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For Arturo Sandoval, jazz represents a way of life, but the way it came into his life could only be described as an act of fate. The trumpet aficionado, who grew up in Artemisa, Cuba, learned to love the genre through the sounds of Dizzy Gillespie, whose music would became a guiding force.

During his military service, Sandoval was caught listening to American jazz broadcasts on a shortform radio; he was jailed for a little over three months. During the period that followed, Sandoval was allowed to play publicly in only limited circumstances. But after his release, he was enlisted by local musicians to drive Gillespie around Havana during a brief tour stop. Later that night, Gillespie happened upon Sandoval rehearsing backstage at a club. Gillespie would take Sandoval on tour, then help him defect to America.

Sandoval has since defined, re-defined, and broken the ceiling of what some would box into the umbrella of Latin Jazz. He, however, sees it differently. “It’s someth…

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At some point in the spring of 1997, Puff called Jay-Z and asked him to ghostwrite a couple of verses for a Police-sampling track in remembrance of The Notorious B.I.G., who had been murdered that March in Los Angeles. Jay, wisely, declined (the gig went to Sauce Money). Instead, he went down to Virginia and cooked up his own tribute, this one produced by Teddy Riley and slicker than anything that had been on his debut album from the year prior. “The City Is Mine” would not end up an encapsulation of the next phase in Jay’s career, nor would it suggest an extended stranglehold over hip-hop for Riley or new jack swing generally. Narrative dominance in New York aside, this is more relic than manifesto. But there’s still a hint of the future. You hear that saxophone snaking through the hook? That’s played by a young Chad Hugo, who in short order would become one-half of the most accomplished production team of the 21st century.

Now, of course, there’s a federal lawsuit, ugly barbs in the press, enough bad blood to swallow all the plaques. But for a little over a decade starting shortly after “The City Is Mine,” the Virginia natives would imagine a future—usually pastel but occasionally very, oppressively grey—built from synthesizers and swagger and several tackle shops’ worth of hooks. Their apprenticeship under Riley (and competition with fellow Virginian Timbaland) made them nearly as prolific as they were influential, to the point where even their lesser work and most indulgent side projects would spawn generations of imitators.

The Neptunes would go on to work with many of the 2000s’ biggest stars, helping to transform the careers of Justin Timberlakes and Gwen Stefanis, extend and augment the pop runs of Madonnas and Britneys, give Snoop Dogg a second wind, and even flex some belated auteur sway over Jay’s singles. But no one held their attention like Pusha T and Malice, the brothers from nearby whose career, hampered as it was by label bureaucracy in two different decades, became a vehicle for the Neptunes’ most daring beats. The second Clipse album, 2006’s Hell Hath No Fury, sees eight of its 12 songs included here; all told, the duo appears in some form on more than a quarter of this list.

Unlikely as it is that we’ll ever hear a new Neptunes beat, the ones that do exist are sure to echo out of car and club speakers into eternity, the vibrations blurring the line between composition and inevitable effect on the material world. What follows are the 50 best Neptunes tracks, ranked by how hard the malnourished robots in the “Universal Mind Control” video bobbed their heads to them.

50. Clipse, “The Funeral”

The trend of Clipse picking the Neptunes’ weirdest, most challenging beats goes all the way back to their genesis on Exclusive Audio Footage, the debut before the debut. This beat sounds like a Saturday morning western; in anyone else's hands it would probably be corny, but Push and Malice don't just dance on it—they take ten paces and spin. —FRAZIER THARPE

49. Nelly, “Hot In Herre”

It’s possible to be up- and downstream at the same time. While Nellyville’s fifth single presaged the entirety of Anderson .Paak’s career, its first takes Mystikal and formats him for the little TVs in the back of airline seats. And still, the Chuck Brown flip shimmers enough to keep you in a Cancun of the mind forever. —PAUL THOMPSON

48. Slim Thug, “Click Clack” f/ Pusha T

The best Slim Thug-Neptunes collabs are the ones where Pharrell gets out of the way. Already Platinum is a great album, but P makes his presence known in a way that’s an odd fit with a larger-than-life dude like Thug. When it works, you get something like “Click Clack,” a good old-fashioned, onomonopoaetic rap song about how you can get shot. —ANDREW FRIEDMAN

47. Earl Sweatshirt, “Burgundy” f/ Vince Staples

“Not stable, abrasive as fuck” may be how Earl refers to himself in “Burgundy,” but they’re also fitting words for the joint’s Pharrell-helmed beat, a gradually layering orchestra of forceful pianos, horns, and sampled screams that give shape to the young Sweatshirt’s anger and angst. Just after Thebe finishes his affirmative, “start-shit” second verse—closing out his rants with a vision of moving forward—the beat ends suddenly devolving into a cosmic spiral of synth notes that fades out as if dispatching a taunting kiss goodbye. —NITISH PAHWA

46. Gwen Stefani, “Hollaback Girl”

Undeniable even if Gwen is acting as if Mickey from “Hey Mickey!” was into four-dimensional raceplay. —PAUL THOMPSON

45. 702, “I Still Love You”

Whenever I listen to this beat, I get stuck on the fact that the drums sound like a heartbeat. Not just any kind of heartbeat—it’s the heartbeat that appears when the person you love is within earshot and eyesight, pounding and infrequent, re-emerging with so much force to remind you that yes, you’re alive. Everything else orbits that heartbeat: the symphony of synths, the intruding mandolin on the hook, the claps that feel delightfully human, mirroring the perfect universal order that exists when you realize that you’re in love. —MATTHEW RITCHIE

44. Clipse, “Keys Open Doors”

You’d think the highest praise would be for a beat to elicit gasps. But what about it when it sounds like a string of them? Hell Hath No Fury begs overstatement, yet how else could you explain this one except to say you could imagine it spilling out of a pharaoh’s tomb? —PAUL THOMPSON

43. Scarface, “Someday” f/ Faith Evans

The best Neptunes beats are replete with small sonic pearls, the kinds of thing you might not hear at first yet remain essential to the song’s integrity. On “Someday,” subtle MIDI horns double each repetition of the title phrase amidst a field of jittery acoustic guitars and bass drum pumps, woven together over exactly six minutes. Even their work on mid-tier Scarface singles shows the duo’s range. —ALY ELEANOR

42. N.E.R.D., “Lapdance” f/ Lee Harvey & Vita

The repetitive guitar riff in “Lapdance” creates a certain bounce that’s never quite escaped my brain since first hearing the track on Dave Mirra’s BMX XXX, which I played religiously on my PS2 in the early aughts. And in that same vein, “Lapdance” sounds like it was made for the skatepark: able to satiate every flavor of ramp tramp in existence with its fusion of industrial rock and hip-hop. Every instrument ultimately works towards making something that transcends mere rock and roll. The clipped guitar is looped to create a beat that only two music nerds could have made during a long night of experimentation. —DONALD MORRISON

41. Ray J, “Wait a Minute” f/ Lil Kim & Pharrell

I don’t spend much time on farms, but when I do—field trips, transmission problems outside Bakersfield—I always croon to myself that The chickens is watching. This beat sounds like something lewd being tapped out on a two-way. —PAUL THOMPSON

40. Sade, “By Your Side (Neptunes Remix)”

The Neptunes took Sade’s sensitive, acoustic single “By Your Side” and twisted it into something spicy and hypnotic. Elevated by the added guitar riff, trademark Neptunes kick-snare, and rhythmic displacement of Adu’s vocals, there’s a distinct tonal flip from emotional ballad to a sexy, percussive groove. —EFUA OSEI

39. Mystikal, “Danger (Been So Long)” f/ Nivea

The Neptunes spent most of their peak period packing beats with intricate little percussion flourishes that cut against the other, invariably more punishing sonic elements. Mystikal—a truly singular vocalist, here flexing his full James Brown-at-the-end-of-history thing—is at once their most forceful collaborator and their nimblest, skittering along until there’s a line he needs you to really understand. —PAUL THOMPSON

38. N.E.R.D., “Am I High” f/ Malice

The trilling electronic notes before any voice is heard is like an entryway into a spirited discussion between Pharrell, Malice, and the beat, where the production is trying to soothe them during their panic high. Subdued synths and guitar chords fuse to be the voice of reason to Pharrell’s anxieties, giving way to an angelic piano progression, one made to match Malice’s soulful sensibilities. A fitting soundtrack to fighting off one’s drug-induced foolishness. —MATTHEW RITCHIE

37. Britney Spears, “Why Should I Be Sad”

What if I told you that the skeleton key to unlocking Tyler, the Creator’s seafoam funk synthesis of the Neptunes sound is the closing song from Britney Spears’s autoerotic lost-weekend masterpiece Blackout? The sweat equity that later paid off in a quarter-million dollars of sock money started with a study of In My Mind, but arguably nothing sounds more like Wolf Haley than one of the last classic beats from Chad and Pharrell. The chords sway like palm trees in a subtropical wind, the Triton stabs exude a barrier-reef fluorescence, and the triplet staccato drums sound like they’re beating inside a shattered chest cavity. Nothing says “I fucking hate you, but I love you” more than a song about the manifestation of the American Dream finding temporary redemption after having her heart crushed and her illusions Federlined. —JEFF WEISS

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While subjecting myself, willingly and with sick pleasure, to the three hours of awkward tensions, blood-curdling manipulations, and unanswered questions that make up You Can See Everything, I kept thinking of a celebrity who’s not mentioned even once throughout the runtime, much less given his own intimate close-up: Meek Mill.

Allow me some spoilage. Among the many startling revelations offered in the second half of YCSE is the explanation, offered directly from the source, as to just how Elizabeth Holmes has spent the past year and change tweeting prolifically from behind bars. The most intuitive understanding, prior to the film’s release, was that Holmes herself was likely dictating these batshit sentiments to a sympathetic phone-holder in the outside world, in the hopes of eventually gaining President Donald Trump’s attention and securing a pardon. (That, after all, is what fellow tech fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried, whose trial I covered in depth, has been attempting.) What Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s beguiling documentary confirms is not only that Holmes’s quasi-husband is the designated messenger in question, but that he’s often writing these tweets without first consulting her. As Billy Evans himself informs Fielder and [REDACTED CELEBRITY], he’s channeling what he thinks-slash-knows Holmes wishes to convey to the broader world, that he’s more often than not unilaterally taking his own thoughts and passing them off as his much more (in)famous wife’s.

Why does any of this make me think of Meek Mill, you ask? Well:

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Many of September’s finest sets saw selectors going deep on the unexpected, nudging ravers or headphone purists alike towards parts unknown. Bob Chocolate, mixing for the essential and endlessly unpredictable Tabi Tapes series, whipped up an hour of terrible-trip smooth jazz; SW. made a feelings-first diary entry, blending trip-hop and zonked-out electronics, covering his laptop in smog in the process. The drops from this year’s Dripping and Meakusma festivals show best-in-class DJs pushing their craft into wholly out-there territories, and two recent sets from Time Is Away are downright hallucinogenic. Vladimir Ivkovic and Intergalactic Gary’s long-form twister, meanwhile, sees the pair twisting the dance floor into a black hole.

It’s not all smoke and mirrors. Berlin selector Darwin went all in on sub-bass slammers for her subglow/Live entry, and Texan dub-music mastermind Gi Gi looked towards house, breaks, and sort-of-downtempo. hallooo music turned in a masterclass …

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The night I discovered DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing….. is imprinted on my mind forever. I was 14, had coincidentally discovered weed earlier that year, and was hanging out at a friend of a friend’s house where I probably shouldn’t have been. I remember laying on a crusty couch, 29-and-a-half years ago, while someone I had just met slipped a CD onto the tray of an Aiwa boombox. Once the album’s intro track cooled, the keys from “Building Steam With A Grain of Salt” hit me like nothing I’d ever heard before. This was hip-hop, but it also captured elements of everything else my burgeoning brain had been gravitating to. The shwag-addled euphoria washed through my body as the drums kicked up. It was one of the earliest moments in my life that I can remember asking a homie a soon-to-be fundamental question: “Yo, what is this?!”

