As far as my one & only life is concerned, the summer of 2002 was one long lost weekend, all of it soundtracked by that debut Demigodz EP. Those were tumultuous days in the cracker rap ecosystem. For those of us who thought that Eminem was corny, Esoteric was dogshit and Aesop Rock wasn’t on beat, that year was a revelation framed between Apathy’s raspy perfection, Virtuoso’s “World War One” CD, and the nuclear detonation that was Non-Phixion’s The Future Is Now LP.
More than most of his generational (and especially regional) wave, Apathy never lost a beat. There is nothing regrettable in that catalog, and he was continuously upped his game in terms of quality control & precision penmanship, too. He had to. Everyone had to.
Other than the high notes of the Non-Phixion joint, the summer of 2002 doesn’t sound that amazing today. I tried it. You can hear the roots of all that Army of the Pharaohs era bloat & excess in The Godz Must Be Crazy, and Virtuoso’s heavy metal aesthetics worked way better when I was young & dumb. Everything changed since then anyway: Eyedea & Cage blew up and left, Edan & El-P lapped everyone, and Brother Ali baffled the shit out of all involved. Tumultuous.
Back then, we were retards, glorious and free. We earnestly believed that any given cypher could be the moment our lives changed and our rap careers started. Thinking about that kind of fantasy life bullshit for too long can corrode what made you great to begin with. Who do you need to convince? Who are we trying to impress? In Apathy’s case, nobody at all, maybe less. He made his peace with his legacy a long time ago. His latest LP, Connecticut Casual: Chapter 2, stands out most for how much fun he’s having. No old head bitterness, no chip on his shoulder, just one very talented emcee doing what he loves.
As American consumers, we mostly love dumb shit. This particular track stands out as an example of how little we age, any of us, anywhere. Comic books & dick jokes. Our faces drop, our bodies rot, but who we are as people, that usually doesn’t change much. This Demigodz reunion cut is a fossil in amber. They both sound like they could have cut these verses in 2002. That is primarily a compliment.
The beat is the same kind of unwavering melodic boom bap everyone was aiming for circa 2005. Stu Bangas and Marco Polo are both paving comfortable lanes in 2024 by sticking to the same formula. For me, though, I’ve made too many beats to fuck with this stuff. Hell, I was already bored with it twenty years ago. There is an uncanny valley feel to producers who have mastered their machines without mastering the actual music. The seams are all too audible, the chops as spastic as a .gif, all jerky repetition. They should have kept pushing, should have done more interesting work with those samples. If nothing else, they owed that much to these drums.
There’s no such thing as a female rapper, right? You’re either dope or you’re not. The same will never be true of Yakub’s spawn, and I’m fine with that. Apathy is one of the all-time melanin deficiency greats, but this video is only kinda average. I understand that Celph Titled is still trying to pass himself off as some flavor of Hispanic in 2024, but that beard isn’t fooling anybody. Three Dickies.
