El-P - I'll Sleep When You're Dead (2007):
01
Tasmanian Pain Coaster (feat. Omar Rodríguez-López and Cedric Bixler-Zavala)
02 Smithereens (Stop Cryin')
03 Up All Night
04 EMG
05 Drive
06 Dear Sirs
07
Run the Numbers (feat. Aesop Rock)
08 Habeas Corpses (Draconian Love) [feat. Cage]
09 The Overly Dramatic Truth
10
Flyentology (feat. Trent Reznor)
11 No Kings
12 The League of Extraordinary Nobodies
13 Poisenville Kids No Wins / Reprise (This Must Be Our Time) [feat. Chan Marshall]
Genre(s): Hip hop, noise
These days, El-P (born Jaime Meline) is best known as one-half of rap duo Run the Jewels. But before he and Killer Mike became an odd couple success story as middle-aged veterans rising up together from the hip hop underground, El-P was releasing solo records on Definitive Jux, a label he built himself as a means of spotlighting idiosyncratic rap music.
The second of these solo affairs came out in 2007. It was less heralded than its predecessor, 2002's
Fantastic Damage, and less accessible than its follow-up, 2012's
Cancer 4 Cure. But I encountered
I'll Sleep When You're Dead in college, and it absolutely set my hair on fire. It's a massive, squelching airhorn of an album. It sounds like the future while remaining firmly tethered to the noisy boom bap of rap music's golden age, as if you were listening to EPMD and Public Enemy through a blown out speaker as it crashed through the windows of one of
Blade Runner's neon-soaked high-rises.
Both lyrically and sonically,
ISWYD is emblematic of a certain kind of post-9/11, Bush-era anxiety, when fears of a growing police state were only dwarfed by the notion that the inmates might just be running the asylum (feelings that have only been amplified in our terrifying present). It is equal parts pulsating and paranoid, an example of how a political moment can be so uniquely reflected and refracted in the music of its time.
It's now 2020, but this album is no less potent in its dystopic rendering of life and death in Poisenville, a fictional stand-in for New York City that El uses as a backdrop to craft his bombed-out sci-fi narratives of urban decay. NY is currently being ravaged by COVID-19, and if it wasn't so damningly real, one could mistake the pandemic for the content of an El-P track. This is not easy listening, in other words, but it remains marvelously relevant.
El-P is reissuing the entirety of his solo output this year on Fat Possum Records, much to my delight. I just copped a limited release of
ISWYD on
vinyl, and it is now one of the most prized records in my collection, an underappreciated rap masterpiece.
