Revenge of the Nerds: Backpack Rap Appreciation Thread

Cmon the voices are mobb to the point of pastiche. The entire atmosphere is mobb pastiche. There's very little wu in there to my mind. Rae lyrically but the blueprint is infamous

Hermetically sealed/vacuum packed definitely fits

i used to love those rawkus compilation albums, stuff like this that i imagine won't be popular here:



this is undeniable



On the subject of Mos Def/Yasiin Bey, what the hell was the 'world passport' he produced when trying not to get thrown out of South Africa?

is it this? http://www.worldservice.org/docpass.html I agree with it in principle of course, but I imagine it's a fairly long shot when dealing with the SA immigration authorities

This says it all.

Corpsey said:

Again I appreciate your POV but I think it's something of a mistake to characterise ka/rocmarci as 'high minded'. I think it's a question of atmospherics rather than intelligence. As for 'purity', a lot of the samples Marciano uses, for example, are hardly the type you'd hear on a Mobb Deep song, e.g.

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idk, marciano's reloaded reminds me of alchemists recent stuff, production-wise.

by high minded, i just mean it seems like connoisseural street rap. id imagine they do think theyre doing something 'purer' than most rappers, 'truer to the art'.

i think you can cleave to a certain east coast 'purism', or a distilled, minimalist version of that sound, even when youre not trying to sound like records in 1994 (i.e like The UN). its a very minimal, aesthetically pure take on boom bap, unadorned, seemingly barely produced. boom bap without the boom.

Corpsey said:

I guess what makes it seem austere is the lack of emotion in either rappers voice. It's all flat-toned, poker-faced, ice-cold. Although actually that DOES make me think of Mobb Deep. On the face of it its joyless. The joy in it comes from the exhilaration you feel (and which they must feel, one assumes) at the intricacy of the rhyme schemes.

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there was a lot of emotion on the infamous. less so as they settled into a certain idea of mobb deep. or maybe that was the samples on the infamous?

But a lot of that emotion was generated by depicting in a chillingly convincing manner, the state of numbness, trauma essentially

(most memorably "I'm only 19 but...")

Leaving aside sonics I think that was their big contribution. New York winters, dead friends, crack zombies, skunk and gin as anaesthetic etc

yeah fair point. it was half scary, half vulnerable (again maybe it was just the samples that lent it that sort of tragedy/pathos, idk). like hell on earth was all the stuff youre saying, but also kind of beautiful/pained in places (the diff between the title track and something like the totally numb godfather part 3). the later stuff went more for just the cold, apathetic, emotionally dead, trigger happy angle.

ONE OF THE ALL TIME GREATS -



this whole album is excellent

Corpsey said:

Anyway, this has gone a bit off topic. I was intending to flood dissensus with Planet Asia videos.

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there but for the grace of God...

Worth thinking about how ka, roc etc differ from

Ny gothic continuum

There's a playlist in that. Muggs-rza-mobb onwards

Any sense of high-mindedness on the part of Ka is fair point. He definitely has a penchant for digging out particularly 'arty' sample picks that give his music a sense of gravitas, but that's what he's going for. You have to remember, him and Marci aren't YOUNG guys by any stretch of the imagination. The UN was a group Roc had been in, but he'd been rapping since the late 80s early 90s as a teen, so if anything that makes him closer to Nas' age than anything.

Luka def. got close to something when he pointed to the 'vitality' of the music; it lacks the energy and propulsion of even your trad underground hip-hop of the modern day. My father listened to the new Prhyme (Premier and Royce) album recently and was bored to tears, calling it "Professional Hip-Hop". The trenchant nature in something like Marc's work is usually dependent on the fact that its made by a guy who wants to capture the feeling of making the rap of that era, but without any sense of trying to escape what the music should sound like for a guy of his age, and for the New York that doesn't exist while being observant of the fact that it doesn't exist.

Something like "Marcberg" is very much an album about time starting to exile you, and I can personally testify that Hempstead (which was right next to where my grandmother used to live) is such a dying community that despite being a bit of a commercial sub-urb (its got a LOT of office buildings taking up most of the property, so if its not huge apartment complexes or housing communities, its buildings that are half rented that you can't even enter taking up stretches of blocks) its just impossible to truly live in. Trying to make music with a romantic feel like Joey Badass does for Brooklyn (which is already such a lie because he goes to a school for the dramatic arts and his family is rich, like, why are you going to pretend to make Nas songs when you simply did not live the life of Nas, who didn't even live the life of his records but knew it was happening close to him) would be disingenuous, so Ka's version where he's remembering the time that's no longer there and reflective on how its lingering for him, that is a much more healthy take.

Its why its the only East Coast Rap I've made in a while besides GS9 (Bobby Shmurda & Rowdy Rebel) or Manolo Rose. They sound like kids trying to make songs for their city in the terms they've inherited from years and years of growing up on NYC's hits. But Ka/Marci also sound like how I kind of feel a certain grown man approach to rap should sound if you've had the sense of career strain that they've had.

Luka; did you also check the A.G. (Showbiz and A.G., not this A.G. Da Coroner dude) album he did where he was really influenced by Roc at this time? Its interesting solely for the fact that its such a pre-established Backpack Icon playing with those tropes.

That was long as hell, but it took me forever to get my shit together enough today to reply.

Luka; did you also check the A.G. (Showbiz and A.G., not this A.G. Da Coroner dude) album he did where he was really influenced by Roc at this time? Its interesting solely for the fact that its such a pre-established Backpack Icon playing with those tropes.

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No but that sounds interesting. I got a mate who probably owns it I'll ask him. The ka/roc aesthetic is interesting to think about. Its more idiosyncratic than p.rhyme.
I can't help admiring it but can't come close to loving it either. I do come back to it from time to time to see if my feelings have changed.