We are Freak (Rap)

He rhymes as weird as I feel
- Mos Def, on MF DOOM

The abstraction of hiphop – sonically & visually – is a progression other commentators have discussed in relation to instrumental/beats artists like Flying Lotus and the unparalleled Dilla.  But what of the lyrical persona in the abstract world?  Which is to say, in this constantly expanding kaleidoscope universe, what happens to the MC?

Hints to an answer can be found in Mos Def’s awed (stoned?) appraisal of MF DOOM. In [this video], Mos big-ups the “abstract … that kind of wild energy” in Doom’s lyricism: “that kind of raw shit.”  Like Mos, I admire the psychedelic-painterly abandon  with which DOOM approaches his craft (“Please read the signs: no feedin the baboons / Seein as how they got ya back bleeding from the stab wounds…”), though I am also partial to the mouthfeel of his near-gibberish wordplay (“Good googly moogly, see that loogie? / Yeah, but keep it on the D.L. Hughley…”). These flashes of violence and garble interspersed into rhyme make me double-take the way I do when I’m conversing with a stranger on the street and only five minutes in realize she’s schizophrenic. Lately, I’ve been double-taking a lot, as hiphop continues what appears to be an accelerating embrace of the freakish.

This is panic attack rap/ eating four flap jacks
let my rhymes free/ they always come back to me
- Das Racist, “Rainbow in the Dark“

The frenetic, free association rhymes of Das Racist are another example of this move towards the oblique.  But if DOOM is the surrealist garde of rap’s turn towards the freakish, Das Racist is the Dada offshoot, their songs a pastiche of pop culture references blended together to the point of vertigo.  With verses like:

Punch clowns if they touch down/ While I’m eating lunch now
While I’m eating a burger/ Metaphysical lyrical murder
The ill ’96 manifestable third eye
Abstract backpack/ vegan skateboards / etcetera
Rap hella much in busted ass Jettas with Coretta Scott King
Rap bridge on a duet with T-Pain & Stephen Hawking…

Their mixtape Shut Up, Dude evokes the feeling of being both drug-addled and electro-sensory-overloaded, equal parts tweaked-out and burned-out (“Das Racist is the new Kool G Rap, we’d like to thank gchat, we’d like to thank weed rap”).

Kool Keith‘s been repping the Freak for years through the vehicle of horrorcore.  Take, for example, the Dr. Octagon song “halfsharkhalfalligatorhalfman” in which he riffs:

Walking down Hollywood Boulevard/ With a credit card
Three alligators behind me/ Feel my skin is hard
Transvestites/ And people watch space parasites
I left his head in the store/ legs in the street
Body in Wilcox/ with blood dripping off my feet…

I first turned rainbow/ Close my eyes watch my brain glow
People got scared/ And ran away they think I’m weird
I was born this way/ halfsharkalligator
“Is he weird?”

Keith hasn’t stopped his descent into the freakish. His 2009 album Tashan Dorsett continues his playful Mad Scientist experimentation with the intersection between thug and occult (throwing in a bit of sci-fi for good measure).  The song “Black Lagoon,” which he skillfully delivers in the cadence of Count Dracula mixed with E-40, features the following refrain: “Allergies and salaries/ I don’t need an ambulance to take me to the hospital.”  Like Mos Def said: “WHAT?!”

What does this turn towards the freakish in hiphop recall? The eerily meandering lyricism of Bob Dylan’s “Ballad of a Thin Man,” comes to mind.  Mos Def compares DOOM’s style to “Bitches Brew” by Miles Davis, an artist that also dabbled in costumes while he refined his artistic project (see left).  Other early points on the lineage: how ODB eschewed lyrical narrative and rapper bravado for the Freak, how Missy Elliot and Flava Flav broke the equivalent to the sound barrier for Freak haberdashery.

