When David Lynch died this January, my life became filled, even more than usual, with short-form videos. These were clips from his movies and TV shows, the little weather reports he self-recorded in his final years, that wonderful footage of Angelo Badalamenti demonstrating how he and Lynch composed Laura Palmer’s theme from Twin Peaks. There were also pieces of Lynch’s interviews, usually circumspect and deliberately opaque. But one montage punctured that air of inscrutability: a cut of the director saying, over and over through the years, that failing to write down an idea and then forgetting it was one of life’s great horrors. He almost always punctuated this thought with the same sentence: “You want to commit suicide.”
About halfway through Neighborhood Gods Unlimited, Open Mike Eagle experiences a version of this: “I dropped my cellphone and it got ran over,” he raps, with the mournfulness of someone recounting a dying friend’s last days. “Didn’t even see it, now it’s in a bunch of pieces.” He croons about the “priceless data written on my machine” and says that his lost voice memos could have been the skeletons for “like eight or nine songs.” At one point he compares the infamous floods that destroyed hundreds of beats in RZA’s basement—then hedges, self-conscious. “I should’ve put it in the cloud,” he concedes. The song is called “ok but I’m the phone screen.”
Over the last decade, Eagle—a Chicago native who moved to Los Angeles and became a key part of the legendary avant-garde collective Project Blowed’s second generation—has emerged as one of the most incisive chroniclers of the ways the internet has fractured our existence. On the opening song from 2014’s Dark Comedy, he was dismayed that the banal details of his life and habits as a consumer would be valuable to anyone; a few tracks later he was rapping, tongue firmly in cheek, about the new “golden age,” where synthetic opiates are as readily available as “bad spoken word”—and where you can stream Twin Peaks on an iPhone, all that interdimensional dread shrunk down and made to lag and buffer. At one point in “phone screen,” he compares the experience of losing his notes and voice memos to an image that could’ve come right out of that show: a man “scratched up, trying to climb walls in a dream.”
Neighborhood Gods is conceived as a dispatch from a fictional cable channel with a budget so small that it can only broadcast for one hour a week. And it does convey the texture of that medium, full of ads for wonder drugs and the harebrained barbershop theories from opener “woke up knowing everything”: chemtrails, freemasons, Gatorade laced with mercury. But the album’s spirit is unmistakably, claustrophobically online. It’s fixated on the ways parts of us are being stripped away and sold back for a price, be it literal or psychic; on “michigan j. wonder,” he raps about being his “own Dr. Frankenstein,” stitching together parts of his spine and flesh that had gone missing. It’s a disorienting way to live, and its roots stretch back decades, even centuries. But at his most determined moments, Eagle outlines a plan to claw back a comprehensive sense of self. Later on “michigan,” he repurposes an old line about “by-myself meetings,” first rapped by Cappadonna on Ghostface’s Ironman, a masterpiece made in the wake of those floods, when little bits of the artists had seemingly been lost forever.
Though there are pockets of brightness, the melancholy of Kenny Segal’s “contraband” and Child Actor’s “phone screen” are Neighborhood Gods’ prevailing mood. (Child Actor handles nearly half the record, and Segal contributes two beats alongside underground mainstays like K-Nite and August Fanon.) This sadness is not self-pitying—what it communicates, above all else, is desperation. “contraband,” which is subtitled “the plug has bags of me,” is Eagle’s organizing metaphor: an itchy, fiendish consumer muttering, “What you got there?/Let me see” about the little pieces of himself available for illicit purchase. The image is tabled; affixed to the following song is a coda that continues this frantic search: “How do I get some more me?/How do I get some more me?”
Eagle is a sly, adaptive songwriter; his Blowed chops are smuggled inside irresistible melodies and a singing voice that has grown more emotive and elastic over the course of his career. (“me and aquil stealing stuff from work” even channels his longtime friend and collaborator Serengeti.) On this album’s paralyzing second half, he slips in and out of sometimes wildly disparate vocal modes to communicate that flickering dread. When he recounts a dream about a seemingly omniscient baby, he does so in a regimented syllable pattern that feels, uncannily, like a downward spiral; that the image of this baby crawling across a ceiling and Eagle’s self-description as a “random in the ghetto” are mapped onto the same grid makes rips in the fabric of reality and the crushing banality of daily life seem indistinguishable from one another.
The channeling of Lynch is not the only thing Neighborhood Gods has in common with Dark Comedy. That latter album ends with “Big Pretty Bridges,” a missive from a hotel room in Albuquerque during an unexpected lull in a rap tour. That song is its own quiet horror, shot through with the fear that we are all incurably atomized, the gaps between us unbridgeable. Here, Eagle returns with that song’s musical twin, the Segal-produced closer “unlimited skull voices.” This time, the problem is the opposite: He can’t shut off the chorus of voices fighting for space inside his mind. No barrier—not the drywall of a Holiday Inn, not the quarter-inch of bone around our brains—is enough to keep us severed.
Ten years ago, Eagle articulated this central struggle: “It’s hard being brick-and-mortar creatures/My thoughts have to fit in phones and through computer speakers.” What was once a problem of reformatting has evolved, grotesquely, into a sort of soft posthumanism. So he fishes a SIM card out of a destroyed machine to find that it’s dead, covered in dust; he communes with the spirits through the cheap vertical blinds of L.A. apartments; he buys himself back little by little.
Occasionally, he grows resolute. “relentless hands and feet” is a celebration of the industriousness that has kept Eagle and his comrades alive. At one point, he raps that “the fact that we exist is magic.” In context, this is a statement of gratitude: Who could believe we overcame all the forces conspiring against us? But as Neighborhood Gods Unlimited plummets to that cacophonous conclusion, the line reverberates. You strip the value judgment from it and remember the things you’ve learned to associate with magic: misdirection, sleight of hand. An illusion.
