Clipping - Midcity (noise rap)

love this band

If the clipping. team ever committed to a full-blown stage production I would be there opening night (or, more realistically given the Hamilton association, several months later at the earliest).

Already happened, well Snipes and Diggs. Surprised this hasn't came up on this thread yet: https://patty.bandcamp.com/album/patty-the-revival

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfMmwwKFylc

That whole Patty album is brilliant imo.

Bits of 'Body and Blood' look suspiciously like braggadocio to me.

https://clppng.bandcamp.com/track/chapter-319
Back for obvious reasons w/ the first official release of 2014 track “Knees On The Ground” + a searing new one since the relevant people clearly didn’t get the message the first time around. If you thought being the only homicide detective on this train might’ve softened Diggs’ edge then, well, no, it certainly hasn’t.

Another new album due out October 23rd!

https://subpop-wysiwyg.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads%2F1598398526990-Clipping_VOBBB_900px.jpg

Visions of Bodies Being Burned

Intro
Say the Name
Play
Wytchboard (Interlude)
'96 Neve Campbell (feat. Cam & China)
Something Underneath
Make Them Dead
She Bad
Invocation (Interlude) (with Greg Stuart)
Pain Everyday (with Michael Esposito)
Check the Lock
Looking Like Meat (feat. Ho99o9)
Drove (Interlude)
Eaten Alive (with Jeff Parker & Ted Byrnes)
Body for the Pile (with Sickness)
Enlacing
Secret Piece

oh fuck!!

A fine fine thing.

ho99o9 and jeff parker, together at last

totally didn't know he was a big star in hamilton until recently

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=punrsuK62fM

He's great. It was about 18 months or two years ago when it all came together for me to realize that the Clipping dude, the guy from Hamilton and Rainbow's goofy brother on Black-ish were all the same guy.

xxp - if he were from Minneapolis and not from Oakland, that fact would have been inescapable to you (as it was me)

also, because it was never posted here -- an earlier thing by one of the "other dudes" in clipping

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNt0_uSAJ24

With a cast member of that video being a certain ILX veteran!

xxp - if he were from Minneapolis and not from Oakland, that fact would have been inescapable to you (as it was me)

― horrorshow hidden text (sarahell), Wednesday, August 26, 2020 3:39 PM (forty-eight minutes ago) bookmarkflaglinkp

haha yeah, if only someone from Doomtree or Rhymesayers was in Hamilton

partly though i also knew almost nothing about hamilton in general until it came to disney+

omfg they are manifesting

knuck if you buck the bur......sar

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRP5uAuDAr4

"say the name" sounds massive

My first playthrough, I thought "eh, it's okay"
My second playthrough, I thought "oh actually this bangs a little"
Every subsequent playthrough, I've been "FUCK YES FUCK YES"

same

listening independently from the lyric video was key

I may have spent a large portion of the past two weeks listening to the entire Clipping discography

I know it's not considered The Point of Clipping but "Body and Blood" is an all-time workout classic

"Body and Blood" has become my morning hype-up song

I find the reliance on white-noise-as-percussion in the earlier releases a little one-dimensional at times but I still like them a lot, and of course the rapping is fucking ridiculous

As a vocalist, Diggs has the charisma of a metronome and the expressive range of a sock puppet. Performing in a stiff monotone, he exclusively raps fast or faster, enunciating words with crisp diction but never relishing them or giving them life. “And there may even be some meaning gleaming in the streets that they built/On top of dead bodies in the olden days when the pen was a quill,” he raps on “Intro.” “The best menage is a death menage, agree?/ Chest massage with electric rods for three,” he says on “The Show.” You can appreciate the internal rhymes and inversions, but his flow is so robotic it rarely feels like he appreciates them.

Guess I'm still not over that review.

the same writer semi-panned the last Algiers as well. at last, I have a nemesis

I admit I thought this revive was going to be about their cover of "Tipsy" (really -- it's from the Save Stereogum compilation that came out last week, I think).

Watching Clipping palling around on Twitter with Backxwash has been a joy recently. If you've not heard the Backxwash mini-album yet, btw, you absolutely have to: https://backxwash.bandcamp.com/album/god-has-nothing-to-do-with-this-leave-him-out-of-it

oh my god https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19431-clipping-clppng/

It's possible that a capable MC might have balanced CLPPNG's deficiencies, but Diggs is far from capable. His backpacker-y flow sounds shopworn compared to the radically out-there beats, and his lyricism is lacking overall; hip-hop may be a massively self-referential genre, but the fact that nearly every track has at least one reference to an older Top 40 rap song seems like a grab for borrowed interest. Considering clipping.'s left-of-center style, he’s not particularly weird, and the persona that he projects—smart and misanthropic—is muddled at best. Overall, CLPPNG is chock full of ideas, and if its failure is due to overambitiousness, well, there are worse ways to fail.

what the actual fuck is this

Like I said, I'm still reeling. I suppose this means P4k reviews have retained the potential to offend me in 2020.

And you're quoting a different reviewer, to boot.

every Pitchfork review of their stuff I've found is fucking stupid

yup, they've been dismissed by three different p4kers!

I mean compare that paragraph from the CLPPNG review to this, on "Story 2": https://www.rapanalysis.com/2016/10/clipping-rap-music-analysis/

that was in 2014 when every indie nerd was s'ing their own metaphorical d for not liking backpacker rap

Very glad we've moved past that tbh.

you're also talking about ILX until Kendrick got huge tbf

We're not quite there yet tho. Melomane's time will come.

pitchfork love to play the inauthenticity card when a rapper gets too clever for them

"why, Diggs is no G! he is naught but a theatre kid! what does he know of the Streets?"

The Streets sucks

'Geezers Need Excitement' is pretty damn funny to North American ears tho.

btw, that "Tipsy" cover is here: https://soundcloud.com/user319642724/tipsy-j-kwon-cover

is there any connection btwn "Say the Name" and the new Candyman? if not there really should be

I don't know about new Candyman but I saw somewhere that Diggs had talked about loving the '90s movie.