Soundbombing

Company Flow's El-P

by Alex Pappademas

Before Company Flow's first album made him an underground-rap superunknown, El-Producto wrote graffiti. Now he writes rhymes. But he can't fully shake spraycan art's governing aesthetic principles, so his lyrics swirl with visual/verbal camouflage, defiantly showy obfuscation, and contentious sentences as long as whole subway trains.

The "flow" in Co-Flow came less from El-P and turntablist Mr. Len the Space Ghost than from rapper Big Juss, who decamped for solo pastures earlier this year. El-P, now the crew's sole voice, has all the flow of a bald-tired cement truck. He super-soaks tracks with SAT vocab, spitting out couplets that could be rejected Butthole Surfers album titles, or Gertrude Stein ghostwriting for Organized Konfusion: "Citizens blitzkrieg nihilistic heart of dark euthanasia"; "soak, cloak, hormone-injected dairy product and conservative right-wing anti-eroticism." At times, you don't know whether to marvel at the way he cross-fades composure and chaos, like a virtual Rantmaster Flash, or throw down a drop cloth.

Co-Flow's acclaimed 1997 Funcrusher Plus (Rawkus) was heavy enough on artfully gnarled syntax, impassioned playa-hating, and inventively crude drum-machine mudslides to sound like a hip-hop watershed. But it skimped, painfully, on nearly everything that gives hip-hop dimension, aside from brainy rage narrative, laughs, funk, hope, actual songs -- and OD'd on the same independent-as-fuck displeasure principle that makes Fugazi an unpopular mixtape choice among peeps with jeeps.

Still, when Rhino drops that inevitable Cult-Rap Legends of the Nineties compilation next decade, Co-Flow's high-density posse-cut single "Fire in Which You Burn" (Rawkus; originally credited to the Indelible MCs, then included on Funcrusher Plus) more than deserves a first-round buy. Equal parts acid test, free-speech rally, and self-important poetry slam, "Fire" sounded like guys who could probably wreck shop on the New York Times crossword lining up in a space-station basement to burn Puff Daddy in effigy: a seething, literate, proudly marginal ego trip. Belligerent got-to-be-realness -- even in the context of Co-Flow's own discography -- has seldom sounded so damn cool.

If Rhino gives them two spaces, I vote for "Patriotism," a blast of bile Co-Flow contributed to Rawkus's new Soundbombing 2 compilation. As a lyricist, El-P remains in love with the broad stroke, as if he were still writing his lines with a Krylon can. "Patriotism" indicts America, "where the pain grows like poppies," where GM buys off the cops with defense-contractor Benjamins, a place that'll "invite you to cross the border then shit on your divinities." Strident and snotty in theory, it's devastatingly effective in practice, because El-P phrases the whole thing in the first person, playing Uncle Sam as the ultimate overbearing rapper, beating confessions out of innocent men, crushing hopes, dreams, and rebellions instead of wack MCs.

The wordplay gets prog-soggy, as usual, but the shift in perspective is genius. Screaming "I'm America" on the track's breakdown, El-P (who's white, and male, and -- sketchiest of all -- signed to an I-can't-believe-it's-not-indie label bankrolled by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp) cops to his own privileged status, then swings it as a rhetorical weapon. Like every other Co-Flow track, "Patriotism" is just a super-glorified battle rhyme, but it's a self-implicating one, smart-bombing topically and cutting both ways like nothing in their catalogue ever has. In fewer words: the world's a mess, it's in their diss.

An entirely different side of Co-Flow comes through on Little Johnny from the Hospitul (Rawkus), the crew's new "breaks end instrumentuls" collection. It's ostensibly a concept album about a preteen mental patient; the REDRUM-style liner-note inscription reads, "My name is Johnny. I live here always. Sometimes they feed me. I watch TV. The hospital is angry at me. I know because it doesn't talk to me. I leave this place today, one way or another." Johnny, I'm guessing, is the plastic doll on the album cover, pictured making tracks down a country road while El-P and DJ Mr. Len the Space Ghost lie dead in the background. Johnny's always got a paper bag on his head, and he looks like an evil-Chucky doppelgänger for Spike Jonze's hapless TV jeans pitchman, Buddy Lee.

Back story aside, Johnny is basically just an excuse for El-P and DJ Mr. Len the Space Ghost to bring the slow-core ruckus, Hellraiser-style. The boiler room beats prompt flashbacks to the suffocating street hassle of the 1995 Tricky vs. the Gravediggaz EP, or sick-hop obscurities like DJ Mumbles' "Lost in the Funhouse." The sampler has a case of the DTs, the keyboards are ectoplasmic snail trails creeping up your spine, and the fax machine spools out contracts with Satan. You wish the wordy-rappin' hoods would open their mouths to help you out, but they just laugh. Welcome to the dollhouse, sucka.