By the drum and bass pulse of the epic “Stem / Long Stem,” I’d heard enough to know that I needed my own copy of this joint, stat. I’ve long held that Endtroducing….. is the backbone for everything I’ve listened to for the past 30 years. This statement is independent of being hipped, at some point, to the idea that it’s considered to be the first album ever created entirely of samples: My connection to the album wasn’t based on the unprecedented nature of its construction, but on the end result of the output. Every production always felt so timeless. From jazz and hip-hop objets d’art to jungle breaks, Björk to Italo-disco to David Lynch, it roped together the music and pop culture ephemera that would then be woven into my fabric.

This same notion holds true for DJ Shadow (née Josh Davis), who is quick to clarify that he never intended to make an album entirely of samples. “I was just trying to articulate that sampling is a legitimate art form,” he explains on a video call. For much of its life, hip-hop has had to defend this manner of creative expression. Using fragments of the music that defines us to create new productions isn’t stealing—it’s the ultimate exchange of knowledge, preservation of history, and show of respect for the music that came before us. Shadow deserves as much credit as anyone for getting that point across.

This year marks the 30th anniversary of Endtroducing…..; In September, Shadow began a tour that presents the album in ways it’s never been heard before. To even begin to make the live show a reality, he unearthed and repaired the AKAI MPC60 MKII sampler that he used to create the music, and was finally able to craft unique mixes of it that have become the jewels of the performance. The restoration process almost didn’t happen; he told POW about getting some high-profile help he had with it along the way.

In this comprehensive conversation below about Endtroducing….. and more, Shadow talks about finding and connecting some of the more recognizable samples from the album—he’s a major cataloguer and, unsurprisingly, can recall the precise moments when he first came across each David Axelrod album. He elaborates on the relationship between him and Mo Wax label head James Lavelle as a crucial one to some of the biggest choices he made for the album. He recalls the first days of forming the SoleSides crew in Davis, CA, as well as reflecting on the legacy of Blackalicious’s Gift of Gab, who joined him three decades ago to record his vocals for “Midnight In A Perfect World” at Dan the Automator’s mythical San Francisco studio, the Glue Factory.

But what stands out the most in this conversation is Shadow’s dedication to hip-hop. His ultimate goal was to further the possibilities of what the artform was capable of in one of its most fruitful creative periods. “I wanted to bend the samples to my will and make it all really musical.” Read on below for our conversation with the man who listens to samples thousands of times over and over again before using them, is a crate digger of the highest order, and is still trying to clear samples that he put on a record 30 years ago.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity

I think a big question that a lot of people arrive at when they’re pondering Endtroducing....., and this grand label of it being the first album ever constructed entirely of samples, is about how you even thought of that concept to begin with. What’s the genesis of the idea of producing music based entirely off of samples?

Well that wasn’t my plan, in the sense that I didn’t know until after the record came out that that’s what people were saying about it. I grew up on sample-based music, so it never really occurred to me. I was never waving a flag while I was making the record saying, “Oh, I’m gonna make the first album ever made with all samples.” The idea was just trying to further the conversation about what sample-based music can be. I was trying to articulate that sampling is a legitimate art form. I wanted to do it right, and contribute to the lineage of music that I was invested in.

How did that statement evolve after Endtroducing…..? Were you thinking of other concepts when you released Preemptive Strike and then especially on The Private Press?

Well, Preemptive Strike is an outlier in the sense that it was a compilation that I put together of stuff that had come out in the UK, and I knew that at some point, it would be repackaged in the US. So I just wanted to get out in front of it—and that’s why it was called Preemptive Strike. But my next real album was Psyence Fiction with UNKLE. And the idea there was just, “Okay cool, I’ve done an album solo, now, let me apply the same aesthetic—and not limit it to just samples, but also work with all these different singers.” I learned a ton, obviously, doing that record. And then with The Private Press, knowing that it was really my follow up to Endtroducing..... in most people’s eyes, I just tried to take everything that Endtroducing..... hinted at, and built on it exponentially. To that effect, I had two MPC 3000s chained together, so that I had almost unlimited sample time and sample resources, and the programming was much more complicated, developed and sophisticated. But I wouldn’t say there was necessarily a grand statement with The Private Press. It was always about trying to grow as an artist and grow as someone trying to find their way in music. I didn’t take music classes or lessons, so everything I do is always by ear and just by having my own ideas about how things are done. I’m always trying to learn and add to that.

I’m sure this has come up a lot in the past, but as far as sample clearances back then go, how long did it take you to eventually clear everything from Endtroducing.....? What was that journey like?

When I delivered the album, which was in, I think, June of ‘96, the business affairs department was like, “All right, make a list of the samples that you think we should clear.” And I’m like, “How many do you want?” And they go, “Why don’t we start with eight?” So, I wrote down what I felt were like the eight essential samples to clear. I could have gone on and on and on. I could have done 20, I could have done 40. But yeah, I gave them eight. And they said, “Let’s just start with these.” I didn’t hear anything for around six weeks, so I checked in as the record was getting ready to come out pretty soon and asked if they wanted more from me. But they told me those eight were plenty. As a result, we just cleared those eight initially, and then everything else after. Honestly, the process continues to this day.

I’m assuming that’s why something like the whole “What Does Your Soul Look Like?” suite probably took the longest? Trying to stream it over the years was like a slow drip. All of Preemptive Strike really. You could get one of the four-part tracks, then others wouldn’t go up for years and it wasn’t until recent years when everything was available.

I honestly haven’t paid attention to DSPs so much, but what I can tell you is that there’s there’s a lot of other records that’ve had similar arcs in terms of being delayed going up on DSPs, or going up, and then taken down, or then replaced in a different form or whatever. It is what it is. In a perfect world, everything would be cleared, and everybody would accept a percentage of the song based on the actual amount of bandwidth that it occupies in the song. But, unfortunately, we just don’t live in that type of world. People want, like 125 percent of 100 percent, and it makes it difficult. You do what you can.

Through the clearance process, was there anyone you maybe ended up maintaining a connection with over time? I always think about the Syl Johnson story with Wu-Tang, and how it ended up being an amazing resolution for that man at the end of the day, right? They changed his life. Do you have any stories similar to that?

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When Ralph McDaniels started Video Music Box in 1983, he became hip-hop’s premier archivist and documentarian, amassing a collection of music videos, interviews, and raw footage that captured the genre in ways no one else had the foresight to at the time. More than 40 years later, the lifelong New Yorker is still at it, cataloging precious hip-hop history and continuing to digitize his massive analog collection to preserve for future generations.

In light of his being honored by the Paid In Full Foundation this weekend in Las Vegas, I spoke to McDaniels about his singular journey through the early days of hip-hop, the art of video, D’Angelo, Nas, the importance of archivism, and more.

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Anyone who has ever loved a man in a way that makes them sick knows exactly how it goes: He says no two people have ever understood each other like this, that this is destiny, that you are the sun and he is the stars. Then, six hours later, he fucks his ex “by mistake.” You run into him on the sidewalk and immediately throw up at his feet. He says let’s get a drink. You finish a bottle of champagne together, and another the next day, and another the next day. He touches your thigh in a bar and your skin erupts into hives. You say, “Please leave me alone.” He says he never will. All the wounds you’ve ever had open up, and his unabiding half-love feels like acid poured into them. It burns so beautifully. When it finally ends and everything is quiet again, you think you’re better now. “I am not the kind of woman who would let that happen—I respect myself.” Then, a few years later, a man just like him finds you again.

The second time I found myself in this situation, I started walking. Every day, I crossed the Williamsburg Bridge, walked through the East Village, and ended up in Times Square. I stared into the eyes of the malevolent Elmos and the radioactive Cookie Monsters and listened to “Tears Dry on Their Own,” a song off Amy Winehouse’s inky and entrancing sophomore record, Back to Black. Built around an interpolation of Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell’s triumphant Motown soul classic “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” it is one of brightest-sounding songs, all glimmering horn bursts, slinking bass, and jubilant multi-tracked backing vocals.

But the song never reassured me that a happy ending awaited. There are very few of those on this album. Instead, Winehouse laid out exactly how I felt—the early thrill of a relationship built on empty but alluring promises, the clawing feeling that there is more to life than this, the inability to leave regardless—with such clarity that it all began to feel very ordinary. I didn’t listen to this song and suddenly act right: any song that could have made me do that should be studied in a lab. We saw each other for months more, but a subtle and important shift happened. I started to understand his behavior as part of a common but nonetheless torturous pattern of patriarchal violence. A growing part of me understood that I was not caught up in the gorgeous and tragic story of star-crossed lovers who could talk on the phone for 14 hours and who were equally thrilled to spend 4 hours on a Tuesday driving to the Wawa mentioned in a Mary Lattimore song. I was far from the only person who had been in this situation and it never, ever worked out for a woman who stayed in it.

Amy Winehouse released Back to Black at the age of 23, but sang with the wisdom and self awareness of someone thrice her age. She talks about heartache and mistreatment by men with a sense of inevitability, like a scientist outlining the laws of physics or an elder passing down folkloric knowledge: This is how it is, it’s how it always will be. And yet, the genius of her music is that, candid as she is, she’s never didactic or emotionally removed. These songs are ablaze with desire: to hold on to something that cannot work, to believe that, maybe, this time will be different. It’s that central tension between understanding and action, of watching yourself do what you shouldn’t like God staring down at her creations from the heavens, that makes these songs so incredibly potent. When you know how her story ends, how so many of the people she trusted most exploited her, the decision to keep fighting for love feels so much more heartbreaking.

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Long after everyone in the house had gone to sleep, the D.O.C. sat in his front yard, staring up at the stars drooping over Dallas, ruminating on the odyssey that had brought him back home.

This was late 2019, exactly 30 years after the car accident robbed the then-21-year-old rapper of the “golden voice” that he boasted about on his Dr. Dre-produced platinum debut, No One Can Do It Better. Just months after the album’s release, the crash twisted a divine gift into a biblical curse. But that night, after years of false starts and self-destruction, the voice of God paid him a visit.

“You can let go of that pain. You didn’t cause it; I did.” The D.O.C. describes the voice coming both from inside of him and from up above.

“It was all for a purpose,” the voice continued, echoing the scripture that the D.O.C. heard every Sunday as a child. “And you’re about to walk in that purpose.”

On his first album cover, the D.O.C. glowered in an L.A. Kings hat before a Christ the King statu…

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The anonymous TV host says: “Soon, you’ll have forgotten all about this, because you’ll be dead.” Next we’re thrown into the psychedelic philosopher Alan Watts’s meditations on the relationships between sleep, the unconscious, and death. Now a clip from The Secret Life of Walter Mitty where Sean Penn, admiring a snow leopard, says that “beautiful things don’t ask for attention.” The only connection between these shards of an increasingly fractured internet is a creaky, rattling, oddly meditative harmonium track from Aphex Twin’s unwieldy 2001 classic Drukqs.

137,252,913. That’s the number of times, as of late July 2026, that “QKThr” has been streamed on Spotify. The stats feel like a mistake, since Richard D. James heads would cite at least 50 essential songs before getting to this one. So why is it at the very top of his catalog, behind only “Avril 14th?” The answer is tucked away inside the data of a social media app: The song blew up as a popular sound effect on TikTok.

How did such a strange, unassuming composition pop off on a platform designed to reward bright lights and loud sounds, our lizard brains? “QKThr” feels like shifting your feet during an awkward moment, a not particularly comfortable break in conversation—which made it an ideal match for the 2022-23 TikTok trend “Corecore.” These posts stitch together seemingly unrelated images and videos that, when presented together over a song like “QKThr,” create the illusion of a cohesive, often emotional aesthetic. Asking the big questions and so on. The videos mock digital culture by exposing the hollow core of internet -cores.

“QKThr” is tragically effective as background noise to this end, tinting the (digital) air. It’s hard to believe the same artist is capable of making music that lays claim to the foreground with such abrasive, authoritative menace. It’s even harder to believe these two seemingly opposed modes reside together under the umbrella of one album.

