month) is a clever and ironic blending of hip-hop’s most oblique tropes (money, bitches, power; all the usuals) with the sonic nihilism of music’s most avant-garde front.
Production is provided by William Hutson of Rale and Jonathan Snipes of the bizarre and sadly defunct techno project Captain Ahab (which should but won’t be remembered for the epic meditation on gender power struggles and omniscience, “I Don’t Have a Dick”) while Daveed Diggs mans the mic, and the three deftly weave around each other in astounding ways. Opener “intro” begins with a burst of static and feedback before
Diggs drops a few bars with flow and wordplay that put MC Ride to shame; “killer” likewise has Diggs rapping over a sickly synth and whispering the infectious hook while occasional bouts of hissing noise make you wonder if your earbuds are exploding; and penultimate track “real” features Diggs commanding “get (insert hip-hop cliche)” over and over again over occasional drum medleys, crackling fills and the infrequent but unnerving scream echoing in the background.
It’s a loud and punishing album and exactly what I’ve always wanted from hip-hop—the perfect merger of the scene’s inherent swag with the couldn’t-give-a-shit experimentalism of the avant-garde scene. It’ll never be profitable and it’ll never hit the radio waves, but Diggs seems aware and content with this. After all, final track “outro” features ever stacking samples of him chanting “get money,” layering ad nauseum for ten minutes till the words don’t mean anything at all anymore.
How do you feel about noise, hip-hop or the combination of the two? Not good? That’s okay! Let Cameron know at cgraff2@wisc.edu.
