Gun Hill Road by Infesticons (Review)
Way back in 1991 or so, my 10th grade ears were first being wonderfully bent by my exposure to black AM radio. Bass, beats, repetition, and bad-ass lyrics set me off on a life long love affair with hip-hop. One problem, no matter how intoxicating the SOUND was, I definitely couldn’t identify with a lot of what they were communicating. I’m not even talking politics or racial issues here, I just couldn’t identify with partying all the time or dressing to impress. But hey, when you’re being turned on like Georgia Power to stuff as potent as Public Enemy, Tribe Called Quest, Ultramagnetic MCs, Leaders of the New School, or Erik B. and Rakim, who cares that you don’t dress like they do, have nearly the success with women, or get in gunfights like some people get in conversations.
Fast forward. It’s 2000, and Phil Sheridan is writing things in Magnet Magazine like, “When Ronald MacDonald is busting rhymes about Big Macs, the art form has been co-opted to the point of irrelevance.” Thank God and Mike Ladd [aka Infesticon #0] for this record so we can all scream a hearty “BOOOOOOLSHIT!!!!!” to that statement.
This disk loosely revolves around a storyline involving the evil Poof Na Na and his robots [the Majesticons] bent on the jiggification of the universe. [the record’s definition of jiggification: “[sic]…a world only for the majestic people, the beautiful ones, no room for the wistful ones, the iron horse riders, the foot shuffling footshufflers…”] Ok, got the idea so far? Style-obsessed cool people versus the substantive, unwashed, but talented geeks.
Poof Na Na doesn’t stand a chance in the long run. Mike Ladd’s got beats bigger than Puffy Combs’s phone sex bill. Whereas some MCs have less verbal skill than your average Wheel of Fortune contestant, the Infesticon crew rhymes about “the Jedi with the red eye,” J.Mascis and Jackie Onassis, quotes The Day The Earth Stood Still [courtesy of Liza Jessie Peterson’s goddess-like performance on “Figurine Theme”], and readily admits that their “beats talk like Nick Cave, but don’t get you laid.” But they’re equally quick to declaim that they’re “not bohemians stuck on some avant garde shit,” and right they are. This is no stilted, post-anything academic excuse for a record. This is real hip-hop, black science fiction in the tradition of Parliament/Funkadelic and Sun Ra.
Written by Pearson Greer.