A lot of people can’t see past the mask. “The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” Mach-Hommy isn’t rapping to celebrate himself, he’s showing us that there’s a way out. We are living through a time of immense upheaval & glorious chaos. Reality is being re-negotiated.
This modern world is more elastic than you think: Mach-Hommy records are worth thousands of dollars simply because he willed it so. That only looks simple from the crowd. Try it and you’ll find out how much discipline it really takes.
Legendary legacies in human history are being rolled up into investment instruments and sold to private equity frat bros, hungover & desperate to make quarterly quotas. Technologies like NFTs or DAOs sound like insane novelties at first, but like email or dial-up internet access, they will eventually become facts of life. So the DMCA Hammer that Mach used on those bitch nerds at Rap Genius isn’t a publicity stunt, or even good & necessary bullying, it’s a consequence. We are witnessing an artist take total control using every form of lawfare & technology within his grasp. Anything less would be uncivilized.
(Rap Genius: a tech money enclosure of the great OHHLA; Online Hip Hop Lyrics Archive, a labor of love I myself contributed to as a teenager, in the woods, listening to rap. Like most dumb ideas built on brazen crimes, Americans just accepted it. If you work at Rap Genius, fuck you personally & emphatically.)
It’s amazing how little attention most rappers pay to writers. I’m not talking about cheap noise like this review, I mean real writers. Cold killers who cut sentences that can alter the rest your life. Artists like Mach-Hommy, billy woods and Black Thought all perform at the highest levels because they know history & they know culture. Literacy is a mansion with many rooms. Why is everyone trying to star in the same movie when the real world is such an infinite source of material?
“Infinite” is value-neutral. You can read endless arguments about Mach-Hommy, but not one of them matters. Watching adults get mad about multilingual rap is some wild anthropology, I gotta thank Twitter for that one. How the fuck do such men think human history happened? Even if you reduced that horizon down to rap, there were bars & battles en espanol right from the NYC genesis. The Big Apple was the world city. She may have seen better days, but she still holds that belt.
Here’s how human history happened: the incomplete labors of 100,000 specialists in 1000 languages were flattened into a single story, argued over by paid representatives of power & wealth for a hundred generations. Along the way, almost everything that actually transpired, got erased. Everything is dead in the museum. Haiti is an island shaped like a footnote and hip hop is whatever NPR and the New York Times say it is. In a world this hollow & venal, pal, you better start writing your own shit. Otherwise you’re going to drown. It may have already happened.
Being anonymous is expensive. There’s a lot of overhead, a lot of extra effort. #RICHAXXHAITIAN exists in at least two configurations. The version on Spotify’s servers is not the version on the vinyl, and that vinyl is very rare, indeed. Art doesn’t need to be legible to mass audiences, and “independent” doesn’t need to be shorthand for “broke.”
Both tracklists are a triumph for Philly visionary Sadhugold, another uncompromising auteur who has been a god amongst men in these parts for damn near a decade now. My compliments are superfluous. Track down Estee Nack & The Order Of The Golden Fleece if you’re not hip, then run The Ballad of D. B. Looper.
(I will never speak ill of Quelle Chris but the original August Fanon version of “COPY COOL” is worth tracking down. )
Loyalists & collectors will argue album rankings until the power flickers out forever, but this project hits the most important target: it’s on par with all of them, equal to the hype. This is beautiful, surprising, dead serious and funny as hell. One of the best alive, enjoying life in top form. Five Dickies.
