The hipocalist

A definitive Y2K mix

by Alex Pappademas

Millennial marketing has already inspired a bunkerful of corny cash-in discs, like Y2K Beat the Clock (on Sony, celebrating 1000 years of Fatboy Slim!), and the amusing Why2K? Anti-Millennium Dance Party (featuring tracks like Donna Summer's "Last Dance" and the Gap Band's "You Dropped a Bomb on Me" and issued by Hip-O, the Canadian ghetto Rhino). But no one's compiled the definitive New Year's Eve of Destruction hip-hop mix yet, and time is running out. Ignore the following track list at your peril.

* Jimi Hendrix, "If 6 Was 9" (Reprise, 1967). Ticking clocks, a black-hole sun, and sci-fi nut Jimi chuckling "Fall, mountains, just don't fall on me" over a sick Mitch Mitchell beat. Prince Paul's 1996 update, "If 9 Was 6," is an ill wind from Oklahoma City; DXT's "If 666 Was '96" invokes the Biblical "number of the beast."

* Curtis Mayfield, "Underground" (Curtom, 1972). Backing away from the optimism of his civil-rights anthem "We're a Winner" and toward the Superfly soundtrack's haunted crime-drama-on-wax, Curtis issued this spooky semi-skit -- in which humanity, fleeing rampant pollution, deserts the surface of the Earth -- as the B-side of his "Freddie's Dead" single. Curtis also wrote "If There's a Hell Below, We're All Gonna Go," and he even called his 1996 Warner Bros. comeback album New World Order!

* Sun Ra, "It's After the End of the World" (Evidence, 1972). In this overture to the pioneering free-jazz Afro-futurist's Mystery Science Theater 3000-quality screen opus Space Is The Place, Sun plays a Seventh Seal-style chess game with a Satanic pimp figure, sets up an Outer Space Employment Agency in the 'hood, warns everyone not to make plans for after the year 2000, tries to persuade sassy inner-city youths to join him on his home planet, and gets hassled by the Man. There's much dopy dialogue, some of it sampled recently on Phoenix Orion's tongue-in-cheek conspiracy-rap album Zimulated Experiencez (Celestial Recordings). But the mythical weight of Ra's message transcends the movie's porno-grade production, pointing a way out of fucked-up situations for the disenfranchised and forecasting a rain of shit for everyone else. "If this planet takes hold of an alter-destiny," Ra says, "there's hope for everyone. Otherwise . . . everyone must die." When the world (played by a Nerf ball) blows up, everyone does. (Disco advisory: in the late '70s, Black Belt Jones soundtrack composer Dennis Coffey updated Space's "Calling Planet Earth," with less Sun, more booty-shakin' Ra-rah.)

* Funkadelic, "Maggot Brain" (Westbound, 1971). Mother Earth suffers another unplanned pregnancy; Eddie Hazel's extinction-level guitar solo sobs and gnashes its teeth. This was recorded while George Clinton was down with the Revelation-fixated Process Church of the Final Judgment, whose tracts fill the Maggot Brain album's liner notes. Clinton eventually abandoned explicit doomsaying, but Parliament's sublimely hydraulic 1976 single "Mothership Connection (Star Child)" updates both Sun Ra and "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot," as Clinton and his freakazoid entourage return to Earth "to claim the Pyramids." (Dr. Dre later jacked it for "Let Me Ride.")

* Prince, "1999" (Warner Brothers, 1982). Prince was raised by Apocalypse-fearing Seventh Day Adventists, so his ongoing obsession with this stuff is a whole other story. Basically, he's terrified of Armageddon but digs the idea of repopulating the Earth afterward.

* Project Future, "Ray-Gun-Omics" (Capitol, 1983). Pop-locking voice-bots critique Reagan's foreign and domestic policies over catchy laser-beam synthesizers. Sweating the possibility that our commander-in-chief will reach for the pencil sharpener and elbow "The Button" -- not an uncommon concern back then -- the chorus wonders, "Politicians are aging/What price are we paying?" (The B-side is a funky/cheesy "Pinball Wizard" update called "Arcade Lover" that anticipates Captain Funkaho's recent "My 2600," so maybe we were just pumping our whole allowance into a "Defender" machine.)

