Thirty Three Jones | Desktop Site
While I was at work today, I received a mixtape from a Brooklyn rapper named Elucid. I'd seen him mentioned before over at loosie's, but I had never actually heard his music. The rather florid language in the press release for the tape, Smash 'N Grab, caught my attention, though:
"After compulsively snatching up segments from any song that caught his ear, the Queens-born/Brooklyn-living rapper pummels the pirated music until it belongs as much to him as it does to the original artist. By combining his harshly poetic vocals with production stripped from the likes of Johnny Cash, M.I.A., Ratatat, The Black Lips, and Bjork, Elucid has created a unique and frighteningly good mixtape that glints with the beauty of shattered glass -- after a cinder block has been hoisted through it, of course. As avant-garde as this project is, its star is unquestionably Elucid. With vivid lyrics, darkly streetwise wit, and a subversive political bent, he makes the menagerie of music yanked from divergent sources sound cohesive."
While I admittedly haven't had a whole lot of exposure to most of the artists listed above - though I did cop M.I.A.'s first album a couple of years ago - I have to admit I was intrigued by the idea of someone attempting to rap alongside Johnny Cash's God's Gonna Cut You Down and Bjork's Army of Me. Not being intimately familiar with the source material, though, I suspect some of the novelty factor of combining hip hop with these other songs did not have the same impact on me as it would with, say, a Johnny Cash fanatic.
With that said, this is a pretty good mixtape. The concept's original, the beats are not at all what you'd expect to hear a BK rapper spitting over, and unlike most other mixes that use songs from other genres, Elucid leaves a good portion of the original vocals intact. The end result is a mixtape that is hard to classify - it's not 100% hip hop, but it should definitely appeal to hip hop audiences. Best of all, it's free, so go download it.
Two tracks from Elucid's Smash 'N Grab:
Veni Vedi Vici
Cut You Down
You can download Elucid's full mixtape over at rappersiknow.com.
For more info, stop by his MySpace page.
9/05/2007 8:45:29 AM posted by Fresh