Serengeti is a man who likes to wear masks. Earlier this year he donned his favorite disguise for a fourth time on an EP, rapping from the perspective of the titular dumpy Chicago mook named Kenny Dennis who loves brats, the Bears, and the Bulls, and who would kill to spend some time with Brian Dennehy. Serengeti's given name is David Cohn, and he has given multiple interviews in which he says that he likes rapping as Dennis because it's easier to be happy when you're in character. On his new record, C.A.R., we see the flipside of that, with characters that don't stick around because bad things keep happening to them. For instance, Kenny Dennis loves Juelz, his faithful wife. On C.A.R.'s "Uncle Traum", the man who was cuckolding the narrator shoots the narrator's wife. It's not as fun to be that narrator as it is to grow a huge mustache and rap about Chicago sports.
Traum's nephew isn't unique in his troubles with women. 'Geti's characters are frequently lovelorn, rejected by the ones they need the most. On "Talk To Me", a disappointed, wannabe scuba coach repeatedly asks, 'Where you been honey? Where you been baby?" Turns out his wife is missing too.
Elsewhere, the sadness doesn't have much to do with women. "Cold" details a bleak Chicago existence. There's "dandruff everywhere/ Kids got colds/ Dishes in the sink, place smells like mold." The details are tremendously well-realized and heartbreakingly specific. On "Peekaboo", a 12-year old 'Geti takes pictures of his neighbor undressing while she does yoga, until her brother Brad catches him and breaks his shoulder. It's astonishing how much we learn about the girl, whose name is Gwen, her father a soap salesman, along with a host of other little touches that bring the simple song to life.
This gift for detail is most often used for 'Geti to reimagine himself with a new identity, whether the essential change be in location, occupation, or name. The ethos is most succinctly expressed on the ironically titled "Geti Life": "Quick, let me get drunk as fast as I can, so I can fall asleep and pretend to be a different man."
On the Kenny Dennis EP, we saw a successful escape into a stable new persona. But the characters on C.A.R. don't have the same luck. They're eternally shapeshifting, trying to find something that feels right. This inclination is amped up to hyperspeed on "Chill", where the narrator morphs a dozen times over, going from dentistry, to banking, to critiquing films, becoming a whoremongering novelist, a stone-carving gnome fanatic, a music student at city college in Hollis, a Bedouin-bedding heroin addict, and a vegan, amongst a handful of other personas. None of them works out. 'Geti lopes wryly through the identities up until the moment the song ends.
The album's centerpiece is "Go Dancin'", a song which combines the romantic travails and identity shifts of the other tracks into one, viscerally catchy and deeply painful rant. The structure of the track is simple: On the first verse, 'Geti proposes a bunch of new romantic plans to keep a relationship alive. As many of his suggestions are absurd, it's clear that they're not going to happen, anchored as they are by that cliché, relationship-renewing promise to go dancing. On the second verse, things haven't worked and 'Geti bitterly informs the girl of the things that he will do alone. It's clear that he isn't going to do these things either. Some infernal alarm clock is going off in the background the entire time and at the end of the song, in the back of the mix, some despairing soul screams, "we're not immortal," over and over again. Though this might sound almost comically depressing, the fact is that many of these details are not evident upon first (or second or third) listen. What comes across most strongly is Serengeti's laid-back, spoken style and a set of a set of mellow, fuzzy beats, many of which sound as if *Odelay-*era Beck and *Guero-*era Beck met and co-produced a rap album.
Anticon in-house producer Odd Nosdam and DJ/producer Jel handle the beats, and they do a great job. "Greyhound" is made up of faded little scraps of melody wilting atop a dirty drumbeat, occasionally breaking for block party sirens and scratching from Jel. All these instrumental touches help to disguise Serengeti's disguises and make the album into an engaging, laid-back summer listen-- which makes the subjects of the songs all the more enthralling when you finally unpick them.
'Geti attempts perhaps the most unworkable transformation on the song "Amnesia". After the rapper describes his dream of being a man named Peter Panagos who owns a street cart, he closes the song out by repeatedly describing Panagos as "a man of the people." Serengeti will never be a man of the people, at least not while making albums like C.A.R.. It's too sad, too heavy, and too oblique. But C.A.R. is an excellent, devastating record, a chronicle of the amiable pessimism and occasional nihilism of a rapping Bukowski who can't seem to find a way out of the condition in which he finds himself.
