El-P

One of the most influential hip-hop figures at the turn of the millennium was white producer and rapper El-P, aka El Producto, born Jaime Meline in New York.

El-P founded Company Flow with dj Lenny "Mr Len" Smythe and rapper Justin "Bigg Jus" Ingleton. They debuted with Juvenile Technique (1993). Their first album, Funcrusher Plus (Rawkus, 1997), an augmented version of a 1996 namesake EP, featured a second rapper and already displayed the off-kilter, abrasive production skills of the founding duo. But it was the instrumental Little Johnny From The Hospital: Breaks and Instrumentals Vol.1 (1999) that definitely broke with the past, introducing the most bombastic, ebullient and explosive style of the time, the apolitical successor to Public Enemy.

El-P also crafted the schizoid soundscape of Cannibal Ox's The Cold Vein (2001), a project risen from the ashes of Company Flow (Vast Aire and Vordul Megilah). El-P probably achieved his artistic zenith in tracks such as Iron Galaxy. OXtrumentals is an instrumental version (i.e., a solo El-P album) of the Cannibal Ox album.

His first solo album, the dystopian sociopolitical concept Fantastic Damage (Definitive Jux, 2002), is a disjointed, neurotic affair. He handles all of the rapping by himself, but above all he is a polymath sampler who excels at abrasive, gloomy and hard beats, which are sometimes so complex to feel impenetrable. Full of sirens and screaming, they are meant to mirror the chaos in the streets of the modern metropolis. The album opens with a sophisticated trick, an air-raid siren that sounds like a doom-metal guitar riff and then crumbles into a fractured beat (Fantastic Damage). That's just the appetizer. The bleak vision of the future in standout Deep Space 9mm is complemented with a flow of such tricks, from the industrial opening to a rough distortion. The busy ranting of Dead Disnee glides over tinkling electronic shards and disheveled voices. He even uses a scream to construct the martial bombastic beat of Tuned Mass Damper. The ultimate artificial song is Truancy, whose multi-layered beat with tribal African drums and a fat bass line suddenly shifts gear and soars like an hymn coupled with a catchy wordless female hook. A disorienting maelstrom-like collage backs the introverted confession of T.O.J. The Nang, The Front, The Bush And The Shit blends bits of jazz, funk and rock, and then succumbs to a sudden acceleration at half time. A master of tension, El-P sows quacking electronic noises throughout Squeegee Man Shooting, and builds the nightmarish narrative of Accidents Don't Happen over an obsessive dirty drone. This all coalesces around the claustrophobic peaks of Stepfather Factory and Blood. The lyrics, meanwhile, turn the album into hip-hop's equivalent of Orwell's "1984".

The double-disc Fandamplus: Instrumentals is the instrumental version of El-P's solo debut.

High Water (2004) documents an instrumental collaboration with Matthew Shipp's jazz crew (and belongs more to Shipp than to El-P). To El-P's credit, his stew of samples and beats blends seamlessly with the improvisation of the jazzists. Get Modal is the peak of their osmosis, with Shipp introducing a memorable theme, William Parker's drums dancing around it and entwining the saxophone, and El-P's vocals treated to the point of being just another form of beat. Intrigue in the House of India boasts another irresistible melodic pattern mauled by Shipp's piano, decaying into a liquid jam led by guitar, trumpet and electronic noise. El-P leaves a lot of space to Shipp and his comrades, refraining from invading the most romantic portions of the ten-minute Sunrise Over Brlyn (with the trombone acting as the main counterpart of the piano). Shipp's combo concocts a great adaptation of cool jazz to the age of sampling, but it is not clear what contributions El-P made to this album that justified his name on the cover.

Mr Len has released the solo album Pity the Fool (2001).

Relocating to Atlanta, Justin "Bigg Jus" Ingleton released two collaborations with rapper Orko Elohiem under the moniker Nephlim Modulation Sessions, Woe To Thee O Land Whose King Is A Child (Big Dada) (2003) and Imperial Letters of Protection (2005), as well as his solo debut, Black Mamba Serums (Big Dada, 2004), recorded in 2001.

