SUPER HUMAN POWERS – Intellectual Extra Terrestrials (MP3)
I know I’ve talked at length about their “West Evil Rhymes” (and rightly so, a mutation of Geography and Time even Momus might have dismissed as absurd, incongrous and unworkable) but I think this might be even better. It isn’t so much the emceeing, skilled and harsh though it is, or the ever-rising threat of a new form of humanity of superior mind and mental prowess, it’s the sample. One particular 60s / 70s AOR / MOR hit, infuriatingly familiar, used by Chris Morris in BBC Radio 4’s On The Hour over his mutation of the Vietnam war (“the Vietcong, who then started dropping ‘Look behind you’ leaflets on the GIs”), irritatingly unplaceable, which just works perfectly.
I increasingly feel under pressure in my gentle campaign for so-called “undie” rap, as my former heroes and inspirations write long euologies for those obsessed with The Streets (pop’s falsest and most illusory concept), seemingly unapologetic paeans to the ideology of the Thug, the Hot Boy and other concepts which actually appeal to, strengthen and reinforce the UK right-wing press’s reductive vision of all black American people, and try to excuse themselves off the back of a few production traits which make them, admittedly, the strangest-sounding records to enter the Billboard chart at Number 1. Not that that excuses them, really. Simon Reynolds can draw analogies between the Cash Money stable and the theories of Walter Pater and Georges Bataille, but they’ll always be Fur Qs to me.