The textures of Elucid’s music—the sandpaper grate, the demons groaning to life on the low end, the stabs at spiritualism, the stabs of Björk’s sampled voice—are more varied, and layered more densely, than those that bubble on rap radio today. In fact, you would probably have to go back nearly three decades to find a precedent in the genre’s mainstream for the New York rapper’s sound. The closest analog might be Fear of a Black Planet, one of Public Enemy’s twin masterpieces. That record, released in 1990, was manic, cacophonous. The Bomb Squad, who produced the album in its entirety, shifted moods and tempo with a striking clarity of vision; they also sampled nearly 150 songs, according to best estimates. In the years that followed, that labyrinthine style not only fell out of creative vogue, but became vastly more difficult after a New York district court ruled against Warner Bros. and Biz Markie, codifying new rules around sampling.
Elucid does not exist in rap’s mainstream. He’s also not sanding down his messaging for megaphones the way Chuck D often did. His writing is full of cryptic asides and rhetorical double-backs, closed loops and dead ends. In 1990, the idea of rap as reportage was novel to much of white America; in 2018, Elucid is making music that seems to have internalized and processed not only hundreds of years of American history and racism, but the collapse of both into bad-faith, contextless internet squabbles.
His music isn’t about the internet in any obvious way, but it could only be the product of a world where East New York real estate and Nazi recruiters and lupus fundraisers slip past you, one after another on an infinite scroll. On a song called “Obama Incense,” from his remarkable 2016 LP Save Yourself, he details a yard littered with “crack stems and scratch-off tickets,” blows dust off a kalimba, watches pimps kill time by writing Yelp reviews of diners, sees “babies wave guns out in plain view,” then gets to the vein: “You want it all, but it can’t save you.” Where that album took aim at the small- and capital-G Gods who claimed to see through that postmodern fog, his latest, Shit Don’t Rhyme No More, comes across as an urgent attempt to give order, in small increments, to an orderless time. It often addresses its subjects obliquely, but that’s when Elucid, as a writer, is at his best; as he raps on “RZA Taught Me”: “If I can make you really feel it, I won’t have to explain shit.”
Mostly self-produced (with assists from Messiah Musik, August Fanon, and Ohbliv), Shit Don’t Rhyme No More is at turns languid (“RZA”) or fevered (“1010 Wins”). In his rhymes, Elucid similarly flits back and forth between things you can touch, taste and smell, and the vaguely metaphysical—the pronunciation tics his elders might have had, the shoes that speak Cantonese. The songwriting eludes most conventional structure, and is rich with style and detail. Take “Bad Credit Is Better Than No Credit,” where he throws you into a scene on I-95 South; he’s the “so-called poet negro motorist” who’s “lifted up in spirit by praying black mothers.” Or see the sex scene on “Lambskin”: “You could ride my face with your bonnet on/I wanna fuck you in a durag, let the cape fly/I want my scalp greased while the fish fry.” The song itself, though, sounds like a nightmare, like hell is just below a frameless mattress somewhere.
In addition to his solo work, Elucid raps with Billy Woods as Armand Hammer. Last year, the duo put out an excellent record called ROME, which functions largely as an examination of how power works at the tiniest and most macro levels, from police investigations to parking garage shootouts to white nationalist Facebook groups. By contrast, Shit Don’t Rhyme No More skews slightly more internal: “Rick Ross Moonwalk,” for example, plays like a prayer, a humble request for support and loyalty. It’s a shrewd way to round out the record—poise is one of Elucid’s defining traits, and a lapse into such vulnerability gives the I-95 trips different stakes. And so you can loop back, like Elucid does so fluidly in his writing, and take another look at Fear of a Black Planet. There’s nothing on Shit Don’t Rhyme as plain as, say, “Day to day, America eats its young.” What there is instead is that same idea refracted in a thousand different directions.
