On the first track of his crew's first release, El-P spoke boldly and plainly: "In one verse we proved we can rip all these signed, big-budget motherfuckers."
It may have taken just one verse, but Company Flow — rapper and producer El-P (real name: Jaime Meline), MC Bigg Jus and DJ Mr. Len — spent the rest of 1996's Funcrusher hammering the point home, flipping clever, brutal rhymes over spare, rib-rattling beats. Unsigned rappers the world over spew braggadocio more often than they blink, but they rarely deliver like Company Flow did.
More than a decade later, El-P is still on the warpath, chip permanently resting on shoulder. Released in March, I'll Sleep When You're Dead — his second solo full-length, not counting the instrumental/remix comp Fandam Plus, jazz-hop collaboration High Water and odds 'n' sods clearinghouse Collecting the Kid — is one of the most intense, personal statements you're likely to find in hip-hop, this year or any other.
Beginning with a sampled female voice wondering, "Do you think that if you were falling in space, that you would slow down after awhile or go faster and faster?" and ending with a cold, martial grind, Sleep is nearly an hour's worth of ferocious, layered beats, complemented by El-P's blistering lines about post-traumatic NYC, about dystopian near-futures, about bitter breakups.
Bleak, to say the least.
For El-P, the challenge now is to translate the record's dramatic sonics — the crushing drums and digital belches — into a comparable live sound. He's on tour for the first time in years and brings his show to The Orpheum this Sunday. Wanting to break from the live hip-hop cliché (you know: dude walking back and forth shouting at the crowd, while his 13 hype men [read: cousins] reinforce the end of every line), El-P put together a small band to play along with his DJ and worked hard on the presentation. Concert photos depict him onstage in an orange prison jumpsuit, fake blood dripping down his face.
"I put a lot of thought into that when I was putting the show together," El-P says on the phone during a tour stop in Portland, Ore. "I got a lighting director and a set designer. … I would rather transport someone to somewhere else than just to feel like we're standing in a bar. Standing in a club and I'm standing in front of you, rapping, at my record. I wanted to create a vibe and an air in the same way that I did with my record, or attempted at least, a little portion of that world that people can sink into."
Listening to the El-P oeuvre reveals a "world" at turns confrontational and confessional. Company Flow's Funcrusher Plus — the fleshed-out version of the NYC group's debut EP that put the upstart hip-hop label Rawkus on the map in the late '90s — is a relentless, vulgar tour of the mind's basement, although not without its humorous touches, like El-P's boast on "8 Steps to Perfection": "I'm so sick of my psycho metaphors/ But I'd fuck Laura Ingalls, only when she's done with her chores."
Co Flow followed up that classic with a left-field maneuver, releasing an all-instrumental album, Little Johnny From the Hospital. De rigueur for indie hip-hoppers today, beats-only discs were a rarity in 1999, and there was little surprise when the group split a year later.
El-P still maintains the breakup was amicable, although the fallout between him and Rawkus was very raw and very public. (Sample diss from El-P: "Signed to Rawkus?/ I'd rather be mouth-fucked by Nazis unconscious.")
So El-P did what people burned by the industry often do. He started his own label: Definitive Jux. The rapper/entrepreneur built up a peerless stable of underground MCs and released a slew of classic discs: Cannibal Ox's The Cold Vein (still, to these ears, exactly what 21st-century hip-hop should be), Mr. Lif's I Phantom and El-P's own solo debut, Fantastic Damage. You can hear his heavy production hand on all these releases, but he bristles at the phrase "Def Jux sound."
"How could something that just starts be known for anything?" the red-haired Brooklynite says. "And trust me, that annoyed the shit out of me, because for the first two years, every record that we put out was 'a departure from the Def Jux sound!' 'How is that possible? It's only year two! This is the fifth record we've put out!' I always found that kind of maddening."
Gripes aside, there is a noticeable sonic expansion on El-P's latest, which features contributions from some decidedly non-hip-hop sources: indie soul songstress Cat Power; Cedric Bixler-Zavala and Omar Rodriguez-Lopez of punk-prog band The Mars Volta; indie rock pinch-hitter Matt Sweeney and — most famous of all — Trent Reznor. El-P scoffs when asked if the guests are the result of having a bigger budget: "Budget? I'm doing this shit in my house."
The impressive credit reel came about organically. "It just happens that I've formed these relationships in the last five years," El-P, 32, says, "and this is why I've never had these people or any type of people like this on my records. My world kind of opened up a bit."
El-P's expanding Rolodex is just part of a larger restlessness. "The only thing I want people to be able to rely on from me is that I will put my fucking heart into a record, but I don't want people to think that they're going to know exactly what they're going to get," he says. "And in order to do that, you actually have to go somewhere. … If I was making the same music I was making when I was 21, Funcrusher, I would be a fucking asshole.
"Who likes the guy that's the same dude he was 10 years ago? You meet your friends from high school and you're like, 'Jesus Christ! You're still the same dude? How's that fucking possible? I can't even talk to you anymore, man! You're talking to me like you were fucking 16.'"
Now 16 twice over, firmly established as an artist and running one of the best underground labels around, El-P is a hip-hop veteran. But, hungry as ever, he's not far removed from that unknown kid who ripped big-budget motherfuckers on his old crew's very first track.
This article appears in May 30 – Jun 5, 2007.