For someone whose musical sensibilities were largely shaped by the minimalism of hip-hop, it's hard for me to even say the words "concept album" without wincing and imagining the elves and druids of prog-rock past. The only thing less palatable than a concept album is an annotated concept album that explicitly states each song's plot and theme. So when I cracked open the new Lif and discovered the aforementioned attributes in brazen attendance, it was difficult to fight back the urge to toss it into the trash bin. However, after giving I Phantom a few spins, I must say that Lif has managed to transcend the gimmicks and wankery that generally mar this kind of grand opus, and emerge with his strongest offering yet.
Lif's success can largely be attributed to his focus on themes that other, more timid emcees wouldn't even touch; the album tackles the dehumanizing dysfunction of capitalism and its dramatic effect upon a b-boy everyman, including a dissection of commerce's influence upon art, family and spirituality. The phantom of the title is the individual personality/soul that has been drowned in a flood of media-fueled consumerism, empty labor, and abandoned relationships. Explaining his themes in a recent interview with SOHH, Lif commented, "Our identity is essentially wiped out in many ways. Under the code of professionalism, you do not bring your slang or culture into a place of business... there's a code of conduct which wipes out any flare that we have as individuals."
The plot of I Phantom has four acts: an initial dream state where Lif is killed and resurrected; a second act where Lif awakens and struggles with poverty and social alienation; a third where Lif achieves financial success only to find it emotionally and spiritually bankrupt; and a final, surreal postscript where he and his friends lyrically navigate the apocalypse. As you can imagine, this sure as fuck ain't Nellyville. In fact, the album's thematic and narrative scope has more in common with Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections than it does with a hip-hop album.
In the first two songs, Lif cops a gun from Cannibal Ox's Vast Aire and is killed while robbing a store. "Return of the B-Boy", the album's third track, finds Lif resurrected as a hip-hop messiah. "Return of the B-Boy" is a nearly eight-minute epic that is the most lyrically and musically accomplished track Def Jux has ever released. Beneath a noisy mosaic of turntable scratches, squealing effects and bass-heavy beats, El-P drops Guru rapping, "Hip-hop, Im'a bring it back, hip-hop..." Then, as the noise reaches a crescendo, the beat drops and the track transforms into a fast and funky boom bap revival, replete with James Brown grunts and an '89-style fast rap.
On "Mic Check," Lif declares, "How the fuck did you figure you could interfere with a music so potent?" "Mortal Kombat" style, Lif steps up and destroys the Pharisees, Uncle Toms, and Jiggas who've transformed hip-hop from a culturally relevant lifeforce to an aural billboard for excess and self-destruction. In a particularly vivid confrontation with a subpar emcee, Lif raps, "I step to him slow and look deep in his eye/ Say the prison is within 'cuz he's living a lie."
The song ends suddenly, and a ringing alarm carries over to provide a segue to the next song where Lif awakens to find himself preparing to go to the "slave quarters" where he toils for a "trifling hourly wage of $6.50." In the spiritually arid atmosphere of "Live from the Plantation", Lif is confronted with the working man's irony: "Life is a gift to be enjoyed every second.../ Yet I find myself looking at the clock, hoping for the day to fly by." Once again, the song shifts in the middle and we're treated to a beatbox breakdown that sounds like Doug E Fresh remixed by Autechre. The juxtaposition between the b-boy heroism of "Return of the B-Boy" and the everyday struggle of "Live From the Plantation" reveals that the tensions provided by the crippling minutiae of real life are just as dramatic and compelling as any superhero theatrics.
After failing at work on "Live from the Plantation", and being socially spurned due to his economic condition in "Status", Lif turns his eyes to the cash prize in "Success" and becomes a professional slave who's "forced to give [his] life away while [he's] earning a living." Putting forth the professional's mantra, Lif raps, "Smile, don't be too proud, too wild/ You can suffer, but just don't be too loud." Fellow Def Jukie Aesop Rock guests on the track, returning to many of the same themes he dealt with on last year's Labor Days. In a stinging chorus, Aesop raps, "Daddy had a name tag that said 'busy working'/ Mommy had a milk carton that said 'missing person'/ John had a new baseball glove, but nobody to learn with/ The oil left the water and the water kept searching."
Over the course of the next two songs, our narrator sees his family dissolve due to his workaholism. After divorcing his first wife, the narrator remarries and focuses on having the perfect (read: fictional) family and ignores his first, unsuccessful family. The subsequent pressure to succeed causes his daughter from the second marriage to commit suicide. On "The Now", Lif flips the script and raps from the perspective of the abandoned child from the first marriage. It's a creative and revelatory point of view that showcases Lif's incredible narrative skills.
Unfortunately, Lif abandons the concrete details of his narrative on "Iron Helix" and answers the question as to "how we got here, meaning how did we [get to] this point in human existence where these types of social ills are common." For the next song, "Earthcrusher", Lif provides "a visual for the nuclear holocaust." Um... Druids, anyone?
Still, Lif's point has been made, and the last tracks' interesting, yet misguided forays into ponderous sci-fi don't ruin Lif's masterpiece. On his previous EPs, Emergency Rations and Enter the Collosus, Lif showed a lot of potential. I Phantom is the big payoff, the album that we knew Lif had in him. While there are those who accuse Lif of being unpatriotic and overly didactic, a searing social critique in this time of unchecked nationalism and media disinformation is not only refreshing, but absolutely necessary. Whether out of fear, complacency or self-absorption, there have been far too few voices of dissent to emerge from the world of independent music. That Lif is willing to be the odd man out-- especially in a time when publicly questioning the actions of our administration is considered rote, despite the fact that we need it now more than ever-- is exemplary. 'Nuff respect due.
