my 10 favorite anticon albums

Been thinking about this for awhile. anticon might actually be my favorite hip hop label. I guess that's alright but it makes me feel like one of those filthy hipsters. At any rate, I think it's the only label where I've heard all every release, or at least all the notable ones, most of them more than once, probably. So I figure I should make a list like this or something.

10. The Taste of Rain...Why Kneel - Deep Puddle Dynamics
9. Ten - cLOUDDEAD
8. Pretty Swell Explode - Odd Nosdam
7. Oaklandazulasylum - Why?
6. A Point too Far to Astronaut - Telephone Jim Jesus
5. Alopecia - Why?
4. In the Shadow of the Living Room - Reaching Quiet
3. 13 & God - 13 & God
2. Hymie's Basement - Hymie's Basement
1. cLOUDDEAD - cLOUDDEAD

Maybe I should do writeups for these or something. Explain my reasons briefly. Well, that's sort of hard to do, because I like most of these albums for pretty much the same reasons (crazy lyrics over really weirdly beautiful "beats"). Recently I've been thinking about how much I like cLOUDDEAD's self titled and how Ten was this weird profoundly disappointing but still excellent letdown, and why exactly that was. Mainly it seems like cLOUDDEAD was inspired weirdness, and Ten was a little more forced. I think a lot has to do with how the singles could sort of come out at their own pace, and they'd have like, 10 minutes of absolutely genius stuff that they could release as one single. If they had an idea for a cool beat, or a cool sample, or a cool line, they used it. But specifically, they used it for exactly as much as they needed to, just throwing it onto whatever upcoming single needed it. With Ten, it's like they're trying harder to make things into "songs"... same goes for the lyrics. Instead of just throwing out a really clever line, they link everything thematically, and they have like choruses and such... I dunno, it's all really good, again.

Uh, I'll try again. On cLOUDDEAD, I felt like the song writing process was more natural because they were just putting out these singles and you can feel the progression between every part of each track and then from one single to the next. With Ten, they needed a bunch of songs, so they started with "who has ideas for songs" instead of "who has ideas".

I'm having a hard time expressing exactly what I mean here. Anyways, that's something on a high end that I think is different. On a more specific level: the music is pretty similar between the two, really, but there's a few notable differences, especially with the lyrical approach. Again, everything seems more "song-y", whereas cLOUDDEAD was more stream of consciousness and disjointed. Also, it seems like Ten almost uses some of the "tricks" pioneered by cLOUDDEAD, which creates an awareness and usage of previous praise that I'm not entirely comfortable with. Yes, I loved the blender solo on the first album, but I don't want you doing it again on the second album because I loved it, even if I'm going to love it on the second album. And I did love it on the second album.

I dunno, I'll try writing about it later. They're both really, really excellent albums, but it's like, Ten, I can understand how that was made. Almost every line I can start to process the thought process behind, and all the beats and samples and such "sound good" and their appearance "makes sense". It's like reading... Joseph Heller or something. It's dense, you don't understand all the references to characters you haven't met and the allusions to private jokes, and you can't relate to the observations so they seem insane, but you understand how it all came to be and it all fits together in what you would expect of a book or song. cLOUDDEAD is more like Thomas Pynchon. The allusions and tangential tirades are disruptive to the expected flow of the album, but feel all the more natural for it. The point of view is not of some sort of omniscient composer or writer but someone involved in the process itself. It is the product of a mind that you can "follow" and could maybe be deemed sane in the way their though process follows an observable but impossible to predict pattern, but it is almost impossible to conceive the actual meaning.

Actually, here's a bit more about Pynchon, Joyce, etc. versus Heller, Vonnegut, etc. They are all brilliant writers, obviously, but they have profound differences in the way they write that are almost as numerous as their similarities. I'm a fan of the former camp, but that's just my preference. I think it comes down to the amount of exposition they do. Incredibly weird things happen in all of their books, and quite often these things pass with little explanation. The difference is that Heller and his kin present these things with an implied acknowledgment that yes, these things are weird, often just by the virtue of the incident's significance in the writing. Pynchon, however, will present weirdness with a sort of assumed familiarity.

I'm not entirely sure how to describe this. Really, the more clear example can be seen on these cLOUDDEAD songs. On Ten, on what I think is the best track, "Rifle Eyes", there's a few sections that are essentially really well written descriptions of nature's interaction with mankind - spider spinning webs on Styrofoam snowmen, etc. - and you can actually just picture them picturing that. It's one to one. And then later, they have more surrealist stuff - "a single long stem rose sitting behind two mounted antlers" or something - and they way they present it acknowledges the fact that, yes, this is an odd image, this is probably symbolic of something, this probably alludes to something. With cLOUDDEAD, the imagery is generally much more abstract to begin with. Even on the most directly narrative tracks, like "JimmyBreeze 2", the transition between actual description and abstract imaging is too blurred for the viewer to ever get a clear picture of the scene. It's dreamlike impressionist imaging, not realist attempts to relate to the listener on common grounds with easily imaginable scenes. They're both good, though. Furthermore, when cLOUDDEAD gets weird, like, "how did they even think of this" weird, and it does so a lot, it doesn't weigh itself down with the significance of the weirdness. Instead of really trying to drive home the idea that "what we are saying is abstract and symbolic and you just gotta think about it, man". They make the listener work a little bit to even realize all the weirdness going on, and when they do, they've become so familiar with it that it loses it's incomprehensible bizarreness and takes on a sort of... sublime assumed understanding? Because at that point... you already think you've figured out what's going on, and each new lyric or sample you find is vague enough and weird enough to fit within the framework you've automatically constructed in a desperate attempt to understand what's happening?

Did any of that make any sense? Were you doing what I just described when trying to read that? Anyways, that's what cLOUDDEAD does for me, in a nutshell, and very few other albums/movies/books/video games have done that for me. It's one of the most satisfying feelings I've ever gotten from art, though. You're presented with something abstract and strange and incomprehensible and, most importantly, beautiful. At first it seems inaccessible and daunting, but immediately you get the sense that not only will you understand it someday, but there is something rich and rewarding to understand, simply because it's presented in a sort of assumed familiarity that never promises to explain more later, but simply implies that what it has shown so far means more than you may think. And, as you explore it more, you start to piece together an understanding that every new piece you examine fits perfectly in an almost miraculous way. It's like being given a jigsaw puzzle with no explanation of what the end result will be. You sort of get the sense that it might be a horse, though, and you start piecing it together with the intention of making a horse. You begin to realize that it's expertly engineered in a way that yes, it is a horse, if you want it to be, but it's more than a horse, and through your attempt to make a horse you have not only made your horse, but the entire scene that the creator had intended.

Another analogy: it's like walking around in someone else's dream and piecing together their psyche through the vague but intended elements you see. You'll end up with some hybrid of their true personality and yours, and end up learning both something about them and yourself in the process. Coincidentally, it's this feeling, or the lack thereof, that made me very disappointed in Inception, a movie about this very analogy that manages to twist an extremely novel premise into the most generic formula I think anyone could think of. But I'm off topic enough as is. Anyways, anticon. Awesome music.