A quick synopsis of 1997: Wu-Tang Forever, Kool Keith's Sex Style, Three 6 Mafia's Chapter 2: World Domination, and Massive Attack's Mezzanine could be found in the "New Item" sale racks at Sam Goody, theaters were showing Mortal Kombat: Annihilation, and SpaceGhostPurrp was celebrating his sixth birthday. Though he was only in elementary school at the time, the rapper/producer's no-fi mixtapes have largely sounded like bedroom transmissions from an especially creative kid paying tribute to this era with only the crudest computer technology.
But SpaceGhostPurrp is more about re-imagination than revival. Most of the tracks on his latest release, Mysterious Phonk, are previously released on some form, but now that he shares a label with Bon Iver and Deerhunter, you can hear "Grind on Me", "Been Fweago", and the "sequel" to "Suck a Dick for 2011" rendered with high-grade fidelity, giving listeners their best chance to judge for themselves whether SpaceGhostPurrp is for real.
SpaceGhostPurrp owns his niche, and one consequence of this is that the predominant atmosphere on the record is isolation: SGP's voice is the only one on the record, and all of the beats are his. The increase in production values allows you to hear how each element mirrors the other. The voice and production are slow, simple, and enunciated with a menacing calm, yet "Bringing the Phonk" and "Get Yah Head Bust" demonstrate his ability to diversify within his narrow range of tempo and timbre, ramping up rhythmic activity and intensity with metallic snares and modem-like buzz.
Purrp's near-subliminal, ultimately utilitarian rapping recalls non-MC rappers like Tricky more than similarly-minded peers like A$AP Rocky or Main Attrakionz, but while Maxinquaye spoke to more imposing paranoia (of the government, of the oncoming millennium, of creeping schizophrenia), Mysterious Phonk projects an acceptance of lonerhood. Even so, SGP's ability to create a quarantined universe explains why Mysterious is often absorbing rather than oppressive. His P.O.V. has a teenaged sort of magnetism: drugs are consumed as a means of combating boredom rather than expanding one's mind. Self-worth is determined by one's ability to satisfy women sexually. The worth of others is assessed on loyalty and trust, and the morality of the world broken is down into a tacit "us against them" dynamic.
It might be difficult to hear music this grimly colored as being youthful even though he's prone to lines like "I hate this fucking world/ Y'all can suck my dick" as a mission statement or "Taking out my anger/ Your body in danger" as a come-on. And yet, there's something oddly wizened about Mysterious Phonk. The album reflects the resigned tone of a self-identifying nerd who merely tolerates institutions like school and jobs until he can escape into comic books, video games, and hip-hop CDs.
Inititally, the record may seem almost intimidating in its cohesiveness-- its 14 tracks achieve mostly the same effect in slightly different ways. But even if these tracks aren't familiar to you from previous mixtapes, each asserts itself largely with same qualities that have defined 4AD's roster since the beginning: mesmerizing use of reverb and negative space, hooks derived from the phonetic and rhythmic qualities of words rather than their meaning, constructions of alternate realities.
The video for "Tha Black God" is a perfect visualization of Mysterious Phonk's universe, a grayscale vision of 90s gangsta tropes, combining the codeine-sipping pace of Southern rap, New York's subzero bleakness, and the overarching vulgarity that's come to define the hip-hop of his home state of Florida. There's never a track where all three of these factors aren't present, but Mysterious Phonk' range comes from skewing that ratio: the coiled intensity of "Osiris of the East" exists somewhere between Hell on Earth and Hell Hath No Fury, whereas "Suck a Dick 2012" and "Grind on Me" could pass for extremely defiled versions of bump and grind R&B from the That's My Jam collection. While some might find issue with the limitations of Purrp's rapping, the sentiments of standouts like "Tha Black God" ("I got to have the world in my palms/ I'm a god, I'm no longer a black man") and "Grind on Me" ("Grind on me/ I got your bitch on my dick, bitch") sound perfectly reasonable placed back-to-back.
Even with its almost total divergence from commercial viability, the most forbidding aspect of Mysterious Phonk is how it imports the misogyny of its influences wholesale. SpaceGhostPurrp's self-preservative RVIDXR KLVN philosophies can result in feasibly admirable, backhanded wisdom about safe sexual practices, and the worship of the female form. But while women are often anointed as "goddesses" on Mysterious Phonk, they're referred to as "bitch" about 10 times as often. And whereas "Suck a Dick 2012" could conceivably be read as a pre-civilized, utopian vision of sexual freedom, lyrics like "open up your mouth, bitch and swallow it" are more indicative of the fact that you're listening to a song called "Suck a Dick 2012".
Of course, all of the above makes the same point about SpaceGhostPurrp one way or another, and that's that Mysterious Phonk is not for everyone. This is ultimately a good thing. While it doesn't sound like a revelation (or a revolution) in the same way Death Grips' The Money Store, Tyler, The Creator's Goblin, or Shabazz Palaces' Black Up do, it's still heartening to see atypical hip-hop benefactors acting out of belief in the weirdest, unprecedented mutations of hip-hop rather than desperation for the lowest common denominator or a bygone eras. A rapper doesn't have to be everything to everyone at once. And if you happen to be on SpaceGhostPurrp's wavelength, there's pretty much nothing else that will suffice.