I'll Sleep When You're Dead (Definitive Jux, 2007), featuring cameos by several rock musicians, is another moral soliloquy wrapped in dense layers of estranging sounds that evoke urban life (sirens, explosions, mechanical noises, and so on). The bombastic seven-minute Tasmanian Pain Coaster (with a cameo by Omar Rodriguez-Lopez and Cedric Bixler-Zavala of Mars Volta) is a "message" for the new century and its anxieties. The seven-minute closer, Poisenville Kids No Wins (with Cat Power's Chan Marshall), is a concentrate of angst with a two-minute coda of noise-rock. Claustrophobia is pervasive, notably in Habeas Corpses (Draconian Love) with its ever-changing landscape. The intensity is relentless, whether he's busy with the grotesque collage of Smithereens, the catastrophic beat of Up All Night, the brutal rap-metal Run the Numbers (with Aesop Rock), or the demonic dance Flyentology (with Nine Inch Nails's Trent Reznor), boasting one of the catchiest refrains. The pessimistic vision of the album is counterbalanced by the love song The Overly Dramatic Truth (with a melodic motif in the background) and little else.

The all-instrumental mixtape Weareallgoingtoburninhellmegamixxx3 (2010) tried to secrete a digital symphony out of a bunch of leftovers, bridging old-school hip-hop beats and trivial dubstep bass lines.

Too cold and surgical, the production on Cancer for Cure (Fat Possum, 2012) often fails to connect with the listener the way his visceral productions used to. The album seems neatly divided between music in which production prevails over lyrics, namely the operatic and symphonic Tougher Colder Killer, the cosmic funk shuffle Request Denied (almost entirely instrumental) and tortured multilayered Drones Over BKLYN (basically a concentrate of sound effects); and music in which rapping prevails over sound, namely The Full Retard and The Jig Is Up, but especially the psychological bomb Stay Down, a concentrate of suspense and anxiety. The two camps mix and match, with the former displaying what El-P is unique for.

EL-P produced Michael "Killer Mike" Render's R.A.P. Music (2012), one of the most vitriolic agit-prop rap albums of the new century. Then EL-P and Killer Mike formed Run The Jewels, a project that debuted with Run The Jewels (Fool's Gold, 2013) and de facto continued Killer Mike's political mission. From the beginning the brooding electronic soundscape and lashing sound effects of Run The Jewels provide Killer Mike's energetic vernacular with the ideal backing. Another peak of the collaboration comes with the abrasive and pounding Get It, where the rap dissolves in vocal effects that are even more tense. Not many songs maintain that standard of musical violence, and EL-P mostly prefers to invest in unnerving atmospheres of 36" Chain EL-P's tricks span a huge range, and he can even indulge in peppering Banana Clipper, a collaboration with Big Boi, with a bubbling synth that gives it a comic flavor, or injecting a cuckoo clock in the melodic ethereal coda of Job Well Done, or scattering a chaotic fistful of found sounds and dissonance throughout Twin Hype Back, a collaboration with Prince Paul.
That is not to diminish the contribution to the sound (not only to the message) by Killer Mike's in-your-face soulful rapping, as Sea Legs and No Come Down prove. When Killer Mike is at his best, one feels that the beats are weak because EL-P tend towards sophistication, not barbaric emotion, preferring sci-fi synths, subsonic bass lines and acid guitars instead of booming blasting noise.
It is still a far cry from the explosive agit-prop hip-hop music of Public Enemy or even of Company Flow's Little Johnny From The Hospital.

