It’s the Slugger from “On It (Seven Grams).” It’s the Slugger, slowed and throwed. It’s symptomatic of Gaika’s MACHINE, a dim portrayal of inner-city tensions with no bravado or glorification, “from fiction to friction.” – Soe Jherwood By the time “HANNAH” rolls around, a voice that may (or may not) be saying “Are you my angel?” pierces through the off-kilter effervescence of a Dutch E Germ original, a call for redemption that remains unanswered as the tape fizzles out. Dig deeper, though, and there’s a wealth of lyrical disconnect and discontent to be found, from watching turned-off TVs to political unrest - a reminder of the human in posthumanity, like bared teeth concealed beneath a meshy exoskeleton. The future-shock beats clang and rattle with mechanical menace while Gaika’s dancehall-esque vocals are placed atop, occasionally dissolving into the instrumentals themselves and becoming near-indecipherable. MACHINE, his debut mixtape, accelerates the deep-seated urban decay of the Streets into freshly twisted forms, tearing an industrial fissure in the fabric of UK hip-hop and dance music. “Humanity is being digitized” and #EVERYTHINGISGREY under Gaika’s watchful gaze. But unlike the salutations of that rare diamond or that 3.38 million, Badu’s psychedelic hotline is marked by a dial tone rooted in spiritualism, a miscommunication smoothed over by Tibetan singing bowls, the cellphone’s cultural overtones subsumed by the tuning fork’s universal pitch. Exaggerated inhalations, Tyrone and Drake, fear and love. And it’s all plump with desire, contradiction, and inside references. Here and throughout the tape, off-hook tones and disruptive alerts turn into off-the-hook melodies and erupting lyricism. But in her first long-form release since 2010’s incredible New Amerykah Part Two (Return of the Ankh), she soon takes this annoying sound of failure and attunes it to her own “sympathetic vibration,” bending it into sultry frequencies and re-routing its signals to communicate an eyes-closed, oscillating delectation. (Check out last month’s installment here.)Įrykah Badu begins BUT YOU CAINT USE MY PHONE with a busy signal. The focus will primarily be on rap mixtapes - loosely defined here as free (or sometimes simply free-to-stream) digital releases - but we’ll keep things loose enough to branch out if and when we feel it necessary. In this column, we aim to immerse ourselves in this hyper-prolific world and share our favorite releases each month. With a daunting cascade of releases spewing out each day from the likes of DatPiff, LiveMixtapes, Bandcamp, and SoundCloud, it can be difficult to keep up with the overbearing yet increasingly vital mixtape game.
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