Listening to Company Flow is not a casual experience. "We always drew people down the middle," El-P remarked in an interview with Pitchfork earlier this year. "There were never people who were like 'Eh, it's all right.' It was either 'I wanna find those guys and beat them senseless because their crazy noise is hurting me' or 'This is fucking incredible.'" But despite their divisive reputation, Company Flow had an important role as one of the last crucial bridges between the East Coast hardcore battle rap of the 1990s and the deep-end abstraction that was to follow in the transition from underground hip-hop to "indie rap". It's the kind of rap that was out-there enough to be aggressively polarizing, yet true enough to the game that no less a classicist than DJ Premier co-signed it.
Looking back at the tracks that first appeared on 1996's Funcrusher EP and the additional material that supplemented it on Funcrusher Plus a year later, you can hear where many of those space-rap acolytes of the late 90s got their motivation (even if they frequently picked up their verbosity without retaining their b-boy bonafides). But you can also hear the precedents, harbored in the grimy beats and cipher-based shit-talk that has a stylistic younger-brother kinship with the likes of Organized Konfusion, D.I.T.C., and first-wave Wu-Tang. Now, after a few years in Rawkus-entangled out-of-print limbo, Funcrusher Plus has been reclaimed by Definitive Jux, brought back in a no-frills yet still-essential reissue that serves as a valuable reminder of how advanced MC/producers El-P and Bigg Jus and DJ Mr. Len were at the time-- and, well, now.
If you're more familiar with their solo work, Funcrusher Plus might be a bit of a surprise lyrically. There are a few signs of the personal details that'd inform El-P's later material-- "Last Good Sleep", in particular, is a vivid, stomach-turning account of growing up being kept awake by domestic violence-- and subtle hints at the more culturally focused material Bigg Jus would develop in his later career, most clearly in the recollections of his graf-artist days in "Lune TNS". But for the most part, they're on some wall-to-wall battle-rap punchline business, and it's crafty, bewildering, repeat-rewind material. There's a defiantly sick sense of humor all throughout Funcrusher Plus, starting with the anti-child-molester safety record intro on opening track "Bad Touch Example" and extending through El and Jus' punchlines, which mash up pop-culture references, conspiracy theories, threats of physical trauma and independent, anti-industry broadsides into a mutant strain of hyper-crowded lyricism that borders on information overload.
They're never content to lay an obvious, straightforward metaphor on the table; where average MCs might claim they "shine like a light bulb," Bigg Jus' showcase verse on "Silence" has him "encased in a glass dome, I pull mikes like filaments/ I'm tungsten, light within that causes somethin'." If that reads like a parody of backpacker wordiness, on record it sounds like verbal swordsmanship. Other punchlines are a bit more to-the-point but no less audacious: "I see through pussy like the invisible woman" (El-P on "Blind"); "MCs couldn't hang if they was lynched by the Grand Dragon" (Bigg Jus on "8 Steps to Perfection"); "Even when I say nothing it's a beautiful use of negative space" (El-P on "The Fire in Which You Burn"). But even more pivotal to their style than their punchlines is the way they're thrown at you: relentlessly, with a minimum of setup, weaving between clarity and abstraction until the two of them are blurred. Both Jus and El have deliveries that switch from traditional on-the-beat flow to a manic, hectoring semi-conversational tirade when you least expect it, a technique even more indicative of their anti-commercial stance than their prevalent fuck-a-label rhymes. It's all so dense and serpentine and intricate that pretty much every single attempt to transcribe it has left Funcrusher Plus' Original Hip-Hop Lyrics Archives entries riddled with question marks and mistakes. Twelve years and dozens upon dozens of listens after first buying it, I'm still catching new details.
And aside from the lyrical epiphanies you might get from return visits, the other reason to keep Funcrusher Plus on rotation is its production, which boasts some of the most oxidized, tetanus-infected doom-rap beats of the era. With the exception of the nocturnal crystalline funk of the Bigg Jus-produced "Lune TNS" and the frequent scratch contributions from secret weapon DJ Mr. Len, Funcrusher Plus' beats bear the mark of El-P's dusty-but-digital aesthetic, which even back then had the same sort of beautiful-dystopia Blade Runner feel that informed Cannibal Ox's The Cold Vein and his own Fantastic Damage a few years later. "Krazy Kings" and "Blind" explode with horn blasts amputated from brassy jazz and funk and turned into jeering exclamation points, "Legends" has this great woozy-sounding blues-funk lope to it that perfectly evokes late night smokin'-and-drinkin' surliness, and the vertiginous guitar loop in "8 Steps to Perfection" is such a stark example of psychedelic horror that sample-spotters might want to start looking in late-60s LSD-awareness educational films if they want to find its source. But no matter how close the atmosphere gets to nightmarish slasher-flick ugliness or bionic space-age futurism, the beats beneath still knock; everyone remembers that fuck-around-sounding three-note synthesizer riff from "Vital Nerve" but it's laid over this heavy-ass drum break that makes you want to just punch the hell out of something.
Aside from some subtle remastering that thankfully still preserves the album's underground grit (like Bigg Jus' spit-via-intercom presence on "Krazy Kings"), this edition of Funcrusher Plus isn't exactly deluxe. Some fans might be disappointed in this reissue for completist reasons-- it doesn't include "Corners '94", a highlight on the double-LP version, and there's no bonus disc of fan-favorite post-Funcrusher singles like "End to End Burners", "Simple", or "Patriotism". But it's still absolutely necessary, and not just for rights-reclamation reasons. As abrasive and confrontational as this album might've sounded in the Bentley-buying shiny-suit atmosphere of 1997, Funcrusher Plus seems both more vital and more unfathomable now: vital because its independent-minded ethos seems to be getting its long-awaited validation in the post-going-diamond era, and unfathomable because few of its practitioners have been able to extend this far out into the furthest reaches of abstract lyricism and still retain that classic b-boy connection.
