Hey, what's this-- an extended wallow in self-pity and self-loathing from a pissy, drug-addicted white rapper who can't stop reliving his terrible childhood? And all of it sounds like a painfully dated dispatch from the era of Insane Clown Posse and Marilyn Manson? That Slim Shady: did he buy Cage's tape and dub over it again?
It's a real shame that Cage's latest, Depart From Me, turned out the way it did. His last record, 2005's Hell's Winter, was a harrowing example of emo-rap, a record that transformed the well-rehearsed details of Cage's traumatic life-- violent and heroin-addicted father, abusive stepfather, a history of drug problems and a tortured stint in a mental institution-- into a compelling showcase for the other thing he shares with Eminem: prodigious rapping abilities and a gift for rendering nightmarish scenarios, like the one in which police rip heroin bricks from the floorboards of Cage's home while his father brandishes a gun at him and his mother, with uncomfortably vivid detail.
Hell's Winter veered off-course only when Cage indulged his unfortunate weakness for Linkin Park-style emo, like "Shoot Frank", which features a mewling nu-metal hook courtesy Glassjaw lead singer Daryl Palumbo. Sadly, Depart From Me seems to have taken "Shoot Frank" as a way forward rather than a dead end, in the process reinforcing the lamentably accurate stereotype of rappers with terrible taste in rock music. Worse, Cage seems to have bottomed out psychologically again, flipping us off with his deliberate lack of effort: "I have nothing left to say, I'd like to share it with you/ If you don't care, is it too bad for me or too bad for you?" goes the chorus to "Nothing Left to Say", the first song on the album.
Lyrically, he's still "cling[ing] to [his] addiction like a kid in swimmies," which is fine; if Clipse can spend a career detailing their addiction to pushing dope, Cage can certainly devote as many albums as he wants to his addiction to doing it, but, as Malice and Pusha T are finding out, if you're going to rap about the same thing over and over again, you better damn well be finding new and better ways to say it. And just as there only so many puns you can build around the words "ki's," "birds," and "snow," Cage is running up against the fact that he's already obsessively detailed this stuff-- his addiction, his deadbeat dad-- with more fervor and invention than he ever musters here. "Beat Kids" is an almost-complete retread of Hell's Winter's "Stripes", right down to the scenes of his wild-eyed, terrified mother. And as far as drug rhymes go, "silly habit, drugs are for kids," just ain't cutting it.
It might help if Cage spent more than half the album rapping, but mostly, he is trying to make his version of an early-80s hardcore album here, shades of Suicidal Tendencies, Circle Jerks, and Rollins-era Black Flag. His success rate roughly equals that of Andre 3000, trying to make Idlewild OutKast's period-blues album. The NOFX-ishly titled "Fat Kids Need an Anthem" sees Cage doing his best impression of Mike Muir's aggrieved-loser narrator on Suicidal Tendencies' "Institutionalized", and the song, a frank and refreshingly funny take on his fluctuating weight and self-image problems, is one of the album's few fleeting moments of real wit: "They say you are what you eat, that means I went from shit to a vegetable! And the worst part about it is, I was happier when I was fat on drugs! I went fantasizing about women to fantasizing about food I can't eat anymore!" But then the song's chorus-- "I WAS A FAT GUUUUUUY! I WAS A BIG, FAT GUUUY!" leaves something to be desired even by the loose standards of 80s punk.
There are one or two moments where Cage manages to bridge the gap between miserable-underground-rapper guy and miserable-suburban-punk-rock guy, and they come when Cage focuses on the kind of small stuff that makes 80s hardcore winning-- girls, mostly, and obnoxious friends asking for too many plus ones at his shows. "Captain Bumout", about wanting the club to empty out so you can talk to that one girl, boasts the album's only great, anthemic chorus. But for every one of those, there are three songs like the title track, where Cage spends four minutes throwing withering insults at a girl who dared to leave him when he suffered a mental breakdown. (Clincher line: "You ruined art for me." Classy.) Like the other white rapper he will never escape comparisons to, Cage exhausts the patience of even his faithful followers at times, and Depart From Me almost reads like a plea to whoever might be left checking for him in 2009.
