Clipping - Midcity (noise rap)

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.

hell yes:

https://youtu.be/tq-hODfHPf0

METRONOMIC

Cam and China sound so fucking badass on this goddamn

um hell yes

https://www.instagram.com/p/CFxEnNSgn_6/

my 6yo just now, "What's the name of that song about visions of bodies being burned?"

all these gangster rapsters or whatever they're called, putting Satan into the minds of our young

I'm back on The Deep EP and it boggles my mind that people are interpreting "y'all remember when you had to let 'em breathe" is a line about the Drexciyans showing the surface dwellers mercy in a song that ends with a giant tidal wave on an EP that ends with a song called "Drownt" using slang that is most commonly used to describe shooting someone, ie putting holes in them to ventilate them

hell yes

https://youtu.be/c0RYIIzsvFw

I really hate these lyric videos but every single so far has been incredible

They're just that good.

uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh I'm levitating

Also I just found this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qd97k4Jr80

Daveed just casually killing it there like it's nbd, jesus

That new song is unbelievable

DJP you are going to lose your fucking mind when you hear the whole album, holy crow

wall to wall bangers

whiney's clipping profile is really good

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/19/arts/music/clipping-daveed-diggs-chapter-319.html

also:

“There Existed an Addiction to Blood” closes with a cover of the composer Annea Lockwood’s “Piano Burning,” for which the group set a piano on fire in the desert, recording the crackles and pops on 17 microphones. Eight mics did not survive the session, including an Audio-Technica 825 that Snipes had since college.

“We were listening to that channel, and it was just crackling,” Hutson said. “We were like, ‘Oh my God, look at it, it’s on fire.’”

bravo, Whiney

Thanks, man!

Good piece, yeah.

good read brah

This album is relentless!