Once a year, a new electronic artist gets crowned the next Aphex Twin. By writers, by fans, by Instagram pages. Direct comparison is a sloppy, imprecise way to describe any artist, but especially when it comes to someone as versatile as Richard James. Which Aphex Twin era, exactly? SAW II, Syro, Surfing on Sine Waves? He’s a man of so many pseudonyms that reducing him to a static reference point seems to miss the point entirely. Of course, that versatility is the very quality that makes critics so quick to smash the Aphex comp button. It would be paradoxical if it weren’t so trite. Individual songs of his have spawned entire subgenres of electronic music. It’s safe to assume that just about every electronic artist listened to Aphex Twin at some point, no matter how divergent their own work would eventually become.

James was already legend when Drukqs was released, but was also a few years removed from his peak popularity, which coincided with the late-‘90s electronic surge.His prolific run started with Selected Ambient Works 85-92, which gets most of the love; its ambient follow-up, SAW Vol. 2, confused some listeners at first, but is now revered for introducing Eno and Cagean concepts to the rave chill-out room. I fell in love with 1998’s Richard D. James Album because it leaned into the melodic side of his sound design, but still paired these (comparatively) catchy melodies with relentless drum breaks, automated at warp speed. Drukqs is commonly referenced as his most divisive work, and I get it. On my first listen, it sounded like RDJ Album’s drill n’ bass eruptions but on steroids, fed through a pencil sharpener. Plus whatever the fuck those weird percussion/piano songs were.

Critics at the time were similarly divided. Pitchfork dismissed the piano tracks as “crude instrumental contemplations” and “languid noodlings.” In a review for Spin, noted IDM/“intelligent” genre skeptic Simon Reynolds called the album “disappointing” and an “absurdist caricature of drum n’ bass,” its “whiplash beats suggesting the fast-forwarded impacts suffered by crash-test dummies.” His criticisms sound like praise in disguise to me, specifically the crash-test quality of the drill n’ bass cuts. Like the ferocious drum breaks of “54 Cymru Beats” which, despite IDM’s reputation as a dance floor disperser, propel me out of my seat, into motion. Maybe a bit spastically, but still.

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Kurtis Blow is, somehow, only 67 years old. To put that in context, Jay-Z, whose debut album came out in 1996, is about to turn 57; Run, who introduced himself to the rap world as “the Son of Kurtis Blow,” is 61. But the Harlem native started early. At the tail end of the 1970s, he became the first rapper signed to a major label; his debut single, “Christmas Rappin’,” was a narrative counterpoint to the ubiquitous and comparatively freeform “Rapper’s Delight.” Overtly comical though it was, the man born Kurtis Walker was pulling from a rich history. His communications classes at CCNY had focused on the West African griots, who had travelled from village to village and reimagined the narrative power of song.

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For some, a creative path appears early on in life. This was the case for Seattle’s Bobby Granfelt, aka Bobbyy, who started playing drums in his early teens and soon enough found that playing in bands, alongside others, was “his whole thing.” The garage band spirit of the Northwest Granfelt grew up around—a vibe he describes as “two guitars, a bass player, a drummer, and everybody has distortion pedals”—was counterbalanced by the reality that the whole thing wasn’t just Nirvana and Sub Pop anymore, even if some might still live off those fumes. His first CD purchase was Usher’s 8701, he grew up in the suburbs listening to hip-hop on the radio, and eventually fell into jazz, first through musical curiosity and then through practicality when a band director at college invited him to replace their recently graduated drummer. That timing was fateful as by the time he left college, in the mid 2010s, the likes of Daedelus and Flying Lotus were showing him there was a world of…

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Growing up in East Tennessee, it wasn’t uncommon for your neighbor or grocery cashier or mailman to ask, unprompted, if you’d found your “church home” yet; my devoutly religious first-grade teacher once stood me up in front of my classmates to accuse me of being a witch. It was the 2000s, when televangelists and Harry Potter fanatics both saturated the culture—you do the math. These warped doctrines wedge shame into the most vulnerable crevices of the soul. Artistic practices, usually a space for divination, are clouded and corrupted.

Though separated by a few states, Sparklmami and I immediately connected over the religious traumas of our youths spent in the South, and our respective Chicago-based extended families that exposed us to an artistic life beyond them. On her debut album, in this body, the musician, visual artist, and creative director examines the impacts of her Texas upbringing; it’s a defiant neo-jazz return to her own vessel.

“I grew up in the church, and that was my formal introduction to singing,” Sparklmami says. “I used to be in the church band with my cousins and my youth pastor. When I left the church, I didn’t sing for ten years. I was making visual art, and had stepped away from music.” Fortunately, that interlude was clarifying, an expansion rather than an end. “While I wasn’t making music, I got to really learn what I liked, and got to cultivate my taste, and spend a lot of time just collecting music, finding things.”

Studying visual art in high school and later earning a BFA from the University of Illinois Chicago, Sparklmami began to forage references that encapsulated core memories from her childhood, imagery she would later synthesize on the album. “A lot of my work at the time was about processing my own lived experience through Mexican television and soap opera aesthetics,” she says. “I was dabbling in everything. My visual practice was very much world-building, thinking a lot about utopia, and trying to reimagine things that were inherently me processing my childhood. That world developed on its own, and I made my way back to music.”

Backyard bandas on warm summer nights; a CD collection surreptitiously toted in her mother’s car; lush Brazilian jazz and silky disco—this is the alchemy of in this body. “A lot of making this record was from coming across artists like Flora Purim, and being super enamored with how she was so ahead of her time, and really embodied her voice as an instrument,” she says. “I was really inspired by a lot of the Brazilian sounds that were coming from the ‘70s, like Marcos Valle, Sandra de Sá. Azymuth, Cortex, and the freeness that they embodied.”

Sparklmami’s retro-utopia is replete with enchanting vocals sung in both English and Spanish. Rediscovering herself through meditative, subconscious character work inspired by the poet John Giorno, much of the album was recorded in singular takes. “I’m just trying to get free,” she explains. “Seriously: Just get as free as possible.”

I read somewhere that you did a stint as a DJ. How did that help shape your taste in curation, having grown up surrounded by a specific church music sound?

Growing up, I wasn’t really allowed to listen to secular music, is what they call it. It was more my own moral dilemma as a teenager, [feeling like] I’m guilty for wanting to find music. I learned how to DJ over the pandemic, and prior to that, I was always finding music. I had 10,000 songs in my Spotify library or some shit like that, [going] down the YouTube holes. I didn’t grow up going to music school, I had no formal training, didn’t really grow up with jazz in the house or anything like that. It wasn’t until college when I really got to further the taste. The way I think about my work, whether that be visual projects or music projects, is that I’m a student, and I’m interested in a subject, and I’m researching my way through it.

I grew up in the South, and it was a very, very religious place, so I definitely understand the conflict of moral dilemmas and internalized guilt as a child.

I’m 12, feeling guilty for listening to Coldplay. Like, what?

I’m curious if you have any sort of grounding practices that you integrate, or if the creative process is your meditation in itself.

The creative process is my meditation and is my landing place to freely feel. So much of this is intuitive to me, and I want to protect that. My intuition is what got me here to begin with. While growing up in the church wasn’t always the most positive experience, I learned very quickly the feeling of spirit. I experienced that same feeling in the church, and I experienced that same feeling again ten years later when I started to sing again. That is my gospel, not [coming] from a place of shame.

I stepped away from Christianity as a whole, and I associated that with my voice for so long. I always had this inherent desire to make music, but I was too scared and was not there within myself to do that. I remember my family always [telling me] I have such a nice voice. I was always around musicians, and when I was in college, [my friends and I] used to host DIY shows in the basement. I was just always around. I was also a makeup artist for a while. I used to do makeup for other artists in Chicago, and sometimes artists that were touring through Chicago, and I feel like that was my footing. I believe it takes time to cultivate community.

That moral dilemma really came about when I was a preteen, and more so understood the conditions of my environment. Visiting my family in the summer in Chicago, they put me onto house music, block parties, and bandas playing in the backyard on the south side. That was very formative for me. My mom also was a music collector, and she had this huge binder that [held] hundreds of CDs that she used to collect. I remember when she became committed to religion, that was the last thing that she really had a hard time letting go of. It makes me really emotional. She would just carry it in her car, and [say] I know I have to throw this away. But, you know, I think flipping through that [binder] as a kid was also just so formative for me. Seeing a lot of, like, Spanish rock and house music. She loved a lot of techno from the UK, things like that.

The whole process of making this album was coming back to my voice. That and the title itself, too. It’s literally coming back to my body on all my own terms, and knowing that I have agency. I tell my friends, I’m just trying to get free. Seriously, just get as free as possible. Your body does hold on to shame.

It’s really intense to come to terms with that, too.

Yeah, but it gives me a lot to make [art] about, so…

I love that you use characters to express yourself; were you involved in theater, or did these characters develop in private?

When I was younger, I used to go to drag shows. I would just, like, wear a wig, and do my makeup really crazy, and just go about my day like that. I’ve always just been interested in the idea of an alter ego, you know? And now I’ve gotten to develop it through sound.

Who is your alter ego? What’s her vibe?

Well, I’d like to say she’s my confessional subconscious. [She] is informed by me, but for some reason, she has an English accent. She’s unapologetic, and calling out her own shit, and is also inflecting stories through a more third-person perspective. There’s also a character named Dr. Laura that I’ve gotten to develop more, and she’s my therapist. I’ll go on stage, and I’ll modulate my voice, and I’m having a therapy session with both characters, and so I’ll have two mics, and so one is me, and then the other one is the modulated voice.

It was inspired by this show called Caso cerrado, which is on Telemundo. It’s kind of like Judge Judy, but [with] a therapist. But yeah, I don’t know. I really don’t know how it came about. I remember being inspired by this poet named John Giorno, and I think that’s where I initially got the idea. I remember watching some of his earlier works, where he would literally just go up on stage and just start speaking from subconscious, and then there would be someone transcribing what he was saying in real time, and that would then become published poems. So I kind of took that approach. I just started talking. I would like to say that whatever spirit is channeling through me becomes that. I don’t know how to explain it.

How did you get into visual arts? It sounds like you were interested in music, and then you shifted gears.

The BFA program that I was in was pretty open-ended, and was actually more, like, conceptual than technical, so I just got exposed to a lot of different shit.

I was painting, and then I took a bunch of video classes, and that’s when I learned that I was interested in early 2000s, ‘90s, Mexican soap opera television aesthetics, so I stuck to that, and developed that. I was really interested in the green screen as a motif of worldbuilding, and then moved on from the green screen as a background to making that into the foreground. I [would] paint my body green, and was thinking about how a green screen is often used as a tool to render space, so what does it mean to render my body? I was thinking about these different things, and was doing a lot of different performances where I would dress up as a patient, and had my friend dress up as a nurse, and he was painting my body green. [I was] critiquing or speaking to, like, the notion of feeling like there is something that needs to be changed about myself.

How did you get comfortable with the performance aspect of all of this?

That’s been new. That’s something I’m still navigating, figuring out my stage presence. I don’t even want to be thinking about it that much. I know who I am, and I know what my energy is. I’m not really trying to choreograph or dance in that kind of way, I am interested in pushing the boundaries and really seeing something that I just haven’t seen before, bringing more of that conceptual-driven, performance art on stage. Stage design, and bringing live green screening on stage, and what that would be like.

I definitely am a creative director. I’m definitely creative and directing everything, and I know what I want, I know what I see, and [I’m] spending more time growing that. I make decks, I love a deck. I love a storyboard. I’ll shotlist things out [for my videos]. I’m very involved in the process. It is very much what I see.

Do you have any movies that you love? Was anything super influential to you?

Holy Mountain was a very life-changing movie for me when I was in college. It changed my whole understanding of what film could be. Watching David Lynch films in college as well, like, Mulholland Drive, I remember watching that in class. Video artists, like Shana Moulton, Jacolby Satterwhite, a lot of video artists that I liked. Alex Da Corte, that’s another one that I really liked, he does a lot of critiquing consumerism. He actually directed a video for Tierra Whack, most recently. So, that realm, those are more my references. Not so much straight-on films, but video artists and performance artists.

