On 16 Shots, from G-Side’s brand new iSLAND, Clova takes Hov’s “ball so hard” line from N.I.P. and moves it beyond “they wanna fine me” into a critique of artist as commodified industry fodder. Fascinatingly, “clone me” comes before “own me” and then “sign me” is saved for last, making it the most egregiously dystopian. Following the Garvey reference in “intelligent hoodlum” Bentley’s black power-infused verse, it’s particularly radical, especially when paired with the grass-roots entrepreneurialism the album is an argument for. In a way, given the copious references ST 2 Lettaz and Yung Clova make to Watch The Throne, it feels appropriate to look at iSLAND as a complex, working class supplement to Kanye and Jay-Z’s lavish fatalism, as ST is still all about that Ferrari, but will “ride a bicycle” til’ he gets it.
Though WTT attempts ushering the transition from Murder to Excellence, it functions best as an outsider-turned-insider’s sociological critique of 1% instability. The pieces are there, from the nods to civil rights movement to the (pre-occupy and racially specific) call for another million-person march to the vivid snapshot of still fractured race relations and their exacerbation by class war in ways that shed light on how far we haven’t come. Invaluable in the insight offered, if there’s nothing on JSTOR about it in 5 years I’ll call bullshit. Still, it’s less a manifesto than primary source material for one. iSLAND, on the other hand, is a blueprint.
Appropriately, G-Side got interviewed on a Forbes blog for iSLAND’s marketing strategy instead of being listed in the Forbes 500 for their earnings. The album’s release on Bandcamp, allowing the Slow Motion Soundz enterprise to set its own release date and have direct access to uploaded distribution, is only part of a larger, ambitiously pragmatic business model that recalls CRASS Records as much as it does Malcolm X’s black-owned business rhetoric. Both the trap and the top are losing currency in rap and these guys know that, so they push a DIY model, except one that’s not afraid of money. In a post-label internet market with less firm-created PR teams to blow cash on pushing an artist into general attention, where the rapid influx of voices dilutes the concentration of street narratives with regular dude minutiae of someone like Curren$y, this is especially prescient.
W-2 Boy, the Kristmas album also put out by SMS this year, has a philosophy that partially explains their agenda, reworking the idea of grinding and hustling to include those slaving at 9 to 5 jobs, an endlessly treacherous hustle in itself. It’s a different iteration of income tax swag, balling on a budget whose legit earnings give cops nothing to work with. In a way, it’s the second prong to WTT’s question re: what’s the point of all this material excess? On Huntsville International’s Rising Sun, the W-2 Boy emissary himself (sadly absent here) voices a young man’s concern, asking, “Why the fuck do I wanna be a D-Boy?” The answer meets somewhere in the middle.
Like a street version of T2, he could have been conversing with a younger ST and Clova, in particular their facsimiles on the Starshipz and Rocketz cover where two kids point up awestruck at a spaceship. Their POV, though, was from the slums of Huntsville, where a spaceship can represent limitless opportunity while its docked status can invoke resignation to the structural barriers preventing upward mobility. In light of the duo’s poverty, homelessness, foster care, familial deaths and slow-dying addictions, abandonment, drug crimes and so on that spaceship registered as a taunt, its grounded position slyly empathetic at best. Even with legit jobs - gas station attendant turned video director ST and barbershop-owning Clova - it had the option of leaving earth while they were stuck on the local grind. With every subsequent release, though, G-Side (as well as the city’s sprawling “mini-Memphis” of a rap game) have worked at bridging that gap.
Merging the NASA-fetishizing synth work of astral projecting New Agers like Jean-Michel Jarre with the slow-simmering, trunk rattling, 808 stutters of southern tradition the Block Beattaz work like Space Cowboys at carving out a stamp on every layer of the atmosphere they hit. If Starshipz was Troposphere then iSLAND is the Thermosphere, though it always feels like dimensions are bleeding into each other regardless of their place in the universe. Here, especially on first song Cinematic and last track Look Up, they take the paranoid rumblings of incidental music from 70’s action-thrillers and weave it in with the lounging quixotics of, say, Esquivel’s Space Age Bachelor Pad Music via, like, early 00’s Stereolab.
People who thought the Tame Impala sample was audacious (and a lot of internet posts did in a condescending, “surprised it works!” way) are probably being floored by the heady reconstruction of galactic soundscapes at work here. There’s the zero-gravity dilation of “Thug Motivation 101” Moroder-isms on Recognize, the searing guitar solo looped into flittering drum-and-bass assists on the cunningly bubbling Atmosphere, the effortless M2E-style transition midway through Cinematic, and though sampling Joy Orbison is a big deal if you missed out on their reworking of Dune’s Hardcore Vibes, it’s still a very canny nod to the internet hype cycle they’re surviving in.
And surviving here is a large part of the narrative. “Rabbits” grapples with the Tangle of Pathology-informed stereotypes that loom over poor black families. Unfortunate rhetoric about the civil rights movement remains to this day. The idea that everything was set straight and blacks failed to cash in on the hand lent while blaming absent fathers on the misdirection is still common. Here the blame is shifted upwards, making iSLAND at least partially a metaphor for stranded do-or-die fending. Clova lays it out:
steal our identity, tell us to plead guilty
throw us in jail look at us like we filthy
for real d, this is the society
treat us like slaves, actuality, gotta be
‘cause your payroll less than the bills be
no overtime how the fuck do the kids eat
Clova still mourns a single-mother upbringing, but, by taking shots at the environment it happens in doesn’t lay the blame solely at its door when an eldest son turns to crime. ST, proudly “bible-belt” born, made it up without a father, listing all the possible dead-enders that could’ve put him to sleep before he “woke up” i.e. “trappin before trappin was even a word for it, before we realized they trapped us.” It’s “crabs in a barrel” from the crabs in the barrel.
24/8 adds another day to the week to make room for that overtime-less slaving, with the vocals every now and then tripped up by effects whose echo-y submersion makes it feel like you’re inside their head mid-hustle. On Recognize, ST responds to an earlier generation’s definition of consciousness and flips Common’s slut-shaming, rap as now-impure woman misogyny of “I use to Love H.E.R.” clean-slating the whole thing with “I’mma lover her til’ she old, and fuck her like she new.” With two solid, boundary-expanding albums in one year, that’s no joke and the boundless excitement, only slightly tempered by weariness, is life-affirming.
On Getting’ It, the flipside of accomplished oblivion is a destructive void, lines like “having nightmares of being broke when I’m 30” fear confirmation of all the nonsense Clova responds to on Rabbits. Thus, “make my lil money, take my lil money, flip that shit a couple times, ‘cause it’s either the matrix or the cages” is a defiantly optimistic stab at stability. Though WTT meets its detractors’ hypocritical complaints about conspicuous consumption by detailing its affirmative, history-corrective worth, iSLAND is the tux-less that still haven’t made it to the promised land of the O.G.’s, instead carving out a niche for their own black tie affair. Not holding up one above the other, we should be thankful for both of these monumental offerings coming out at a time like this.
