![]() It was seismic in the true sense - a shift in terrain that exposed a fault line that had been developing for a while, and revealed a whole other realm of creative possibility, an opportunity for an alternate history. That made “Operation: Doomsday” one of the most idiosyncratic hip-hop albums of the 1990s, and one of the defining documents of the independent hip-hop explosion of that decade. It suggested that you could not so much reinterpret or borrow from history as become one with it, experience and memory all bleeding together into something that wasn’t quite present or past, but some ineffable other thing. This approach was a conceptual innovation beyond a simple sample or interpolation. Sometimes he had specific older songs resung with slightly altered lyrics - Sade’s “Kiss of Life” on “Doomsday,” Atlantic Starr’s “Always” on “Dead Bent” - in a way that felt fully inhabited. ![]() Band’s “The Finest” on his track of the same title - and built beats around them that felt like they were woven into the sample material itself. He used familiar sappy songs as reference and foundation - Quincy Jones and James Ingram’s “One Hundred Ways” on “Rhymes Like Dimes,” the S.O.S. His sonic choices were radical - both no-fi and elegant, lush with history and emotion. Most crucially, though, Doom produced almost all of the music on “Operation: Doomsday” he was a bedroom auteur before it became the norm. The music was intimately, almost quixotically, personal. In an era in which hip-hop was polishing its rough spots for mainstream acceptance, Doom was almost completely interior - he sounded like he was rapping to himself. He could sound like he was rambling, which belied his rather astonishing sense of craft. His vocals were slurred, almost dreamlike. On “Operation: Doomsday,” Doom - whose October death was announced on New Year’s Eve - molded an approach to rapping and producing that was suffused with memory. The album served as a multilayered memorial - an act of grief for a lost loved one, a somber tribute to an approach to music that was becoming extinct, and an unassuming yet towering act of artistic recalcitrance. You felt drenched, drained, gut punched, short of breath. Listening to the album was like standing outside in a summer rainstorm. But, even when he didn’t, the clouds still hung low above him. Oct.Sometimes on “Operation: Doomsday,” Doom rapped about death directly, and heavily. 7 – San Francisco, CA Great American Music Hall * 4 – Santa Ana, CA Constellation Room *įri. 28 – Houston, TX White Oak Music Hall (Upstairs) * 22 – Philadelphia, PA First Unitarian Church * 20 – Brooklyn, NY Music Hall of Williamsburg *įri. July 31 – Jackson Hole, WY Center for the Arts July 22 – Louisville, KY The Whirling Tiger July 21 – Chicago, IL Pitchfork Music Festival Williams below, and scroll on for dates of Youth Lagoon’s first tour in eight years, including a stop at this year’s Pitchfork Music Festival in July. You can watch the video directed by Tyler T. “Make it true.” I finished the song in 2 days. I listened to that 30-second sketch called “Prizefighter.” It was like an angel fell from the sky to tell me how to finish it. Scared of not making it great… so I tabled it.Ī couple weeks before leaving to make the record, I went through some old voice memos while watching a VHS of Drugstore Cowboy. That song I started those years ago meant too much to me to finish. 4 weirdos home all day who adored each other and hated each other and played baseball everyday in the backyard and threw rocks at each other’s heads and laughed ’till we threw up. It was real joy - the kind you didn’t have to look for cuz it smacked you in the face or pushed you off the bed into a file cabinet. Our love was strong and so was our barbarity. I grew up with 3 of them, so our house was doomsday but with more sugar cereal. Powers said the following about the track:Ĥ years ago, I started writing a song about brothers. Like “Idaho Alien”, the track is strikingly personal, exploring the bond between two brothers with alarming specificity of life in small-town America. “Prizefighter” exists in a similar world as the lead single, with a little bit more of Powers’s distinct grasp on harmony shining through the sepia-colored sonics that exist on the record. ![]() The lead single “Idaho Alien” was a bluesy, melancholy number that was a ways away from the dreamy psychedelia of the project’s past, and today he’s revealed the second single “Prizefighter”. ![]() After two albums under his own name, Youth Lagoon, the beloved project of Trevor Powers, announced its return last month with Heaven is a Junkyard,due out in June via Fat Possum Records. ![]()
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