I’ve been unemployed for months. If there was ever a perfect moment to go on an adventure, it’s now.

When Washington D.C. punk lifers SEXFACES announced their very first West Coast tour, I hemmed and hawed over covering it formally. I could go to one show and enjoy myself; maybe take some photos! I could go to a couple shows and get a healthy dose of the band who made my favorite rock album of 2025 (the caustic, nasty fever dream BAD VIBES OST). Then, I had the above epiphany and thought to myself, “Why the fuck not?”

Singer/guitarist Sal Go asked me, “Do you want to ride in the van with us to Yakima?” My unofficial bonus parents Paul and Karen offered me their guest room after the band’s Tacoma date. I had a credit card available, just in case I needed to get a hotel room. What I didn’t have, however, was an excuse to blow off this self-appointed assignment.

BAD VIBES OST took the garage punk scene by storm, adding an avant-garde element to their barnburners named after Iggy Pop and rowdy tributes to Valerie Solanas. I’ve written a bunch of times that they sounded as if the Dirtbombs were really into Spacemen 3—even if drummer/vocalist Jacky Cougar doesn’t care for the Dirtbombs—but there is a distinct flavor to all the band’s members; a confluence of musical identities which created a group that equals even more than the sum of its awesome parts.

SEXFACES’ debut full-length has more than enough to make your ears perk up. The way Jacky shouts “Loooooooooord stop me!” at the beginning of “James Osterberg” (Iggy’s government name). Or how Hana Racecar’s electric viola squeals while Sal sneers about smashing the state and killing landlords. Or the grinding, gnashing interpolation of Carly Simon at the end of “Special/Lame.” Opener “Ultraviolence” is one of the best Side 1, Track 1s of the decade.

I first saw SEXFACES last fall, at the first Gonerfest afterparty I had attended in a decade. Taking the stage at about 2:10am, they played a trio set because their bassist couldn’t make the trip, sounding enormously shrill in a way that nobody who knows my music tastes would be surprised that I really liked. I knew at some point I would hear the band in full complement, and it only took a few short months for them to announce their maiden West Coast tour.

All in all, it was the feedback from my soon-to-be-spouse who’d be in charge of taking care of our chihuahua Rodeo for three of the five days the band would be in the state—”This might be the only time you’ll be able to do something like this”—that secured my participation in this idea: somewhere between Almost Famous and Our Band Could Be Your Life. Fate had chosen me.

In the famous words of pro wrestling Hall of Famer Booker T moments before he won his first World Heavyweight Championship, “Opportunity has knocked and I’ll be damned if I don’t answer the door.”

Time to gas up my subcompact Jeep and hit the road, I guess.

OLYMPIA, APRIL 20

4/20 is the St. Patrick’s Day of cannabis consumption. The rookies make too big a deal out of it and then overdo it, while the vets treat it like any other day—or they give themselves an extra treat, just because. As I parked on historic 4th Avenue in Downtown Olympia, I gobbled an edible and looked around the expanse that has generated some of my favorite music in the world. I had dinner at the food truck conclave with my musician pal Olivia. Realizing I was late for the show, I gave my friend a quick goodbye hug and walked the two blocks to Wild Child, only to find the band having dinner at the bar.

I warmly greeted Sal, Hana, and Jacky, and met Ben Schurr—filling in on bass for this tour since Neil Cobra couldn’t make this slate of dates. Within minutes, Ben and I are chatting about his theory regarding certain guitars being linked to gentrification patterns (a similar idea to my feelings about LCD Soundsystem fans). “If you see a Jazzmaster onstage, you know the rent’s going up,” he says.

Pete Menchetti, tour manager and owner of Slovenly Recordings—the label that released BAD VIBES OST and other obscure punk classics—is perched at the end of the bar, typing away furiously on his phone, trying to put out fires and handle business. The merch table is stocked with crates and crates of Slovenly LPs and CDs, as well as choice selections from the iconic Crypt Records.

Already, this feels like more than just one band’s tour. Not to spout clichés about “community,” but this run of shows carries hallmarks of collectivism and multiple parts of being in “the underground scene” coming together to make the whole, an interlocking network of bands, labels, venues, writers, and people looking for a dope rock show.

I could hear the opening bands through the doors that led from the bar/restaurant to the music space, and they didn’t sound all that remarkable, so I hung out at the bar with the band. Jack periodically went back to evaluate the bands for his “scene report”—off-the-cuff reviews he writes on his Notes app and posts to his Instagram Stories. The rest of the band hung out, and we caught up since it has been seven months since we’ve last seen each other.

By the time SEXFACES took the stage, the room was more or less clear. The only people who remained were me, Sal’s friend Lauren (whose home the band are crashing in tonight), Pete, and a couple of teenagers from the opening bands whose parents were in the bar. The band ripped through “Ultraviolence,” and by the time they launched into a new song, “I Hate Living in the USA,” the parents were telling their kids it was time to go.

The quartet finished their set with a pummelling version of “James Osterberg,” closer of BAD VIBES OST—its coda a gloriously unhinged breakdown instantly reminiscent of the immortal second side of Black Flag’s My War; threatening, in and of itself, to double the length of the song’s recorded version.

After the show, probably because I was stoned, I thought the band was standing in a well-lit dressing room instead of an alley behind the venue, until Sal motioned for me to join them. Outside, in spite of being disappointed by there being no turnout, the vibe was chill and lighthearted. I told the band that they played well and, if anything, they could count this show as a top-notch rehearsal.

Ultimately, we talked about the fall and Jack’s other group with Hana, Jacky Cougar and the Vampyres from Africa, to distract ourselves from the disappointment.

TACOMA, APRIL 21

For all intents and purposes, this is my first true day on the road. Sure, I drove from North Seattle to Olympia and back last night, about 140 miles in total, but I slept from the comfort of my own bed at the end of the night. And I’ve made that drive many times before. For the better part of the next three days, I’ll be lugging around my Hill-Side weekender bag with a couple nights’ worth of clothes and a toiletry pouch, sleeping in the downstairs of Paul and Karen’s house, and springing on a hotel room in Central Washington when I ride with the band to Yakima.

I invited my longtime friend Emily—one of Karen’s actual kids—and her partner Jason to the show; in the early 2010s, Emily was my primary show buddy, so it was nice to turn back the clock in a way. We had dinner with her (our) parents, I dropped off my stuff, and she drove the 10 minutes from the Lincoln District to New Frontier, the Downtown-ish venue a stone’s throw away from the Tacoma Dome.

This feels noteworthy because back in those days, I was a fledgling music journalist who didn’t know many people in the scene I dwelled. Much of the time, Emily is the only person I knew at shows; as opposed to tonight, where I’m flitting around, chatting with all three members of support band Semisoft (more on them in a minute), Tacoma punks like Del and a few others I don’t see as often since I moved to Seattle nearly five years ago, all of SEXFACES (who I found sitting at a table eating two plates of loaded fries), and Pete, while browsing the ever-present crates of items marked with Slovenly and Crypt catalog numbers.

Now that I’ve reached the tragic comedy of being a forty-something-year-old rock journalist, I’ve thought a lot about the ways in which members of very specific music scenes grow up together—or grow up separately and come together, the latter of which has happened more often than not in my case.

The members of SEXFACES are all in their forties, all have day jobs and/or side gigs, and are all on tour to keep a sense of adventure in their lives; most certainly not as a lucrative endeavor, as evidenced by the attendance (or lack thereof) in Olympia. It’s funny when people call the scene a “network” or put the term community in scare quotes, because not many of the bands in the global landscape of underground punk are financially solvent. I suppose it is a network, but not in the capitalist sense of the word.

Most of us—and that includes the one-person label operations, photographers, writers, etc.—are just hoping to just make enough money to break even for getting to do this stuff. The best of us know we aren’t owed a living for “cultural production,” that it’s a wild privilege to get to do this at all. When I “broke into” the formal world of music journalism, I was working the graveyard shift at my neighborhood supermarket.

This global community of underground rock weirdos, we meet people based in other cities at shows or music festivals, hear about each other through our friends, set up cheeky group chats, and if we’re extremely fortunate, become pals if we see each other in person enough times.

I’ve known Alina and Malia—respectively, guitarist and bassist for Tacoma trio Semisoft, both sing and write for the band—for years. Alina worked at Alma Mater, one of the handful of great Tacoma music venues, before owner James Walton—the youngest son of Jim Walton, heir to the Walmart fortune—pulled funding for the venue and donated the building to the Indigenous Puyallup Tribe. At various points, she’s helped organize events, tended bar, and played solo-electric country sets on its rooftop.

As the cliché goes, it takes a village.

Hidden Driver, the first band of the evening, were very good—immediately reminiscent of indie rock’s current wave, where Gen Z bands attempt to interpret the greats of ‘90s alternative rock from cellular, indistinct memories beamed from their parents’ stereos into the womb. But these Tacoma youngsters go a little off the beaten path, opting for Where You Been or Without a Sound-era Dinosaur Jr. rather than the same ol’ shit their contemporaries take cues from.

The roadside dive bar atmosphere of New Frontier emitted a hopeful vibe for the night. It helped that the venue was bustling and getting fuller with each passing song played by the bands and the DJ—whose name I forgot to write down but impressed me verily when they played the Pleasure Seekers’ “What a Way to Die”—a far cry from the previous night. SEXFACES, sharing several plates of loaded fries, naturally felt much better about the evening.

A full house and a lively mood is really all a band can ask for, as far as the things they can’t control go.

In the past year, Semisoft have become one of the buzziest bands in the area, which would normally bring me a healthy pang of suspicion, but Alina and Malia are incredibly talented songwriters individually, so why wouldn’t their combined efforts turn out to be fruitful?

Described as “dreamy post-grunge” in their press materials (and thus, half the sites online which have covered them), I would say Semisoft is more of a very good iteration of contemporary alternative rock. Alina’s guitar was heavily treated with effects pedals, but it wasn’t on some boring neo-shoegaze shit. There’s quite a bit of surfy guitar, but it’s not a retread of any band of Washington State’s past that used that style to good effect in different ways—of which I could name quite about a dozen offhand from the Seattle-Tacoma area. They had moments that clearly showed a love for Black Sabbath, like “BDS.”

Jacky favorably compared Alina’s guitar work to that of the Birthday Party. He told me the next day that he said this to her but she had never heard of them. Celia, Semisoft’s drummer, is the band’s secret weapon; pummeling, intense, just a monster on the kit. It was an incredible sight to see her play and I made sure to tell her when I saw her later in the evening.

Thanks in no small part to the local draw of Semisoft, SEXFACES played to a full room in Tacoma. I’m sure their Olympia experience had something to do with it, but they hit the stage with fierce determinism and launched into a scalding rendition of “Ultraviolence.” It was fated for SEXFACES to leave the stage in obliterated debris on this night.

At every show on the West Coast tour, Jack deploys a joke before the band plays “Babies.” It’s about an aborted (no pun intended) idea for the song’s music video, where he and his friend kick around a baby doll with the face of Adolf Hitler superimposed on it. I’m not going to give away the punchline here, partly because I think it’s more interesting to gauge the reactions of people without most of the people reading this aware of the context. (Another part of it is that I’m conscious of SEO and such, and I don’t want this piece to scan like Westside Gunn’s HWH series before he had the good sense to stop using its full title.)

Anyway, the Baby Hitler joke got a smirk from me last night in Olympia and I didn’t catch Sal’s friend Lauren’s response. In Tacoma, the joke was followed by nervous laughter and awkward silence from people who were deeply unsure if it was okay for them to laugh.

Of course, “Babies” itself is a funny and slyly political song, rife with cynicism, righteous indignation, and self-skewering in equal measure. One of my favorite things over the course of this week will be chant-shouting “I DON’T WANT A BABY WHO LOOKS LIKE ME” along with Jacky and Sal.

