1) Harlem Spartans- Call Me A Spartan
Medusa-head sitars spit and lurch over a jittering bossa nova of hissing high hats, claustrophobic clicks, guttural bass growls and barking brass stabs. Intricate, multisyllabic wordplay zips and zigzags past in every direction, vividly recounting tales of “Spartans” and “shinobi men” equipped with blades, swords and spears inflicting “wounds” in epic tales of “vengeance”. It seems then that it’s not only the brass that stabs in this setting. In fact it’s hard to find much in the song that doesn’t at least tangentially conjure images of bladed weaponry. The percussion clinks, the sitars are tinny and metallic - gliding from note to note like swords swooshing through the air. Even the editing is quick cut; chopping, slicing and swiping to the extent that the screen is occasionally engulfed in a scarlet red filter as though the camera lens has been splattered with blood. We’re presented with a group of shadowy figures, their faces disguised and obscured behind balaclavas and hoods. They’re amassed outside a nondescript convenience store, but that does little to allay their ominous aura. In this context, even the most incidental of background details is sinister. The infantile, heart-shaped Wall’s ice-cream logo that repeatedly appears suddenly feels palpably gory. The word “FOOD” that hangs over the rapper’s heads insinuates that the violence they embody is predatorial and primal. The skeletal park gate they congregate around, with its brittle metal arch, morbidly evokes the “arbeit macht frei” sign above the gates of Auschwitz. A legal disclaimer at the beginning of the video isn’t enough to assuage this sense of malevolence. With its grammatical mishaps and inconsistent capitalization it comes across as disingenuous and subversive. It professes that what is being portrayed is “fictional”. It is not. This is real life. This is London. This is UK drill.
