Modern life is a headache. Shouldn't music reflect that? The spirit of independent hip-hop keeps coming up with new ways to answer in the affirmative, and the world keeps giving it reasons to. Since El-P captured a paranoid new zeitgeist with the meticulously abrasive Fantastic Damage, six months after 9/11, doggedly underground thinktanks such as Anticon and Mush have kept it real by keeping it weird and usually noisy. But before El-P was the Renaissance man of that movement, he was in the storied and short-lived Company Flow, whose Funcrusher Plus predated the Def Jux and Rhymesayers trademarks by a presidential term. Company Flow counted Bigg Jus among its ranks as well. Though he hasn't compulsively evolved like El-P has, Jus' comparatively obscure solo output has kept Company Flow's gritty and challenging spirit alive. Now, as society gets its downward spiral on, his new album finds him pretty much where you'd expect: on a soapbox, in front of a small army of half-broken amplifiers.
Poor People's Day, the follow-up to Bigg Jus' solo Black Mamba Serums, is as traditional as this sort of thing gets: Clattering samples with no apparent stylistic continuity, monstrously noisy beats, and breathless vocals. The liner notes print the lyrics, in case you miss a rumination like "Photosynthesis be pumping chlorophyll intravenous through my incisors," but they're not entirely necessary. It takes only a small percentage of the names dropped (Judas, Zell Miller, Hitler) and institutions hated on (poverty, government, wackness) to grasp the point. - Resonance |
1XLP/Out Of Print