"Six Degrees" ft. Danny Brown- Ghostface Killah & BADBADNOTGOOD

Finding the common thread through "Six Degrees", Ghostface Killah's collaboration with Toronto jazz trio BADBADNOTGOOD and madcap MC Danny Brown, is near impossible. It's akin to performing alchemy or decrypting James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake. Sure you can try, but your attempt is going to end in embarrassment. Ghost is arguably the greatest to ever do "stream of consciousness" rap. He blends painstaking descriptions about the "tartar sauce on my S Dot Kicks" with head scratchers like "fly like Egyptian musk," delivering each with a similar command. In that sense, Danny Brown is a direct descendant of Ghost. Making the most out of his pinched-off, nervy flow he talks about "b**** p**** smell like Penguin's" and avoiding crack fiends on the way to the store with equal urgency. Both of their brains leak like a sieve and every thought flows out with the same pressure. 

Emboldened by BADBADNOTGOOD's minimalist noir-slink, Ghost and Brown fill in the blanks with a deluge of details. While delivering bodies to Staten Island landfills, Ghost "creeps like a caterpillar." To keep his evil third eye functioning, he pours "bottles of the 150 over twisters" and blows "on the green deadly." As drums pan back and forth, Ghost spotlights a fiend "with a needle left stuck in his arm, died of bad fix" and doesn't even blink. Like any "good" narrator he's careful not to romanticize any one character. Guys from the block "stashing guns in shrimp bags" aren't a tragedy, but a matter of fact. If Ghost opts for the ego-route with his verse, Danny Brown nears full-blown id. He'll scratch you without thinking twice if you dare stand in his way while watching Juice. Rappers will be devoured "like butternut squash" if Brown feels his tummy rumbling. Even the decision to go "drunk drivin' in a Charger" doesn't scan as ill-advised. It’s just something to do. When you're as unfiltered as these two, there's no telling what thought might come out.

"Six Degrees" drops as a 10-inch single through Lex on June 24 and can be preordered here.

Thanksgiving Playlist

Whether it's family, friends, food, or football everyone has something to be thankful for not just today, but everyday. That said, it's easy to fill up on too much food, throw the remote down after the Cowboys give up another touchdown, or storm off after your relatives give you just a little too much lip. I for one am thankful for music, and whether your day be friendly or dysfunctional, I hope there's something in this playlist that whets your appetite more than another plate of mashed potatoes ever could.

Have a safe and happy holiday, and try not to injure yourself during the Black Friday madness tomorrow, all those discounted DVDs won't watch themselves.

"Mashed Potato Time"- Dee Dee Sharp

"And Your Bird Can Sing"- The Beatles

"Ham & Eggs"- A Tribe Called Quest

"Family Business"- Kanye West

"Thanksgiving"- Kendrick Lamar

"She Don't Use Jelly"- The Flaming Lips

"Harvest"- Neil Young

"Macy's Day Parade"- Green Day

"Food Fight"- Titus Andronicus

"Chicken and Meat"- Das Racist

"Lonesome Electric Turkey"- Frank Zappa

"Vegetables"- The Beach Boys

                                                         "Yams" ft. Triple C's- Rick Ross

"Nutmeg"- Ghostface Killah

"Meat is Murder"- The Smiths

"Chicken Grease"- D'Angelo

"Filipino Box Spring Hog"- Tom Waits

                                  

                                                 "Peach, Plum, Pear"- Joanna Newsom

                                  

                                                            "Pecan Pie"- Golden Smog
                                     



                                           "Yam the King of Crops"- The Mountain Goats

"Enter the Wu-Tang" Turns 20

I've written before about the countless CDs littering my car, about half-cracked cases and fraying cardboard covers I hold on to because of their vitality. I'm unwilling (or unable) to part with them because they all occupy a special place in my cluttered musical brain. Some are recent additions like Yeezus or Wise Up Ghost, while others have been around for a minute; surviving countless scratches and lost cases. Anchoring one of these cluttersome piles in my car is the Wu-Tang Clan's debut 1993 record Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers). For me it's the foundation, the enduring anchor. Still in its original case, it's stuck with me like the gum under the table of bulldozing posse-cut "Protect Your Neck". When I first purchased the album, I'd already been orbiting hip-hop writ large, but Enter the Wu-Tang was my entryway into the underground. A ticket to a sideshow of: comic book villainy, wanton violence, and kung-fu flicks. With the record turning 20 over the weekend, I decided it was time to return to the land of Shaolin.

