Hip hop has become mainstream America, walking hand in hand with big country nashville and American Idol pop as a big three headed fashion, music and lifestyle brand. Hip hop is now a pallette for lifestyle choices, available in any flavor. But that hasn't always been the case. At one time hip hop was the DIY voice of independent African American MCs and DJs trying to escape poverty. Now hip hop is anything from Jack White rapping on “Lazaretto” to Blake Shelton’s “Boys Round Here” to poppy R&B radio commercial hits.
There's a fair amount of discussion recently about the state of hip hop among its players. Brand Nubian's Lamar recently bemoaned the state of hip hop in XXL questioning "how much water can you add to the whisky without getting drunk?" Lamar is really talking about hip hop aesthetics here, about country rap (Rebelcore) and rock rap, and Macklemore's cross cultural messages directed towards LGBT youth. Kid Cudi told Arsenio Hall that hip hop is holding the African American community back, referring to the negativity that hip hop has planted in the minds of the youth by glamorizing money and material wealth and gang violence. The Roots’ Questlove questioned the impact of selling hip hop culture as a package in a four part essay for Vulture. Questlove stated "Once hip hop is everywhere it is nowhere.” The danger of a culture gone mainstream is that it becomes commodity not culture, and the messages become a T-shirt. It becomes invisible. What the three aforementioned artists have in common is that they see a music genre that has been exploded and exploited so that it doesn’t resemble the music or the culture that gave it life back in the 1970s. Enter Shawn Dix, aka Carnage 45, a lover of hip hop music, and a living testament to the fact that music can change lives for the better. He makes music that Lamar would approve of, and has used hip hop as a vehicle for change that both Kid Cudi and Questlove would approve of. In short, Carnage 45’s latest effort is a true hip hop record.
Carnage’s third LP, Elite Breed, finds the MC wearing his hip hop history on his sleeve, delivering an album that embraces the past and looks forward. It’s an album that offers conflicting musical tones; lush backing vocals back Carnage’s tough tight rhymes. The music crafted here is like two arms wrestling, sugar and spice competing for the dominant flavor. Carnage (his name refers to the Carnage left behind when he takes the mic) keeps the message positive (“...I’d rather hear about who you motivated not who you led astray...”), and draws on his personal work ethic to ground the songs on the album.
Elite Breed is laden with Machiavellian tropes of crown and princes, kings and queens, and rising from the ashes to the top. And Carnage has risen from nothing. “...from a little country town” (from “Reflecting Outro”) to hip hop success. Hard work has always been one of Carnage’s central themes, and Elite Breed finds Carnage in a reflective mood about his life, the life of his loved ones, and the life of hip hop music. Hypnotic R&B beats, rap battle bragging, and rising from nothing to become successful in his craft are the DNA of the record.
Elite Breed opens with “Standing Alone” which has Carnage dissing and dismissing those that have tried to bring him down over the years, while reinforcing the central theme of sticking with your dreams and working hard to get there. He could be talking about rap music in general here, when he raps “experience new things, y’all in a routine” over backing vocals that come out of a hipster’s world record dream; a honeyed female voice ahhing and humming. The track “Pawn to a King” encapsulates Carnage’s vision of coming up through hip hop’s ranks to find success, personal freedom of expression, and the master of his world, in Carnage’s case the 757 area code. “Pawn” even includes the club ready chorus “I came up.”
Carnage 45 wears his hip hop history on his sleeve, and has produced an album that recalls its history and looks ahead. “Monday Morning Dreams” recalls West Coast gangsta rap when Carnage tells how his uncle and friend were killed in a drive by. But Carnage isn't hyping this violence, nor glamorizing the violence or the lifestyle for that matter. Carnage would rather rap about something else other than senseless murder, but violence is something both he and America can not completely escape. At the end of the album in “Reflecting Outro” Carnage rhymes “I could have been another statistic dead or locked up, instead I’m Langston Hughes part two --I’m second to none” over layered beats and R&B samples.
The album is produced by a slew of collaborators and the beats are hypnotic head nodding, and are layered with a variety of samples and sound effects (the gunshots, for example, on “Monday Morning Dreams” would feel at home on a vintage NWA or Ice-T record, TuPac--whom many young music listeners do not know--is sampled). The overall musical effect is one of tension, almost mellow, at times, reflecting the 757’s laid back atmosphere. The backing tracks offer great contrast to Carnage’s gritty lyrics, such is the case with “The Overview” which finds Carnage laying rhymes over scratches and jazz clarinet riffs, and “Street Poetry” which features sampled piano riffs to float Carnage’s lyrics depicting poverty and desperation. But Carnage and his house of producers don’t back away from hard beats, “The Overview Goddess Edit” uses big rock synth beats to recraft the song into a stadium shaking, club ripping jam. Carnage and his team of producers sound ready for the summer concert series and the more intimate clubs.
Carnage's struggle through Elite Breed is personal, and throughout the album he hints at dark times, about hitting rock bottom and rising back to the top. His album delivers tales about black on black violence that made me think of what Chuck D said nearly 30 years ago, that rap music was the CNN of Black America. And what Carnage reports on is not just the discord among rappers, but the discord among people at every level, brought on by poverty, prison terms, and generations of disenfranchisement. It is in this way that Carnage 45 delivers a hip hop album that reminds one of hip hop’s roots, it’s golden early years (even the cover art recalls Jodeci’s debut record, and LL Cool J), while looking forward to its future.
You can find links to the downloads, and find more on Carnage 45 here.
Comments