After chatting with the band for a bit (who were pretty elated about the night) and exchanging numbers with Pete to set up a pickup for the drive to Yakima, Emily, Jason, and I went to Top of Tacoma for a nightcap and late meal. I turned down food because Paul cooked burgers for dinner and I was still full, but took up Emily’s offer to buy me a drink and got a vodka soda. Her and Jason dropped me off at their parents’ place at about 1am, picked up their 60lb bull terrier Ripley—named after Sigourney Weaver’s iconic character from Alien (1979)—and it didn’t take me long to fall asleep in the guest room.

YAKIMA, APRIL 22

I sat at the dinner table eating leftover burgers while Karen did some online administration work for her business; she’s a glass artist with a kiln in the same converted garage space where Paul keeps his record collection. I’d estimate that he has somewhere in the neighborhood of 5,000 records. At some point, and I hope with all the might in my heart that it’s not anytime in the next quarter-century, I will be the beneficiary of a decent number of these records, as per Paul’s last will and testament.

Glass art was supposed to be a retirement hobby for Karen, but now she goes to markets and can clear a couple thousand dollars on a good day.

Karen is by no stretch of the imagination a punk rocker; she’d probably relish in telling you this herself. And as much as this tour diary is about 40-something punks sleeping in guest beds and packing four people into hotel rooms and driving across hell and Earth to play to literally nobody—or, concurrently, being self-(un)employed and dumping money onto one’s credit card just to hope to break even when one gets paid for filing the piece—it’s also about expressing yourself through art and playing with the idea of commerce on a DIY level; it’s about adventure (a word I’ve used a few times now) and artistic fulfillment and being your own boss at least some of the time while you do so.

And so while the identities are different, the experience is incredibly similar. While I’m waiting for Pete’s Sprinter to show up in Karen’s driveway, I delight in hearing about my bonus-mom’s stories of setting up at makers’ markets, sending stern messages to people who take pictures of her piece and try to pass them off as their own, and getting a commission from a client who wants their parents’ ashes fused in glass.

It’s certainly akin to a process a punk can understand intimately.

Soon enough, I see a road-worn-but-not-completely pulverized Sprinter pulling up and my phone vibrates from the text Pete just sent me. I say goodbye to Karen, letting her know I’ll pick up my car tomorrow, grab my bags, and toss them in next to me in the free seat—front row next to the sliding door.

I realized I had rather unwittingly participated in Earth Day by agreeing to ride with the band to and from Yakima rather than driving myself.

The difference between a good interview and a great interview comes down to chemistry. And even if you have a great interview with someone, it doesn’t always translate to spending an entire day with them and having a good time. When our route along Highway 18 led to eastbound I-90—about an hour from Tacoma—conversation topics ranged from pigfuck and true crime to where we were on 9/11 and childhood Adderall prescriptions. Sal was fast asleep in the back row, but the rest of us were engaged in lively chatter.

“It’s like a film canister,” I said. “Like what they used to carry movie reels in.”

Jacky is pitching ideas to Ben (who works in record manufacturing) about the forthcoming Jacky Cougar & the Vampyres release—he’d later reveal to me that it’s a covers album—and came up with the notion to pay homage to Public Image Ltd.’s masterpiece second album, Metal Box. Ben was sort of unclear on what the packaging looked like, so I chimed in and he and Jack discussed potential alternatives.

I’m not saying I take the majesty and beauty of the Pacific Northwest for granted; it’s a large part of why I’ve lived in this region for close to three decades. But it’s a much different feeling to see the wonder of the natural world through someone else’s eyes. As we drive through Snoqualmie Pass, Sal has awakened and every member of SEXFACES is looking out of the window as high up as they can. Jack asks, “Are we between two mountains right now?” I answer in the affirmative while everyone else takes in our surroundings in awed silence.

The funny thing about the immense natural beauty of Washington State is that once you get to Cle Elum (about an hour past the pass), the rolling foothills and 100-foot-tall trees are replaced by farmland, a sprawl of sagebrush, and dead grass as far as the eye can see. There are spectacular views in the highlands near the Gorge Amphitheater—the most scenic outdoor concert venue this side of Red Rocks—but we headed south for Yakima before we got there.

“Martin Douglas just put a shitload of barbecue sauce on his pulled pork,” said Jacky to his partner on the phone. I was starving when we finally made it to the Bearded Monkey in Yakima, what appeared to be a music gear shop with a performance space tucked away behind double doors in the lefthand corner. That’s not a dis; apparently their setup is working for them, as they had a fully-stocked fridge of beer and water, sparkling and still. There was pulled pork in the slow cooker, baked beans and rice in a hot pot, and plenty of buns for sandwiches.

I helped Pete unload the records from the van, and one of the members of the opening band, Nevins, recognized me. She apparently came to the Marnie Stern x Wimps show where I DJ’ed…and played Thee Oh Sees’ cover of Ty Segall’s “The Drag”—a 45—at 33⅓RPM. I recognized her too, because she complimented me for it when everybody else just thought I fucked up.

Nevins were great; after Semisoft, they were my favorite I had seen all week up to that point. They were two young people on guitar and drums, playing an alluringly odd combination of (at least in my mind) Butthole Surfers, Modern Lovers, and a dash of the Frogs. It gave me a sense of pride that young people were doing something refreshingly weird in a place like Yakima.

I only caught a couple of Picket Lines’ songs; they seemed like perfectly serviceable Oi! (or Oi!-adjacent) punk. Not my thing, but I was in the minority because the room was full, spilling out into the showroom lobby. I was fairly comfortable being in the minority, specifically due to the fact that Jacky and I were probably the only Black dudes within miles of this place.

The room mostly cleared out for SEXFACES, but thankfully, the other bands stayed along with a few attendees. It’s common courtesy for the opening bands to stay and watch the headliner—and useful to study as many live bands as possible if you’re a live performer yourself—which is what bugged me so much about the Olympia show. Staying for the whole show is basic etiquette.

The soundman (who I assumed was also the booker and venue owner) was a burly, cowboy-strong dude with a big beard and a straw hat. His professionalism particularly shined in the soundbooth, as SEXFACES sounded the best they have all week on the Bearded Monkey stage. They might just sound like a noisy punk band to most people, but SEXFACES are a sonically rich group, and it’s pretty easy to misinterpret the sophistication of their sound if you don’t get it. At Bearded Monkey, all of the moving parts worked perfectly in sync and sound.

Hana wasn’t turned up too high (or worse, too low), Jacky’s vocals were as clear as his kick drum, Sal’s guitar and voice were right in front of the mix as they should be, and Ben’s bass was right in the middle; neither too muddy nor overpowering anything.

Whether or not the band knew the sound was perfect from the crowd, they turned in a perfect performance in spite of the meager attendance.

A handful of new songs have been sprinkled into the set list for this tour, including the aforementioned “I Don’t Want to Die in the USA,” sung with extra vitriol by Sal, and “Vero,” an absolute banger with Jack on vocals. Unsurprisingly, given the locale, Jack didn’t lead off “Babies” with the Baby Hitler joke. They played the song without incident, and then Sal goaded him into telling the joke after, maybe not realizing why he was reluctant to tell it in the first place. The joke landed well, it got pretty good laughs, which is also not surprising.

Getting to know Jack over the past couple days, I’ve learned that he gets a kick out of jokes that make people uncomfortable—so everyone who laughs heartily at the Baby Hitler joke is telling him who they are a little too easily.

After the show, we hang around for a bit and then load out. Ben exhibited his prowess in stacking the gear in the van, Jack was watching English football on his phone in the passenger seat, and after Sal and Hana smoked cigarettes and drunkenly teased each other, we went inside to chill out for a little bit. I shared one of the couches with Pete and Sal, who pulled out a pocket breathalyzer to my particular amazement. Then she told me an amazing story about it, along with a lot of drugs, in a hidden shoebox; a wild story of friendship, betrayal, and retribution.

When I was a service porter at Jaguar of Tacoma, one of the shop’s customers owned an XJ8 which always smelled like stale cigar smoke; he had a Colt .45 in the side panel and a breathalyzer attached to the motor. The hose you were supposed to blow into was as long as the one used for colonoscopies. Anyway, after all these years, I didn’t know they made breathalyzers that can fit in your pocket.

Such is the ignorance of a man who came from a fair lineage of highly functioning alcoholics and addicts.

“I like dogs. I hate dog owners,” Jacky says from the passenger seat, some time during the 45-minute drive between Yakima and Ellensburg, where we’ll be staying at a mid-level Marriott just off I-90. I had just offered to put Jack up in our guest bedroom in Seattle after their show in Bremerton tomorrow night (I forgot that it is currently inundated with wedding decorations).

“I would lose respect for Martin if I saw him being all [says in dog-baby-talk] ‘Thatssuchagooooodboooooy Rodeo!’,” says Jack. Hana protests by reminding the van that Rodeo is the cutest and goodest boy ever.

I essentially agree with Jack, “That’s exactly what I’d do. But if you want to crash at my place, I can make that happen.” Jack just wanted to go on the Bremerton-to-Seattle ferry.

We chat about the new songs and Jack seems particularly enamored with “Vero,” asking me what I thought about it as everybody—except Sal, who is taking a whiskey-induced snooze—discusses which of the new songs could and should be released as singles. I chime in, saying “Vero” is a no-brainer for a future A-side. Jacky half-jokes that the song is gonna buy him a house.

Not incredibly long after, we’re in the lobby checking into our rooms. I pay for my own room, the band shares another room between the four of them, and Pete decides to sleep in the van. Within about 45 minutes, I’m falling asleep to ESPN’s late-night NBA coverage.

BREMERTON, APRIL 23

I woke up with the television still on and tuned into ESPN; Stephen A. Smith hollering in my dreams and all—and switched it to ESPN2 as soon as the theme music for The Pat MAGAfee Show started blaring. I took a hot shower, checked out, and waited in the lobby for the band.

Minutes later, we’re outside, gathered around the Sprinter. Sal takes a swig from her plastic pint of Jim Beam, assuring me it soothes her throat and preserves it for singing. Pete tells us about sneaking into the hotel pool at 6am for a swim. The group asks for lunch suggestions. It’s shortly after 11am, so I tell them if we hit the road now, we should get to North Bend by lunch and we could eat at Twede’s Cafe—famously depicted as the Double R diner in Twin Peaks.

Ben is the only real Twin Peaks fan in the group (myself included), but everybody seems game to have lunch at a local diner.

After stopping at the same gas station we visited yesterday, I noticed Pete’s GPS speaks in Italian yesterday but didn’t say anything, and now someone else in the band has finally acknowledged it. Sal says, “You know, Pete could take us anywhere and nobody would notice.”

“I’d notice,” I reply.

“Do you speak Italian?”

“Uhhhh, I live here?”

The band bursts into laughter. I hold it in for as long as I can, but ultimately succumb to chuckling as well. This is the first time Jack recites what will become a running joke between us for months, “That’s off the record.” With a laugh, Sal asks me to leave it out of the piece and then changes her mind. We all laugh about it intermittently for the rest of the two-hour drive to North Bend.

At some point, Jack was concerned that the band’s caustic sense of humor and penchant to occasionally have a laugh at each other’s expense was potentially too mean-spirited for my tastes. When he asked if I was feeling comfortable hanging with the band for the better part of 24 hours, I replied, “Like a hand in glove.”

Naturally, we all take photos in the parking lot of Twede’s and cross the street to get photos with the Cascades in the background. Inside the diner, Hana sets her work laptop on the table, we each name our favorite David Lynch works—Eraserhead, Mulholland Drive, Wild at Heart, and my favorite, Blue Velvet—and order our meals before Ben steps out to take a work call. While perusing the menu, he noticed there was a peanut butter and jelly burger and wondered aloud if that was what Elvis ate the night he died on the toilet, to which I responded that Presley had a burger with peanut butter and banana and bacon slices. [Writer’s Note: Research has shown Elvis’s actual last meal was four scoops of ice cream and six chocolate chip cookies.]

As the sun tries to emerge from the thick afternoon clouds, I’m finally dropped off at Karen and Paul’s house to pick up my car after a heavy spate of afternoon traffic. (We passed the time discussing Sharp Pins.) I chat with Karen for a few quick minutes before I leave, go to the Costco off of 38th Street to fill up my gas tank, and crawl through traffic up the Narrows Bridge and Gig Harbor, getting farther up the Olympic Peninsula as the sky clears.