There are shades of the freakish in sizzurp, in chopping and skrewing, in the dirty south hick, in international versions of such cultural peripheries.  DJ Solarize,  a South African DJ and artist with progeria, describes hip hop as his “journey” and was featured in a recent music video by Die Antwoord, a South African outfit that makes quasicomic music claiming the voice of Zef (check the comments on that link) – as well as, apparently, individuals with degenerative disorders, the inbred, & amputees:

Freakish strands also run through krumping, clowning, and the “dumb/stupid/ride the yellow bus” elements of hyphee.  Although Mac Dre generally meditates on the harder, grittier themes of thugging, the “Thizzle Dance”, at the very least, is a Freak rap song, his “mask” the Thizz Face.  I’m counting the minutes until gurning turns up in a music video (if it hasn’t already).

That’s why I make the goofiest faces, I don’t want people to think I’m up there trying to be cute . . . I think when personality is at the forefront, it’s not about male
or female, it’s just about, who is this weird character?

- Nicki Minaj, in Fader

Newcomer Nicki Minaj with her experimental melange of styles has not definitively settled on Freak rap as her preferred mode (late 90s queen bee mc, lil wayne lyrical protege and lady gagaesque diva are active contenders for her primary m.o.) – but her act nonetheless displays a tendency towards the Freak. Consider the video for “Massive Attack.”  Between showcasing a truly awe-inspiring (rumored to-be-prosthetic) rump and a hot pink GT, Minaj bulges her eyes, bares her teeth, jerks her limbs about, introduces a pair of unsettling contortionist dancers. Minaj punctuates her raps with growls and squeals. Her mixtape Barbie World is 50%  urban teenybopper ballad, 50% dirty south Werewolf from Jamaica, Queens specializing in fem-affirmative bling-rap hits.

The performance art aspect of rap music alter egos has always been around and still happily populates the mainstream, from T.I/Tip to Eminem/Marshall Mathers/Slim Shady. But the abstraction of the MC goes further than mere roleplaying or pseudonymous artmaking – it entails the actual refraction of the self. To illustrate: please note that many of the artists discussed above are later-incarnation artists.  Before Daniel Demile became DOOM, he was also Zevlove X and he is, of course, also Viktor Vaughn.  Before Watkin Tudor Jones became Die Antewoord’s Ninja, he was Max Normal, then Waddy Jones, and Yolandi Vi$$er was Anica the Snuffling.  Keith Thornton has been (sharp inhale) Kool Keith, Keith Korg, Mr. Nogatco, Black Elvis, Dr. Octagon, and Dr. Dooom.  (Note also that “Ballad of a Thin Man” came after Bob Dylan released several albums and had been attacked for moving between folk and electric modalities; I’m sure I need not enumerate Miles Davis’s pre-Bitches Brew incarnations).

Mos Def describes buying the Madvillain album on vinyl just to stare at the masked face on the album cover, whispering in a reverent hush: “I… under…stand… you…” Though impossible to divine the precise image dude saw reflected in the silver of that mask (or perhaps in the eyes behind it), dollars to Donuts it’s got something to do with the same force that’s continuing to drive the absorption of disfigurement & the dark arts into today’s rap milieu. After all, it was the mask that revived DOOM – albeit “badly deformed” – after he lost his brother and his faith in the creative industry.  One wonders if it is only through adopting new nomenclature that Kool Keith stays out of Bellevue.  No wonder the focus on the supernatural & occult: what else is their re-animation into entertainers but necromancy?

Thus the truly freakish is released when the artist’s project derails from the the Hollywood aim of glorifying the identity (i.e. achieving rep, cred, stardom) and resorts instead to the human sacrifice of that identity to the art itself – catalyzing a repetitive process of mutation, amputation, and vertigo. In other words, the evisceration of the ego by the id … like a hiphop  Monkey’s Paw. Lest you think I too am crazy, let me reassert that I’m not just making this shit up:

Like DOOM says: “only in America could you find a way to earn a healthy buck/ And still keep your attitude on self-destruct …” Dark as that may be, we are indebted to this regenerative mutilation for the comic and uncanny abstract lyricism borne from the crepuscular haze of its wake.

DL the New Madvillain single [HERE].