If Run the Jewels 1 was mostly an El-P album, with Killer Mike guesting as a rapper, Run The Jewels 2 (Mass Appeal, 2014) was truly Killer Mike's album. The difference can be perceived already in the opener, a tense but slow Jeopardy, with the intended lyrical explosion further diluted by a plaintive saxophone melody. It is Killer Mike's show, and he shines in the singalong Lie Cheat Steal as well as in the visceral All Due Respect (boasting the best percussive effects, that range from techno pulses to African-style propulsion). EL-P hijacks Early with a plethora of production detours (and perhaps a Beatles-ian or ELO-ian obsession), triggers the panzer-grade thumping beat of Blockbuster Night Part01, hides a melodic refrain inside the snoring basslines and hyper-dub reverbs of All My Life (like a Radiohead remix of a vintage Mersey-beat hit) and probably pens the structure of the vulgar cabaret skit of Love Again. The rare cases in which the dialogue between two voices truly works are memorable: Close Your Eyes (the second voice being a stuttering Zach de la Rocha), and Crown, drenched in a mood of alienation (sculpted by Hendrix-ian guitar, sci-fi electronics, angelic backing vocals and a relentless alien pulsation). Overall, this album lost some of the magic balance of the previous album, while, of course, still being an impressive display of punk-ish elegance.

Run The Jewels 3 (2016) is all carried out in a solemn, stark tone, and the tone is really the main ingredient of Down and Don't Get Captured (Hey Kids is ruined by Danny Brown's contribution). This is meant to exude rage, especially in the two more ideological tracks: Thieves (Screamed The Ghost) injects a line from Martin Luther King's 1967 speech "The Other America" ("A riot is the language of the unheard") and A Report To The Shareholders/ Kill Your Masters, a Caribbean shuffle that doesn't do justice to the motto "Kill our masters and start again" until the shrapnel rapping of the second half. (One can only wonder how much more effective these songs would have been in the hands of the Pop Group or Tackhead). But the real show is El-P's angry propulsive beats and abrasive textures, evoking urban warfare like the lyrics fail to. Talk To Me is propelled by pounding, tank-like rhythm and anguished synth lines. Everything contributes to create the dense pulsing apocalyptic requiem for human civilization of 2100: magmatic synthesizer, twanging guitar (reminiscent of the House of the Rising Sun) and reverbed backup vocals (alas, the singing dilutes the impact). The ominous atmosphere of Panther Like A Panther is sculpted by African polyrhythms, Kamasi Washington's droning saxophone and Miami rapper Katrina "Trina" Taylor's twitching phrasing. Less cataclismic but no less effective are the post-industrial stomp of Legend Has It and the hysterical slim shrill beat of Call Ticketron (littered with commercials and trombone-like synth rumbles). El-p's class is manifest in the details: the swampy bass synth-lines and the sax fanfare of Oh Mama, or even just the sudden change of beat halfway in the otherwise uneventful Stay Gold. The duo gets mellow in Thursday In The Danger Room, defanged by Kamasi Washington's romantic sax and chirping synth sounds. As ever with rap artists, the value of the message really depends on how much poetry you read. Lines like "life is a journey, to live is to suffer"... well, a child could have written them.

El-P's hard-hitting production is placed to the service of contemporary protests against police brutality on RTJ4 (2020). The stormy and confrontational Yankee and the Brave, the disorienting and morphing Walking in the Snow (with Lola "Gangsta Boo" Mitchell), the polyphonic Ju$t (with Pharrell Williams of the Neptunes and Zack de la Rocha of Rage Against The Machine), the lumbering punk-rap The Ground Below, and especially the pulsating and Terminator-evoking Never Look Back compose their agit-prop manifesto and match the zeitgeist of 2020. Holy Calamafuck adds a thrilling dub-tinged atmosphere, and Pulling the Pin, a collaboration with Josh Homme of the Queens Of The Stone Age, a morbid and funereal feeling. The closer, A Few Words for the Firing Squad, is all cinematic runaway energy, replete with jazz saxophone and pounding bass line. That leaves the single Ooh La La as the only light moment in an escalating tragedy. It is their loudest album yet, the closest they have come yet to Public Enemy's agit-hop.