On Monday while in Olympia, I ran into noise/avant-garde/punk musician Max Nordile while shopping at Rainy Day Records, and after telling him my plans for the week, he recommended a Bremerton shop called Beats & Cats, which specializes in (hand-carried) Japanese imports. After a traffic-elongated drive, I stopped into the shop and was initially disappointed by the lack of shop cats.

Seconds later, two big cats wander cautiously through the shop while the owner wordlessly minds the counter, barely acknowledging my existence until I walk up with an Albert Ayler live record and a Nigeria 70 comp—and even then, it’s just a semi-polite greeting, giving me my subtotal, and a goodbye.

After a dinner of fast food in my car—to my surprise, only the second of such meals I’ve had this week—I roll up to the Charleston, affectionately known to locals as “the Chuck.” I stumble upon Jack and Hana having an impromptu Vampyres from Africa meeting in and around the van. Inside, a steep flight of attic stairs led us to the green room, which had a window offering a view of the stage.

Watching the bands from the bar, I take a photo of Ben while he’s dozing off—with the flash on—while Sal takes video of me doing it and laughing heartily about it after. The opening band was a very young group from Bainbridge Island called Fuck Everything; the sound was akin to what people would term “post-hardcore.” I feel the same way about “post-” genres as Elmore Leonard feels about semicolons; they just tell me you went to college. Little flashes of Unwound appeared in their aesthetic, a dash of At the Drive-In too. Their singer was growly and mumbly, which didn’t appeal to me at first, but then I started to get it by the end. I have to admit, Fuck Everything were very promising and possessed loads of untapped potential.

Hemmed Up was a grouchy punk band very much in the spirit of Social Distortion; likely a popular act in the hometown of MxPx. One of the members of SEXFACES told me this is their least favorite punk subgenre, and I replied, “Same.”

I stayed in the bar while SEXFACES took the stage; I had just ordered a vodka soda and couldn’t take it to the lip of the stage because this was an all-ages show. After a false start and some sass from the sound guy, who Jack took pleasure in correcting when he identified Hana’s instrument as a violin—”It’s an electric viola”—the band was off, ripping into “Ultraviolence.”

SEXFACES looked and sounded great on such a big stage. I mean that literally and not figuratively, as the Charleston is not necessarily a large-capacity venue, situated in the Navy town probably most famous for being the birthplace of Quincy Jones. The songs they have been playing all week were given heft, which isn’t better or worse than playing in a small room—I kinda prefer the latter, but that’s just a matter of taste—but a nice alteration to their sound.

Hana is the band’s secret weapon, especially in this space; her electric viola adds a significant amount of art damage to earworm punk songs like “Can’t Do That.” Her instrument—to reiterate, not a violin—cuts through Sal’s radical, humanist manifestos and fantasies of liberation through violence; through Jacky’s mordant wit and “post-punk”-inspired misanthropy. The first line of “Babies” finds Jack singing, “The kids today, they’ve got nothin’ to say,” with Hana’s viola screeching over her bandmate’s words like a chainsaw trying to breach corroded steel.

Speaking of “Babies,” Jack told the Baby Hitler joke prior to playing the song (as usual) and a guy in the bar laughed REALLY FUCKING HARD. The only other time I had felt as uncomfortable witnessing art alongside people with sketchy views was when a scattered mass of people laughed at the use of the N-word at a screening of The Hateful Eight.

Before launching into “James Osterberg,” Jack dedicated the song to Fuck Everything. The two of us were chatting before he went onstage and he asked what I thought of the barely post-adolescent Bainbridge Islanders. He loved them and was very enthusiastic about their set. It became clear to me that he has a deep compassion for weird kids who start bands, and he has a clear investment in the future of the scenes we dwell. The late-set shoutout was really endearing, and felt to me like he was telling them (and all young oddballs playing music) to never give up expressing themselves.

I stayed for about half of the headliners’ set, because I had to make sure I wasn’t late for the midnight ferry to Seattle, the last one of the night. A couple members of Hemmed Up asked Sal and Jacky to sign their freshly purchased copies of BAD VIBES OST, which was a very cool show of support for a fellow touring band. Life Rips was not my thing but certainly not bad. I used the time to say goodbye to the band and Pete, thanking them for letting me ride in the van with them.

Downtown Bremerton was eerily quiet on this Thursday night, as if the city’s residents allowed the ghosts of sailors and brothel workers to have a chill night as the living prepared for the last day of the workweek. After a long day of marching across a third of the state, I put my seat in full recline and fell asleep in my car instead of hanging out in the seated passenger floor of the ferry.

SEATTLE, APRIL 24

After getting home at about 1:40am, my day started way earlier than usual, as I dropped off my fiancée at the light rail stop so she could take the first train to the airport for a weekend trip. I decided to gorilla press the day on about 2 ½ hours of rest.

Just kidding. I put Rodeo back in bed with me and went the fuck back to sleep. I woke up at 10:30.

About eight hours later, I enjoyed a gorgeously sunny drive down Highway 99, across the West Seattle Bridge, past my future-in-laws’ house down Delridge Way, and to White Center—celebrating a half-decade of the formerly unincorporated King County suburb being gentrified into Seattle’s hippest neighborhood.

I had a burger and a Cheerwine at trendy-ish and relatively affordable (for Seattle, notoriously one of the most expensive cities in the world) “elevated fast food” chain Lil’ Woody’s, bought their McDonald’s homage shirt, and walked the two blocks to the venue, past one of my favorite spots in town, the wrestling-themed Lariat Bar.

After showing my ID and getting into Tim’s Tavern, I caught the band at the end of what I was told was a “long and unproductive” soundcheck—in front of a bunch of older people who were likely just there for Friday night dinner-and-drinks.

A gentleman who appeared to be in his fifties, who was identified later as a member of one of the support bands (and a former member of deep-cut Sub Pop band Cat Butt) struck up a conversation with me. He had white hair and a black and white striped shirt (think “cherubic French sailor” or an extra in a Jean-Luc Godard movie) and we were talking about musical projects for a little while. It took me a minute to realize he thought he was talking to Jacky, and by then I felt too awkward and embarrassed to correct him.

Thankfully, Sal was there to cut through the bullshit. With a hint of amusement, she told him, “That’s not Jacky, that’s our friend Martin. He’s a writer. From here.”

Just when I thought every member of every band in Seattle knew who I was, I get served a slice of humble pie, mixed in with some “Black people look the same” / “There can’t possibly be more than one Black person here” type of nonsense. To his credit, the musician profusely apologized for his mistake. To his discredit, Jacky, among other distinctive qualities, is at least four inches taller than me.

As many different places as I’ve been in this state this week, the very last place I expected to be confused for another Black dude was the city where I live and work.

Sal and I resumed our conversation on the patio, where she was getting into her professional background; she was a video game designer before leaving to freelance and write. In the van, she had just received information about a translation of her second novel, Way of the Walker. We chatted about marketing books (“I’m sure fantasy fiction is easier to market than music nonfiction,” I quipped)—and she talked about hustling up a little extra cash by selling handmade posters.

Inside Tim’s Tavern, where there are so many tables it almost felt like a supper club, the first two bands were actually pretty stellar. Toxic Thrust were a very good garage band and Bug Nasties were like an ‘80s indie (or even “college rock,” if you will) group preserved in amber. Chico Detour was also notable, potentially even the best band of the bunch; a cocktail of Tex Mex country twang and krautrock rhythm; the septet was led by very strong songwriting.

They also played forever; it seemed like they were onstage for over an hour, even though they were the third band out of four.

During the openers, I had a deep conversation with Hana about astrology, as we have two of the same planets in different major placements. Jack told me he’s a Gemini—his merry prankster smartassedness was a clear indicator—and then immediately afterward, told me that this was off the record because he was considering lying about his sun sign because of how much grief Geminis get. That comment was also “stricken” from the record.

One of Jacky’s pals was in on the conversation, and I reminded him in front of her, “Again, that’s not how ‘off the record’ works!”

After Chico Detour’s set, the venue weirdly turned the house lights on; maybe they were confused by their set length, which was basically that of a headliner. SEXFACES, the actual headliners, seemed confused by the lights coming on. People started leaving. And then the house lights were mercifully turned back down.

As with many of these shows, the local bands drew the house and only a handful of openers and attendees, Seattle musician Emi Pop (a friend of Sal’s), along with myself, my friend Ray, and his wife, stayed for a killer set.

“Ultraviolence” set the tone as usual, but the vibe was different. The less-than-half-full room burst open with people jumping around, whipping their hair, and really getting into the music. “Vero” banged like a future underground hit and a song they’ll be playing live for years to come. Late in the set, the band banged out the motorik pulse of “Feed Machine” like the cavepeople who invented the wheel plowing down the Autobahn.

When the band played “James Osterberg” on Monday, they finished it off with a My War-style breakdown; all slow, heavy drums and dissonant guitars, going on for about three to five minutes. After that set, I told them the story of how basically every Seattle punk went to see Black Flag on their My War tour, and while every other city in the nation notoriously hated the album’s Side 2 and reacted viscerally to it, the Seattle crowd reacted viscerally in a good way. Side 2 of My War was one of the building blocks of Seattle’s most enduring musical export: grunge. I told them Seattle would flip out if they played the coda to “James Osterberg” like they did that night.

SEXFACES did the breakdown, maybe even extending it by another two minutes. The Seattle crowd did indeed flip out. Greg Ginn, and maybe even Iggy Pop himself, would have been proud.

I hung around for a bit after the show, chatting with people, shooting the shit, meeting a very cool DJ in town named Carmella (who spins under the name “DJ Glitterous”), and making jokes with friends new and old. I said goodbye to the band, passing hugs all around and wishing them well on the remainder of their tour. Sal told me to be “brutally honest,” but there was nothing to be brutally honest about when it came to characterizing SEXFACES. We shared a good time, relatively few disappointments, and many miles across this wondrous stretch of land.

For a five-day workweek, I caught a glimpse of what it’s like to be in a punk band in 2026. To make new jokes that turn into inside jokes and laugh all the way to the nicest highway-stop hotel you can find after a long drive that put about 200 miles on the odometer in a day. To take in arguably the most scenic region in the country in a van full of human bodies and Trader Joe’s detritus.

A touring punk band is part chosen family, part traveling circus. They have a secret musical language onstage and humorous shorthand offstage. It’s a group of people working hard toward a final goal: the euphoria of about 40 minutes onstage.

And if you break even financially, that’s just a bonus.

If form does, in fact, follow function, then it’s fitting that the one time Serengeti sounds like Drake is when he’s rapping as a character whose mansion was sold to a “crypto kid from Miami.” “He put LED lights in the tiger room,” the narrator says, “that shit offended me badly.” That last clause, which comes just six seconds into Geti’s new EP, boxer driver, is so deeply Grahamish that it initially scans as an impression. But while the syntax is a perfect match, this boxer character—washed up, deeply in debt, alienated from his family, scarfing egg whites over his kitchen sink—has none of Drake’s gambling app-underwritten joie de vivre, none of the glint that suggests he knows this is all a little ridiculous. For the boxer, the revolving vultures are several steps closer to true predators. When, at the end of this opening song, he peers through his blinds and sees a black sedan idling outside, he runs through the possibilities: repo men, tabloid stringers, enforcers sent by people sick of waiting on wire transfers. Instead, it’s simply his ride to an appearance he’d forgotten he’d agreed to.

boxer driver’s title is literal. The record, which runs a little under 15 minutes and is produced entirely by DJ Crucial, is structured like a two-man play, where both that boxer and his newly contracted driver voice their inner monologues. They have many of the same problems: their sons have largely rejected them (one sends an expensive watch, meant as a birthday present, back with no note, the other offers only one-word responses to the immigrant dad whose accent now embarrasses him); they’ve been stripped of their one-time professions (the driver built engines and taught in his home country). While one man is still wearing a watch that costs more than the other is paid in a year, neither has enough money, and when they pull up alongside the windows of a building at dusk, they both see their fathers in the reflection.