* ESG, "UFO" (99 Records, 1983). This sampled-to-death art-funk classic's air-raid whines added ominous atmosphere to Public Enemy's "Night of the Living Baseheads," Gang Starr's "Take a Rest," and countless other hip-hop milestones. It sounds like the flying saucers from War of the Worlds zooming through the Lower East Side and disintegrating all the no-wave bands.

* Time Zone, "World Destruction" (Celluloid, 1984). The end of Planet Rock is near. Afrika Bambaataa name-checks Nostradamus; sneering ex-Pistol John Lydon toasts marshmallows over society's ashes. The Signs of the Apocalypse Hot 100 chart in Bambaataa's 1996 album Warlocks, Witches, Computer Chips, Microchips and You (Priority) ranks hits like "Clones," "New Age Religion," and "Smart Card." In its 666th week at #1: "Extraterrestrials"!

* Model 500, "No UFOs" (Metroplex, 1985). This distress call to the alien nation -- transmitted live from economically post-apocalyptic Detroit by Juan Atkins, one of techno's founding structural engineers -- builds on Ra and Clinton's mothership mythology but sounds way more urgent. "They say there is no hope, they say no UFOs/Why is no head held high?/Maybe we'll see them fly," a steely voice says as Atkins's precision-engineered synth-bass patterns dive-bomb your car.

* Public Enemy, "Countdown to Armageddon" (Def Jam, 1990). With Chuck D as your unfriendly pre-millennial hall monitor barking "Armageddon is in effect! Go get a late pass!" And tuck in that shirt, mister. The fine print on the cover of PE's recent sorta-comeback There's a Poison Goin' On (Atomic Pop) says, "The millennium for many is the wall."

* Leaders of the New School, "The End Is Near" (Elektra, 1993). From their expansive, Pete-Rock-smoking-dancehall-dust opus T.I.M.E.: The Inner Mind's Eye (The Endless Dispute With Reality) (Elektra). Checking the milk carton, Boogie Brown realizes it's "Expiration 2000 for the rebel or the devil on the planet . . . possible, casualties, fatalities, probable." Busta Rhymes chimes in: "Better start runnin', 'cause the end is comin' . . . sucker, motherfucker, behave yourself." There's also a reference here to Nena's new-wave nuclear-apocalypse jingle "99 Luftballons," which both Scarface and the Fugees' Pras later sampled. But the Leaders count 1999 red balloons. Eerie.

* Freestyle Fellowship, "7th Seal" (Sun Music, 1993). J. Sumbi sees avenging angels emerge from "a pure black whirlwind" at Conjunction Junction and gets dragged down to Middle Earth by elves. No, really. And in the middle of the song, J. remembers how his friend got shot and how nothing in the Bible could explain it.

* Killah Priest, "B.I.B.L.E." (Geffen, 1995). This bonus track on Genius's Geffen debut Liquid Swords predates Priest's philosophically dense, musically soggy Heavy Mental (Geffen). True Master's beat (unusually funky by Wu standards) makes a kid's giggle bob on the breeze, and Priest -- on hand to kick the "Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth" -- vows that "the first shall be last, and the last shall be first" before bouncing whole bookmobile's worth of poignant, tangled theological scholarship off your unsuspecting cranium. Some of it even makes sense.

* DJ Shadow, "Transmission 1-3" (ffrr/London, 1996). Fuzzy, scary recurring-dream interludes ("We are transmitting from the year one . . . nine . . . nine . . . nine . . . ") lifted from John Carpenter's 1987 Antichrist flick Prince of Darkness. Extra credit: Shadow's 1993 B-side "Hindsight" samples Tower of Power's "Mahdi, the Expected One," Mahdi being the Islamic prophet whose return is said to signal the beginning of the End.

