I feel like I can finally talk about Cancer 4 Cure. It took some time and a lot of listening but this isn’t the type of album you can just settle on. It’s a virus that sets up shop in your ear and slowly begins to amaze and terrify you. I find myself listening to it more and more, fighting with myself over which song is “best,” as if that even matters for an album like this. I’ve followed El-P’s career since a friend turned me on to Funcrusher Plus in college. I’ve bought all of his albums within a week of release and even purchased most of the Def Jux catalog. I’ve grown to admire him not just as a rapper and producer but also as a force in independent music recording and distribution. I always talk about my Big Three of creative types, obvious choices for a guy who likes to make comics: Walt Disney, Jim Henson, and Charles Schulz. I’ll occasionally put Kirby and Ditko and Eisner on that list but, lately, a strange thing has been happening. El-P has been sneaking onto it as well. Maybe it’s because I’m trying to distribute some of my own stuff and I’m seeing how difficult it is. Maybe it’s because his lyrics about dystopia and violence have been speaking to me in a world that seems to be falling apart every day. I don’t know what it is, but this album has affected me on a very gritty level - somewhere I’m not used to being - and beneath all of the violence and intensity it is starting to feel important and poetic.
El-P’s past albums have all had this future dystopian feel. What’s coming around the corner and how we should respond. Just look at the lyrics for “Truancy,” my favorite song on Fantastic Damage:
This is for New Jacks trying to decide where they fit (get busy)
Destroy the walls when you spit
For writers with a Krylon image brain print (translate it)
Leave your name dripping from bricks
For cats who covet fame with my name on their lips (re-think it)
you’re sucking poison milk from fake tits
This is for kids worried about the apocalypse (do something)
Prepare yourself and stop talking shit
There’s an obvious message of preparing yourself that runs through Fantastic Damage and I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead. Contrast that against the lyrics to “Tougher Colder Killer” from Cancer 4 Cure:
To the mother of my enemy, I just killed your son
He died with his face to the sky and it can not be undone
He didn’t die hard, in the end he just grinned and bowed
Made him dig his own grave at the point of a gun
While he laughed to the gods out loud
And it made me want to jump out a window
And it made me want to scream
Tear my face off run through the streets
Pandemonium me, fucked by decree
Came a long way from young and alive when I was not blind
Now I can not see
Grace in reverse at best it gets worse and I wanted you to know
Since then I don’t sleep
And the uniform, tags, side arm and ID that I wore
When I did it got sent C.O.D
To the HQ, note reading, “This is not me
And I hate you for making me make a man bleed”
And before the man passed and his last gasp fled
(And this is why I’m writing you now) his eyes gleamed
And he pointed to the part of his chest that still beats
Looked dead in my grill and then said this to me
There is a tougher colder killer
A tougher colder killer than
A tougher colder killer than you
And he will wipe us all from this place
You will learn to crawl
You will learn it all in just one day
Just one day
Just one day
Just one day
There is a terrifying sense of urgency in those lyrics that you didn’t get in previous albums. This is dog-eat-dog and we’re all going to die. At this moment the beat speeds up and what you get is an outpouring of absolute violence that you don’t see very often in rap songs anymore. It just feels so now.
In “To My Upstairs Neighbor (Mums The Word)”, El-P notices a man heading out to do something devious and tells him, “Do what you have to do and I swear I’ll tell them nothing.” That’s levels beyond the type of vague violence I’m used to in hip-hop, and way different than El-P’s usual schtick of “The Future Will Be Violent.” This is El-P telling us that we’re in the future that he promised. That people will die and that they have to die.
This is a soundtrack for the end of times.
And yet it’s all laid out so masterfully. You can actually dance to some of these songs. And the combination of polished beats that dive off cliffs and intense, intense violence just makes this one of the most fantastic albums I’ve ever listened to.
And yet it ends with such a sense of hope! “4$ VIC/FTL” is a masterpiece. And that ending…
There’s nothing they would do for you, differently
They’re not even listening
They don’t even gleam that we’re existing in
There’s nothing here but love and you
Groveling, look what they’re accomplishing
The systematic gods have all demolished it
But I’ve never felt so brave
As when I’m looking at your face
They can decimate my body
But my heart will not disgrace
They can torture and interrogate
And shackle to my boot
I will gnaw off my own leg
And hop the fuck right back to you
Good lord, those are End Time Wedding Vows. Those lyrics are saying that everything is going wrong, but I still have you to keep me human. They’re heavy and heartbreaking.
There’s no “In Conclusion” for this review. This album, I feel, will continue to evolve the more I hear it. But I have to at least talk about it. Maybe next year I’ll hate it, I don’t know. But, for right now, it is one of the greatest hip-hop albums in at least ten years. It is a frightening triumph.
