Indie Rapper Reseizes the Brooklyn Moment
WRITERS and musicians often fixate on certain landscapes at certain times. For Thoreau in the 1840s it was Walden Pond. For Madonna in the 1980s it was her body. For the rapper-producer El-P (birth name Jaime Meline) in the ’00s it’s post-9/11 New York.
“I wanted to capture something I felt was unspoken,” he said last month, chopping garlic at his apartment cum home studio in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. “There’s a shroud that’s enveloped this city since 9/11 that everyone is pretending isn’t there, and it’s affecting me. I’m not trying to make heavy-handed political records. I’m just trying to make sense of this. And make something good to listen to.”
An intense, stocky 32-year-old with gray-blue eyes and close-cropped reddish hair, El-P seems consumed with dark thoughts. Making things helps to distract him — like music or, at this moment, an elaborate lunch of tortellini with sausage and pesto. Another result of this impulse is “I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead,” a CD to be released Tuesday, El-P’s first in nearly five years. (He performs Thursday at the Bowery Ballroom.)
The CD arrives at a time when the Brooklyn music scene he predates has exploded, making him a veteran both literally and — in his embrace of funk, noise and electronics — aesthetically. He commands respect in rock as well as rap circles. TV on the Radio and Cat Power, who both made critically acclaimed records last year, have employed him to remix their material. And coincidentally the return of El-P, who is of Irish-Cajun-Lithuanian descent, comes as the “white rapper” is back on the cultural radar, between VH-1’s well-received “Ego Trip’s (White) Rapper Show” and Jason Tanz’s newly published “Other People’s Property: A Shadow History of Hip-Hop in White America” (Bloomsbury USA).
“I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead” feels simultaneously futuristic, anachronistic and of the moment. Rhymes flash back to Sept. 11, flickering amid surreal scenes of city life witnessed by a strung-out narrator who finds himself awake at 5 a.m., sitting on his stoop smoking a Newport and waiting for the bodegas to open, writing breathless rhymes like:
Fell asleep late
Neon buzz
PTS stress
We do drugs
City air strange
Sticky lungs
Mayor Doomburg
Gives no funds
And I’m cryin.
The futuristic tinge comes from frequent science fiction allusions and especially to the music undergirding the words. Unlike many peers El-P doesn’t refashion old soul hits or other familiar songs, although he will sample old records for raw sounds. He adds these to gritty synthesizer tones, distorted voices and machine beats to create data-overload collages. The effect can conjure classic Public Enemy, as if that famed rap group drew inspiration more from Philip K. Dick’s future-dystopian fiction than from “The Autobiography of Malcolm X.”
“I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead” is also a throwback to the indie-underground rap scene of the ’90s, when a certain kind of rap held sway for connoisseurs and critics: music often defined by abstract or bookish rhymes, unconventional music and anti-mainstream attitude, as opposed to radio-friendly bragging and dance-floor fodder. And that’s entirely appropriate, since El-P helped pioneer the indie-rap movement, first with his revered group Company Flow and later with his record label Definitive Jux — “jux” connoting both artful juxtaposition and, per street slang, artful thievery.
He grew up near the Fulton Mall, walking distance from where he lives now. His parents split early on, and he became in his own words “an unbridled capsule of teenaged rage and delinquency.” After being kicked out of two high schools in rapid succession (one being St. Ann’s School in Brooklyn Heights), he got an equivalency degree at 16 and finagled his way into the Center for Media Arts in Manhattan, where he studied audio engineering. “I pretty quickly made the decision that since school wasn’t working, music would have to,” he said.
It did, beginning with Company Flow, a rap group consisting of the D.J. Mr. Len, the rapper Bigg Jus and the rapper-producer El-P (a spinoff of his moniker Lyrical Punisher, or LP, which became El Producto, El-P through rap wordplay). The group self-released the “Funcrusher” EP in 1995, and before long El-P quit his job in the Tower Records mail-order department “because, y’know, I was a rap star.”
Though clearly speaking with tongue partly in cheek — by rap-star standards El-P lives, now as then, a modest existence — the group was a hit among cognescenti for its fiercely anti-almost-everything wordplay and aggressive, near-industrial sound. (The current issue of Vibe magazine calls “Funcrusher Plus,” the expanded 1997 version of their EP, “the defining document of ’90s hip-hop dissent.”) And before Eminem was a household name — and when the embarrassing one-hit wonder Vanilla Ice was still fresh in people’s minds — El-P was singled out as one of the few respected white rappers.
“I think he’s what a lot of kids struggle to be,” said Sacha Jenkins, co-creator of the cheeky “American Idol”-style “Ego Trip’s (White) Rapper Show,” which has contestants vying for “ghetto credibility,” among other things. Mr. Jenkins recalled meeting the 16-year-old El-P at a Manhattan performance space, “making beats and surrounded by black people.” And while El-P says that his race is no longer a big issue these days, Mr. Jenkins sees him as the prototype of the white rapper. “He’s not trying to be anything he’s not, and I think that’s what hip-hop has always been about.”
When Company Flow disbanded, El-P went solo and started Definitive Jux, which cultivated a stable of progressive hip-hop acts including Mr. Lif and RJD2. El-P’s 2002 debut, “Fantastic Damage,” was widely praised, and “I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead” addresses some similar themes: modern-day paranoia, rappers mistaking thuggery for artistry and the corruption of love. It also gathers prominent friends and fans.
Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails contributes to the grinding “Flyentology,” whose narrator discovers religion on a crashing airplane. And members of the prog-rock group Mars Volta add frenetic guitars and vocals to “Tasmanian Pain Coaster,” about meeting a troubled, bloodied friend on the A train. El-P said the character represents both himself and his traumatized hometown: “I feel like New York needs therapy, man. And I’m one of the people.”
By modern hip-hop standards his rhymes are remarkably self-analytical. The CD’s finale, “Poisenville Kids No Wins,” relates a struggle with what sounds like a fearsome drug problem, while Chan Marshall — who performs as Cat Power and suffered a publicized struggle with alcohol abuse last year — sings the redemptive coda. Is the character autobiographical? “It’s an amalgamation of me and other things,” El-P said. He declined to be more specific but said he had indulged in “self-destructive” behavior.
Marketing his record may also be a fight. Independents like Definitive Jux are feeling the same crunch as media conglomerates amid illegal downloading and falling sales. And their aesthetic, underdog by definition, seems to have lost some cultural traction lately, as critics and taste-making bloggers appear more dazzled by drug-dealing, true-crime narratives of major label acts like Clipse and Ghostface Killah. Even El-P has moderated his anti-mainstream stance. “Just because I run an indie label doesn’t mean I don’t think Jay-Z is nice,” he said.
But he remains optimistic. His label’s Web site, definitivejux.net, offers its own downloads, and he says their “secret weapon” is, simply enough, quality.
“I strongly believe in the art form of the album,” he said, contrasting the concept with the current hegemony of the hit-singles-plus-filler formula that rules commercial hip-hop. “If you have your artists in the right mind-state, it’s possible they’ll make important records, beautiful records, records in the classic sense of what they meant when we fell in love with music as kids.”
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