I: 'From Atoms to Adam'
I begin to flock, flock, flock...
His formal introduction to the world was 'B.I.B.L.E' but this was the thing to come from the spaced out sessions in California that formed the back bone of Heavy Mental and pissed off Geffen Records. "I got a bad report," he said.
I wander out on the horizon from the top of holy mount Zion
holding a staff that turned into a python
Killah Priest a living icon...
It's a definitive opening statement: a cosmic ego emerging from a void and transforming into a force that aimed to capture not just rap but the modern imagination. Like Leo Strauss breaking down the present day from the perspective of Athens and Jerusalem it was a project of the mind and the music was a stage for it. Already, in his early twenties, Priest is laying down the key elements of his cosmological canon: the Pentateuch, Judges, Kings, the Maccabean Revolt, Egyptology, the Twelve Tribes of Israel and Brownsville, Brooklyn. But it's only a start.
Walking from Tyre to Sidon to Lebanon to the walls of Hong Kong
recite the 23rd Psalm, long gone before the crack of dawn
dodging and weaving through the Garden of Eden...
The canvas got wider as the years went on but this opening statement presented his world, as it was then, like an elaborate Medieval tapestry. The second verse is out of this world. "This one took awhile because I was just zoning out on the beat so much," he said, "but I came in and blessed it."