As a gateway into the warped world of the W, "Bring Da Ruckus" decaying drums and deadly-accurate snaps remain an all-time classic. For quotable samples, few in the annals of rap rival "Shaolin shadowboxing and the Wu-Tang sword style...". When two close friends and I pilgrimaged to Chicago's Congress Theatre to see the crew, the whole crowd was in unison repeating the line as it blared out the house speakers. Ghostface Killah's gusto-filled introduction has become mantra in my mind. Self-assured and frenetically paced, his threats "causing terror, quick damage your whole era" were harried, like he had another hit to scurry off to across town. In terms of one-two acts, few in any context can rival the Ghost/Raekwon pairing that sends this track into the stratosphere. Ghost is the rabid attack dog and Raekwon the Mafioso figure holding the muzzle. GZA's warning shot to the world is assassin caliber. His next level internal rhyme-scheme delivered on the promise of the “God MC” Rakim and had the salvo of a bitter veteran whose debut LP met the sound of crickets. And that's just the opening track.

An album spilling this much viscera circa 1993 was almost unthinkable. Sure hip-hop was littered with promises of violence before, though never quite this joyful. When Method Man's dusty voice resolves to "sever the head from the shoulders" over the infernal horns of "Shame On A N****" it’s the by-product of there being nothing good on TV that night. As a marble-mouthed U-God rushes in to announce a shooting outside, Meth is still concerned with a missing tape.  A full two years before Mobb Deep promised to stab brains with nose brain, the Wu was concocting skits focused on banging nuts with spiked bats and force-feeding unwilling participants (assholes sewn shut of course). When hip-hop critics derisively label it "cartoonish violence" this is the album they mean to cite, but never do.

And there is an almost cartoony or comic-like way in which these nine MCs joined together for a hostile takeover. The origin story begins with two cousins, the RZA and the GZA each nursing their own wounds from failed record deals. While GZA put pen to paper and crafted dense tales of "God squad that's mad hard to serve, come fronting hard, then Bernhard Goetz what he deserves", cousin Robert Diggs began scouring the depths of soul/funk samples with the fervor of a gravedigger who loves his job a bit too much. If it were ever possible to hear dirt on a record, RZA made it so. Vocals don't crisply travel through speakers, they float in disembodied fashion. "Can It All Be So Simple" offers its own origin story as told by a ghost. Elsewhere, drums rattle and clank like bones. Guitars, pianos, and keyboards travel in broken loops, decaying in real time. Frequently the group was just shooting the breeze, but fitted atop RZA's atmospheric production even the endearing lines register as threats. Here "the sound of the underground" is more literal than figurative.

Slowly the seven other crew members gathered together, "forming like Voltron". Rap groups were commonplace when the Wu began, but never this unwieldy or spirited. There was: "Genius" GZA, spliff-puffing/s***-talking Method Man (whose rugged amiability guaranteed he'd be the first with a solo record), Raekwon weighing grams in the backroom with a fierce scowl, Ghostface's full-speed ahead delivery. U-God's leaden voice only appeared on the drunken double-dutch of "Da Mystery of Chessboxin" (he was incarcerated for much of the recording), but his sole verse packed a mighty wallop. The criminally underrated Inspectah Deck made up for a less-than-stellar personality through an eagle-eyed rap perspective. Few hard knock tales have ever expressed as much anguish as Deck's legendary second verse in "C.R.E.A.M." where jail bids are served at 15 and stray bullets become commonplace. Masta Killa's ferocious turn on aforementioned "Chessboxin" corroborates the now mythic-story he stayed up all-night writing to gain entrance into the group. And then there's the Ol' Dirty Bastard, named so because "there ain't no father to his style". In an alternate write-up, I'd spend its entire length and breadth fawning about the now-deceased ODB. In a group bursting at the seams with oversized personalities, his looms largest. The man known as Russell Jones' rap "style" has been described as everything from "drunken" to "seesawing" and "sing-song". More frequently he stumbles, composing himself only to bark out a threat or recount the time he got burnt by gonorrhea. More than a feral animal anthropomorphized and taught to rap, he was the group’s irregular heartbeat.

All those stray elements and fragments coalesce into the alien Enter the Wu-Tang. Debut albums have rarely come as insular as this. Not sure what "jakes" are? Then you're out of luck. Never seen a kung-fu film or B-movie schlock; this fraught world will make no sense to you. And yet here we are celebrating its 20th anniversary as it’s routinely heralded as one of the greatest hip-hop records released. Wu-Tang didn't kowtow to the prevailing wisdom of the era (innovators rarely do). We met them on their own terms. Two decades later and they still "ain't nothing to f*** with". If Wu-Tang really is forever (and recent in-house fighting calls that into question), this was the album that ensured their eternality.