Geti, who already this year has dropped the loose, exploratory symphony of psalms, the buoyant shark attack, and KENNYV, a sprawling and occasionally hallucinatory masterstroke in his Kenny Dennis saga, treats money like water on pavement, following it into every crevice and fault line. “You ever notice how rich people love saying ‘Be present’?” he quips at one point. “Every cousin had a business,” the boxer says at one point, explaining where his $40 million fortune went. “Every business was a disaster.” The driver’s son thinks his father’s job is more impressive than it really is—he didn’t lie, he explained, his son just filled in the blanks the way he needed to. Collection agents have voices “calm as hospice nurses.” Phones vibrate on tables with unknown numbers from familiar area codes. An old friend-turned-creditor looks around an empty living room and smirks: “Damn, Champ, minimalism?”

But he also reaches for something more elemental, the little sorrows and dangling albatrosses for which money acts as a symbol. “Everybody say ‘Pay your debts’ like debts is math.” One of the men—at points, the concerns overlap in such a way that it’s not clear which character is voicing something—notes that when you’re broke, “even your anger know it’s a joke,” your voice betraying you. There’s the Thoreau quote about men leading lives of quiet desperation; Geti’s characters let it grow louder bit by bit, rattling like the engine of a sedan that its driver could fix, if only his boss allowed him to touch it.

1. In April, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame announced that the Wu-Tang Clan would join its Class of 2026, making it the ninth rap group and the first-ever act from Staten Island to receive such an honor. Resultantly, the Forgotten Borough—still as conservative, if not as uniformly white, as it was during the Wu’s 1990s peak, when the island’s disaffected paisanos single-handedly put Rudy Giuliani’s mayoral bid over the top—decided to commemorate its hometown heroes through a special Wu-themed event at Staten Island University Hospital Community Park, home of the Atlantic League’s FerryHawks team.

   

2. If you’ve never heard of the FerryHawks, here’s some background: After COVID shut down much of the 2020 athletic season and caused Major League Baseball to seriously rethink its minor-league structure, the New York Yankees decided they would give up on their Staten Island–based affiliate team, scrapping the 1999 deal Giuliani had brokered to thank those voters. The now-spurned players, also identified as the Yankees, were forced to shut down their club and sever all MLB ties, ceding the future of Richmond County Bank Ballpark to one of those newfangled Investor Consortiums—in this case an incredibly motley crew consisting of, among others, Saturday Night Live’s current Weekend Update rotation, the Rock’s ex-wife, the UAE-backed asset management firm that owns YES Network, and the Mamdani-hating grocery-store-maven-slash-radio-host whose family runs the Manhattan Republican Party. The FerryHawks name was the favored choice of locals paying tribute both to a native bird and to the Staten Island Ferry, an imposing steel hulk that charges its passengers nought. It’s the only vehicle under the Metropolitan Transit Authority where open drinking, courtesy of tallboys conveniently offered for sale at the loading dock, is all but encouraged. It’s also the only one that’ll stand still for a free show from FerryHawks investors Pete Davidson and Colin Jost. More love for the hometown heroes.

3. Inside Staten Island University Hospital Community Park, you can still make out the faded lettering of “Richmond County Bank Ballpark” on the walls just below the box seats, which were mostly empty both times I visited the FerryHawks this season.

   

4. “Shaolin Night,” also known as the “Salute to Shaolin” game, was penciled in for Aug. 29, chosen for no particular reason I can ascertain. (One could posit that a real hip-hop head within FerryHawks HQ recognized that date as the release of Method Man’s 4:21 … The Day After, but I doubt it, since they didn’t even play “Say” at the game.)

5. No Wu-Tang members were able to make it that day because the group was scheduled to perform in Hartford, Connecticut.
   

6. The Salute to Shaolin took place the same month that saw the FerryHawks host special nights on behalf of Faith and Family, Italian Heritage, the Staten Island and Brooklyn Chambers of Commerce, Hispanic Heritage, Dogs, Country Music, and (just the day after Shaolin Night) Loving Staten Island.

   

7. As a child of post-industrial Michigan, growing up far north of the Tiger Stadium/Comerica Park/Fifth Third Park that housed a team notorious for breaking records for losses, I always had an affinity for that crumbling institution known as the minor leagues, the C-tier baseball teams in cheap infrastructure that seemed to have been meted out as pity gifts to any city that was not named Detroit. Our capital, Lansing, had its very own Lugnuts, whose mascot, Big Lug, was a seven-foot-tall purple dinosaur with lugnuts as nostrils. Jackson Field was a great, cheap place to hang out with friends mostly without supervision, and the team was mediocre enough that wins or losses didn’t hurt so much either way. An affiliate of the then-Oakland A’s, the Lugnuts long employed the services of a baseball clown named Myron Noodleman, who just so happened to be Bill Hader’s uncle. Noodleman unfortunately passed not long after I left the Greater Lansing area to start my career in New York, just months after I’d attended a Lugnuts game as a farewell to some college homies.
   

8. Eephus (2025) is not quite about these same subjects, but it is relevant nonetheless.

   

9. Good seats at SIUH Community Park only cost up to $26.50 on regular nights; for Shaolin Night, they came with courtesy RZA bobbleheads. Perks at the game itself included potential free tickets to Wu-Tang shows in Long Island and New Jersey, along with an auction for a special Wu-branded FerryHawks jersey worn during the game itself. You see, for one night and one night only, the team would be known as the “Shaolin Hawks,” while their opponents would remain the lame old, same old York Revolution. (“Revs,” for short.)
   

10. I attended my first-ever FerryHawks game just a couple nights beforehand, when the team’s record was 8–39 and they’d just suffered another loss to the Revs. That game recorded sparse attendance on a rainy day, the jumbotron kept glitching out to 502 errors, and my girlfriend and I left early. Joke was on all of us: It ended up with an extra inning and a pretty sick walkoff for the Hawks.

11. They beat the Revs on Shaolin Night, too. Clearly, the Wu is happy to bless their teams, whether that team be the Hawks or the Knicks.
    

12. As I type this the Hawks rank at dead last in their division with a 10–41 record. (The Revs are first.)

    

13. The week before the game, a significant contingent of Wu fans belatedly discovered that Raekwon is a longtime fan of Palantir, the notorious software firm best known for its Peter Thiel connections, ICE contracts, and sword-waving CEO. Alex Karp himself appeared in the new HQ photos with the Chef, in tribute to the Wu’s farewell tour. An old BET cypher where Rae dons a Palantir fleece got a second look. For some, the hurt felt especially acute since the Wu’s halftime Knicks game performance was widely perceived by New Yorkers (including yours truly) as a direct counter to the curse President Donald Trump’s MSG visit had bestowed upon the Knicks.
    

14. A complete playlist of Wu-Tang Clan songs played throughout Shaolin Night: “Protect Ya Neck,” “Shame on a N----,” “Can It Be All So Simple,” “Gravel Pit,” and “C.R.E.A.M.,” which closed out the night during a round of fireworks that, yes, at one point displayed that unmistakable W.

    

15. The “Gravel Pit” needle drop resulted from one of two trivia questions played for the crowd, the second of which quizzed the crowd on whether Snoop Dogg had ever collaborated with the Wu. The screen did inform the audience that Uncle Snoop had featured on “Conditioner,” but in fairness the programmers definitely realized “Gravel Pit” was the more recognizable selection from The W.

    

16. The first question asked was about the title of their first album.
    

17. An incomplete playlist of non–Wu-Tang Clan songs played throughout Shaolin Night: “Ten Crack Commandments,” “If I Ruled the World,” “Drop It Like It’s Hot.”
    

18. A bunch of kids with green Killa Beez–branded jerseys were in attendance, which is how I learned that Staten Island and New Jersey share a barely two-year-old flag football travel team named for the catchall Wu-Tang affiliate nickname.

    

19. Some of the official FerryHawks merch was marked down by as much as 50 percent.
    

20. Other bits of semi-official Wu merch spotted in the crowd: a blue “Wu York Knicks” jersey with “Shaolin 36” embossed on the back, a Crossfit/Wu-Tang crossover tee, and custom Wu-Tang-branded FerryHawks merch (different from the “Game Worn” black jersey up for auction).

    

    
    

21. The RZA bobblehead really does not look much like RZA, nor does its head bobble that much.
    

22. God bless small baseball teams, and may Wu-Tang always be for the children.

Theoretically, a Kanye and Jay-Z song produced by Lex Luger that sounds like the slo-mo bombing of a Gothic cathedral should be the greatest thing ever made. In practice, it was the first song I ever remember being disappointed by. “H*A*M” came out when I was a 13-year-old Kanye obsessive with every deluxe-edition CD and accompanying poster hanging on my wall. Too young to understand Jay-Z was having a wretched late-career crisis overlapping with a broader midlife crisis on Blueprint 3, but old enough to know it was weird that he made a song rapping about “going hard as a mutherfuker.” I watched the duo’s live VEVO performance a dozen times. They had no motives but to be rich and remind us how far we were from it ourselves, no core thematic or aesthetic values guiding them, no idea how to sound cool or modern on production that was equally impressive. Without their blacked-out shades, one imagines, we’d see the apathetic deadness of their stares, their souls slurped out by marathon recording sessions in the Mercer Hotel and whatever bag of goodies made those nights possible. Their skeletons hunched around wearing leather pants, flexing white girls like they were luxury accessories and flexing luxury accessories like they were Wal-Mart t-shirts. It was an embarrassment. Public Enemy frontman Chuck D and trusted sage No ID saw right through it, too, their own disappointment cutting so deep that the ig’nant luxury rap flex-fest of Watch The Throne 1.0 was scrapped for parts.

“Living So Italian” was a holdover from those early sessions and nearly made the final tracklist. Previewed for journalists in July 2011 with a mostly-finished version of Throne, the two biggest rap stars of the last decade move in devotion to Italian stereotypes over Andre Bocelli’s “Por Ti Volaré.” Rapping over an unchopped opera song is the kind of masturbatory move that only a peak Kanye West would have thought of, much less followed through on. It was so appalling Dante Alighieri would have died of laughter. Andrea refused to clear the sample, leaving “Living So Italian” in purgatory, spoken of in hushed keyboard strokes by Redditors and Kanye completionists. Some things are just better as ideas.

Omari Lyseight, Earl Sweatshirt, and Rockitneedspace, “Square”

British producer and DJ Omari Lyesight’s debut album Digital is a soupy, digitized board game of Six Degrees Of Surf Gang. The record label and genre-less NYC collective Surf Gang has over the years, concentrated down to a few core members linked by their love of keeping a lowkey presence and electronic textures, but still holds a gravitational pull on dozens of artists from across the globe. MIKE, 454, Jawnino, Lerado Khalil, and so on. Near the center of this pool of super friends is the Tan Cressida label, Earl Sweatshirt’s collective of California burnouts who alter the very nature of timing, flows, and pockets whenever they get on a song. “Square” is another one of their patented mind-rewiring, hookless wonders, with Earl and Rockitneedspace filling the space between flute solos and crooked bass blasts with sticky weed bars and sports references for only the supreme ball knowers.

Okgutta, “War”

Every time it looks like we’ve reached the sonic limitations of rage rap someone emerges from the deepest end of the Internet to prove otherwise. With “War” Pennsylvania rapper Okgutta has completely realigned every rage song that’s come before it. It’s so distorted, electronically limited, compressed, and cursed that it circles back around to near silence, mimicking the whizz of a mosquito, impossible to be properly reproduced out of modern speakers. This lovechild of he and Minneapolis rapper/producer Matt Proxy makes the Opium roster sound like Yo Gabba Gabba! sing-alongs, Osamason is recast as radio friendly popstar, 2Slimey as a safe face for daytime television.

The lyrics? Illegible. The flows? Probably fine from what I can gather. This isn’t music made for people who listen to music, it’s made for people who want to react to it; physically within sweltering mosh pits, angrily into the online void, and creatively unbound in their home studios. Yet I can’t stop playing it trying to understand its secrets.

