Are you the type to move to a land of birds and trees? And when all the birds are gone, you’ll have enough to build a boat. You sail home. They suddenly find you and ask you what happened? It’s real simple. Get rich or die trying. Now I’m back in the swing of things like strange fruits in the old days of Georgia. Gypsies with baseball bats that beat us to a pulp. I see it now and they can say ‘Rapping won’t change anything!’ It’s not my fault that tomorrow hollowed out. And if we live, we live to tread on kings. And if we die, we die old, lonely and forgotten. If I ever make it to heaven, I hope they have a wireless connection. Where have I been? In the bathtub, reading Harper’s – things got much worse but I’m chilling. Too cool to draw blood from a life that restricts realities but I watch the old crack open and I fall in. Wandering around in purgatory, looking for batteries. When the last buzzard eats the last candy bar from the last body on the San Andreas, it will be a sad day for the investors! (lyrics may not be 100% correct)
Why post an entire verse of Sole’s lyrics above? With Sole, you have two options… either take him for his one-liners or listen closer and try and unravel the meanings that run through his chaotic, at times stream of conscious rap.
While trying to work out how to review this album, I stumbled across a blog that, although I did not agree with the review, I agreed with one sentiment. And it’s a sentiment that I’ve argued with people about many a time. Punk. What is it to be punk? I was reading some Spanish university paper yesterday, where they lamented the loss of the ‘true’ underground with the end of the rock of the late 80s and early 90s… and how this was the death of punk. But this is crap. Punk hasn’t died. It just changes forms. And it depends how you interpret it. If punk is a sound, and a sound alone, then bury me now. But if punk is an idea, an attitude, an understanding of creation, destruction and everything in between then what we have in Sole is punk.
Punk is the embodiment of anti-establishment, of DIY, and of refusal to give into the expected norms. Whilst this hasn’t been happening much in mainstream alt. rock circles of late, in the twisting lakes of the underground over the last 10 years there have been numerous bands taking the punk sceptre and holding it high… God Speed You Black Emperor, A Silver Mt. Zion, and others in the post-rock movement embodied punk rock ethos and in underground hip hop, Sole raised his head. He co-starts his own label, puts out his own form of music, he refuses to join majors, and he pushes the agenda of revolution over apathy. How is he not punk?
Now the two movements have conjoined forming Sole and the Skyrider Band. A paranoiac mix of frantic apocalyptic rap slammed across the tense post-rock jammings of Skyrider. And the two fit extremely well together. They blend, they break, they peak – just listen to how the music swirls into Sole’s chaotic chant ’100 light years and running, the universe is shrinking, how do you feel when your meteor is crashing?´ – at first building gently arounding it, coaxing the verses out and then allowing Sole’s harrowed call to take centrepoint.
This has to be Sole’s best album since Selling Live Water. Live from Rome was good, but lacked depth at times and I’m still trying to work my head around Desert Eagle Vol. 1. Not only is this a good album – it also pushes rap in new directions, forcing it to see how it can evolve with other forms of music (apart from nu-metal). Lyrically, he’s dark… but older, wiser, and less hopeful. That call to arms that seemed to lie under so much of his earlier music – now emerges as a call to drop out, because there’s nothing else you can do. We are crashing, withering and dying and there’s nothing we can do to stop it. Funnily enough, as I rode the metro home the other night, I read the same sentiment in literature. In reading Kurt Vonnegut’s ‘A Man Without A Country’, I found much of Sole’s sentiment echoed. Reiterated.
we are not the future. we couldn’t catch the sun.
On a side note, re: best album since Selling Live Water… I haven’t heard the new one yet which came out a few whiles back.