* Canibus and Youssou N'Dour, "How Come" (Interscope, 1997). At midnight on January 1, 2000, Jupiter will become a star, and a space probe will guide humanity to "Channel Zero." Weird -- that's the channel on which the girl in Public Enemy's "She Watch Channel Zero!?" watches her "straight-up garbage." Don't confuse this with the B-52s' haunting "Channel Z," where static fills Kate & Cindy's attic and satellite parts rain down through the ozone hole. A true conspiracy geek, Canibus talks to dolphins about cattle mutilations and disses Carl Sagan. But the Masons, or possibly Ma$e, keep slipping him weak beats.

* Wu-Tang Clan, "Impossible" (Loud, 1997). "Apocalyptic" rhymes with "cryptic." This one's from Wu-Tang Forever (Loud), probably the only platinum album in history to open with a six-minute lecture about Five Percent Islam. Overflowing with references to Armageddon, racial confrontation, Bible code, Watergate, bee pollen, and Bat Day at Yankee Stadium, Forever found the Wu on some Lenny-Bruce-in-DeLillo's-Underworld shit, screaming "We're all gonna die!" on stage just to hear it screamed. "I think niggaz ain't gonna figure it out until the year two-G," the RZA says of his byzantine brainchild, and that's an optimistic estimate.

* Ras Kass featuring the RZA, "The End" (Priority, 1998). Sampled talk-show host finds Illuminati in the Chevy Lumina logo. Ras enjoys "reciting a Biblical verse before I make your melon burst/Like that nigga Jules in Pulp Fiction." Jules (Samuel L. Jackson), you'll recall, kinda invented baffling one's opponents with Biblical quotations, and he probably paved the way for more than a few of these songs.

* Goodie Mob, "Just About Over" (LaFace, 1998). Hip-hop's Skynyrd plug their eulogy for the Dirty South into the black-metal legacy of the Boo-Ya T.R.I.B.E. Irony check: the Mob have been talking the conspiracy-theory blues since their 1993 Cell Therapy EP (LaFace), but the monitor-freezing "multimedia" portion of 1998's Still Standing logs you onto America Online without asking permission. The struggle continues.

* Outkast, "Da Art of Storytellin'," parts 1-2 (LaFace, 1998). They're teenagers staring at the stars, then their friends start ODing. Cut to them as reeling adults ducking the Four Horsemen while the sky caves in, punching rhymes through cell-phone static, and worrying about their wives and kids. The world that's ending has actual people in it, and when "Sasha Thumper" dies in "Part 1," it puts the terror and noize that follow in human perspective. Outkast are essentially alone in depicting Armageddon that way, but they nail the real-world suffering pre-millennial myth usually sublimates. Plus, nobody else's apocalypse sounds this musically vivid -- Jimi's alarmed clocks resurface in a storm of garage-rock preaching and broken-winged piano.

* Method Man, "Judgment Day" (Def Jam, 1998). From Meth's highly underrated life-of-grime suite Tical 2000: Judgment Day (Def Jam). Meth surveys the post-apocalyptic landscape -- starvation, plague, misery -- and shouts, "I LIKE THIS WORLD!!!" Not to mention the bad-ass Wu-Wear Beyond Thunderdome-style cues (Gwar-inspired armor, beartrap dental work, safety pins) that come with it.

* Busta Rhymes, "Intro: There's Only One Year Left!!!" (Elektra, 1998). Young Busta gets knocked out while playing on the lawn. When he wakes up, paranoid androids and hideous mutant freaks (like Ozzy Osbourne) are laying waste to the planet. Critic John Soeder said it best in last year's Village Voice Pazz & Jop Poll: "I don't know about the rest of you, but I personally feel a lot less stressed about Y2K now that Busta Rhymes is working on the problem."

* Presage, "The Illuminati" (Future Primitive Sound, 1999). Produced (probably in a small, dark room, with tinfoil on the windows) by Cincinnati's 1200 Hobos DJ crew, Presage shreds beats like classified documents, introduces Chomsky to Zappa, and exposes speed-pass gas stations as a fiendish Trilateral Commission trap. Imagine Donald Sutherland's park-bench CIA spook from JFK as a homeless b-boy with a boom box.

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