Maine CG, “Alphabets”

The DMV rap scene is a hornet’s nest of violence, experimental industrial textures beating at their own pace, and rap collectives dumping music at chaotic speeds, trying to flood the market until they can claim hometown dominance. Maine CG (formerly known as Lil Plukk) uses “Alphabets” to bring a little levity to it all. There’s still gun talk and a mysterious woman carrying around a Call of Duty weapon in the video, but it’s hard to take it all seriously when Maine is running down the ABC’s of raining fire and brimstone on someone. Like a villainous Papoose, Maine flips the building blocks of early childhood education into something fun for the whole family; “L for loser got no hope/M for be that murda money/N-O can’t taking nothing from me.”

Nori & TS7, “The_1”

Another day, another young rapper compelling me to show respect to the UK for catching up to American rap music. North London’s Nori might make music set for boss battles and the final lap of DaytonaUSA, but his “video game grime” would be a natural fit in warehouse raves the world over. “The_1” falls in line with previous singles scuzzy dance rap records “shake_leg” and “hell0_hi”, all cognitive overloads that lead one to throwing their hands in the air and letting out a couple of “woooo”s and “oi”s like [insert good English soccer situation here] just happened.

Extras

“After Further Review” was an idea I came up with years ago to discuss key recordings long after their original release, exploring whether the passage of time led to a change of perspective or new insights. For this installment, I invited Adam Mansbach, the former founder/editor of Elementary Hip-Hop Journal in the mid-1990s and a best-selling author and novelist based in the Bay Area. Together, we revisit De La Soul’s Stakes Is High on the occasion of the album’s 30th anniversary. –O.W.

In the summer of 1996, De La Soul opened their fourth album, Stakes Is High, with something unusual: an homage to someone else’s album. On “Intro,” listeners first hear a montage of voices sharing stories behind “when I first heard Criminal Minded,” referring to Boogie Down Productions’ seminal 1987 debut. De La’s core members—Posdnuos, Trugoy the Dove/Dave, and P.A. Mase/Maseo—had honored their heroes and colleagues via lyrical and musical references before, but this wasn’t just a love letter to BDP. By nodding to a moment of hip-hop achievement from the past, De La was also setting up—pun intended—the stakes for wrestling with the music and culture’s future moral center. Whereas in the past, the group clowned colleagues they thought too eager for crossover success, on Stakes, they now took aim at the glorification of Italian mob bosses and Latin American drug lords. While De La was hardly the only act scoffing at these trife life fantasies, the group’s well-earned stature gave their words extra weight within an internecine battle that had been brewing for years.

For over an hour of music split across 17 tracks, Stakes Is High balanced a tightrope between De La’s artistic progression, commercial aspirations, and social conscience. The first album recorded without their long-time mentor Prince Paul, Stakes also marked a new phase in the group’s maturation: more serious, less silly, but still creatively inspired. Yet it wasn’t just De La in transition; 1996 found hip-hop at a larger crossroads.

Jay-Z (Reasonable Doubt) and Ghostface Killah (Ironman) launched long solo careers. Nas (It Was Written) and The Fugees (The Score) dropped highly-anticipated sophomore albums. OutKast (ATLiens) and UGK (Ridin’ Dirty) secured the South as hip-hop’s vital third coast. Lil Kim (Hard Core), Foxy Brown (Ill Na Na), Bahamadia (Kollage), and The Fugees’ Lauryn Hill further cemented the importance of women MCs. Within that context, Stakes Is High both spoke to hip-hop’s seismic changes in the moment and was prescient about how those rifts would deepen over time. What does this all look like 30 years later? Let’s talk it out.

Oliver Wang: Adam, in honor of how De La kicks off the album by asking people when they first heard Criminal Minded, what do you remember about first hearing Stakes Is High?

Adam Mansbach: In ‘96, I was living in New York City, going to Columbia as an undergrad, and running a hip-hop journal called Elementary. I distinctly remember buying two records from Rock ‘N’ Soul on my birthday, July 1st, even though the official release date for both was July 2nd: Stakes is High and It Was Written. I listened to the Nas first, because I was more excited about it. How about you?

OW: I’m embarrassed to admit that I don’t remember my impressions of when I first sat down with Stakes, but looking back, I was clearly hyped over it. I put out a mixtape later that year—entitled High Stakes, Fly Breaks no less—which had three different songs off the LP and I just realized that was the only time I ever used that many songs from a single album on a single mixtape. I was probably just excited for there to be a new De La album since, by that point, it had been three years since Buhloone Mindstate dropped.

AM: Three years was a pretty long layoff in hip-hop terms. You risked coming back and feeling irrelevant or dated because the landscape changed so fast, but De La was unique because they were three albums in, and pretty much everybody agreed that those albums were all classics.

OW: You raise a good point about how quickly, especially back then, hip-hop styles could change in just two or three years. I think of how the UMCs went from being Native Tongues-esque on their debut, Fruits of Nature, in ‘91, but three years later, with Unleashed, they sounded more like a Beatnuts knock-off, talking about their “Ill Demonic Clique” and whatnot. With De La, though, they were obviously incredible at reinventing themselves across those first three albums without making things feel forced. What were your initial impressions of listening to Stakes Is High?

AM: First, a maybe not-so-minor point: I bought the album on vinyl, and it starts with “Supa Emcees,” so no “Intro,” no Criminal Minded montage. I’m sure that was a question of space on the wax—Tommy Boy was still pressing albums on single vinyl—but it’s a very different listening experience, right?

OW: Whoa, I didn’t even realize the U.S. vinyl version left off the intro. I first listened to Stakes off CD and yeah, the whole “Intro,” especially that homage to Criminal Minded, sets a tone for how you experience the rest of the album. Given how much Stakes critiques hip-hop in that era, for it to open by giving Boogie Down Productions their flowers was a declaration of the kind of hip-hop they held in the highest regard. So now I’m curious: since you first heard “Supa Emcees” as the start of the album, how did that shape your initial impressions of the album?

AM: I always considered “Supa Emcees” a great opener. It feels exuberant and hype, and it offers points of continuity with and rupture from the previous albums right away. The drums are big and crunchy in a very De La way, and there’s a Slick Rick vocal sample, which feels like the next iteration of an inside joke, because Slick Rick samples are all over their previous records. But also, there are punchlines on “Supa Emcees,” which was not what De La was known for—but by 1996 having strong punchlines was more important than ever. The song also showcases a specific kind of wordplay that we hear throughout the album, based on deconstructing words and putting them back together differently: Pos says “while others represent, I present my rep.” He also drops that line about talking “all over your tones/as if my name was Pete Rock or Sean ‘Puffy’ Combs.” I remember being a little confused by that, like, “Hold on, is he dissing them? Is he lumping them together?” But regardless, these things signal a more direct De La, putting aside some of the abstraction and whimsy that had been their hallmark.

OW: Wait, explain that. How do you think the album’s themes fit with your perception of the group being less abstract in their lyricism here?

AM: They’re positioning themselves, if not as elder statesmen, then as grown-ass men with the moral clarity and the standing to critique the materialism and immaturity of their peers and how it’s dragging down the music and the culture. And they’re linking that to larger social and political forces that seek to circumscribe and devalue Black life. And there’s also some world-weariness to them. They’re talking about being divorced dads, about failed relationships, about disappointment that their lives haven’t played out exactly as they wanted. And that disappointment is commingled with disappointment in where hip-hop is at. If you’re going to level those kinds of critiques, you have to be legible, you can’t be talking about potholes in your lawn or having conversations with fish. And it’s worth pointing out for those who weren’t there that although 1996 is looked at now as this golden era, at the time a lot of us were dismayed by what was happening. There was widespread disillusionment with the direction the culture was moving; hip-hop seemed to be fragmenting, culturally and spiritually. A critique of the culture, by the culture, was increasingly coming into focus and this album is important to that.

OW: When you look back across the ‘90s, those kinds of concerns and tensions were layered all across the decade, right? I think of Masta Ace Inc.’s Slaughtahouse from ‘93, whose title song was a deliberate caricature of gangsta rap and horror-core, and heck, in ‘96 alone, besides Stakes, you had Jeru’s Wrath of the Math taking shots at Puffy, Junior Mafia, and similar folks, and The Fugees also lampooned wanna-be mafioso rappers on The Score. I think the difference with De La is that they had more seniority and gravitas by then.

On this note: De La weren’t literally naming-names even if it didn’t feel super subliminal either but as a result, I feel like we, as listeners, just filled in the blanks as to who they were criticizing based on our personal biases. But thinking back now…who do you think De La was speaking to on this album? If they were clowning other artists for fronting like they were mobsters or gangsters, there was no shortage of possible targets in ‘96.

AM: Given the conversation you and I have been having about Black Sheep for the last 20 years, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention “U Mean I’m Not,” their album opener from 1991 and the most hilarious send-up of gangster rap ever, in my opinion. And also, I think there’s an important distinction between playfully lampooning— like Ace, the Fugees or Black Sheep—and a more serious critique, like De La and Jeru were making. Just as it’s important to distinguish being a moral scold like Jeru—whose critiques were cut with retrograde respectability politics and sexism—from the kind of stance De La carved out.

I didn’t waste much time wondering who De La was talking about, because it seemed like a state of the union address meant for all of hip-hop… except for one line, which is the biggest misfire on this whole album in my opinion, and that’s on “Long Island Degrees” when Dave says, “I got questions about your life if you’re so ready to die.” That’s obviously addressed to Biggie, and it’s just so off. Sure, Biggie made a record full of things that you guys object to. He’s toting guns, he’s selling drugs, he’s glorifying materialism—but he also made a deeply vulnerable statement. He called his album Ready to Die, with a song called “Suicidal Thoughts.” And to respond to somebody telling you they’re ready to die with “I got questions about your life” is like the opposite of empathy. It means you’re looking right past the kind of vulnerability you’re calling for. It’s a cheap shot, a real failure to listen.

OW: In hindsight, especially because this album dropped while Biggie and 2Pac were still at the height of their beef and where Ice Cube and Common had only just squashed their skirmish, I’m actually amazed that De La didn’t seem to draw any smoke from rappers who thought that lines like “the only Italians you know are icees” and “Colombians never ran with your crew” were aimed at them. As far as I know, no one publicly barked back on De La. It never dawned on me until now how unusual that seems given how many rappers over the years have taken umbrage over mere hints of being disrespected.

AM: I think there was a kind of continental drift between the underground and the emerging pop scene, where it’s a case of “what’s a mouse to a lion?” Also, we don’t know what private conversations might have happened—it’s not that hard for me to imagine, for example, Pos calling Nas and telling him “we don’t mean you, we love your shit” or whatever. It’s also worth mentioning that De La is critiquing much more than just hip-hop with punchlines that deliver devastating facts that point to a nuanced and well-informed worldview: “De La Soul is here to stay like racism”; “My rhymes escalate like black death rates.”

Like, Jesus Christ, these are dark fucking ways to brag. But they’re also a way of sneaking information into the discourse in a clever and memorable way. And in an era where the dominant paradigm was punchlines that were shocking and graphic—which Nas set off a couple years earlier with lines like “I’m waving automatic guns at nuns,”and “when I was twelve I went to hell for snuffing Jesus” and then Big L elevated to a whole other level—De La sort of inverts the formula. These lines are shocking because they’re so depressingly, mundanely true.

OW: Not to go off on too long a tangent but this has me thinking of how De La’s maturing introspection on the album, which you mentioned earlier, makes for a compelling comparison with Jay-Z’s Reasonable Doubt from that same year. On the one hand, Jay’s obviously positioning himself as a “Don” on the album, both lyrically and visually, but he also does so in this self-reflective, even critical, way on songs like “D’Evils” and especially “Regets.” I wouldn’t go as far to suggest that the two albums are “in conversation with one another” but it’s a reminder that hip-hop contains multitudes.

AM: If what De La is criticizing is a bunch of disposable albums-as-gangster movies, then Reasonable Doubt is The Wire: showing the root causes and the relationships and the mentality and the emotional state of the gangster. Virtuosity has a way of silencing objections to content.

OW: In sitting with Stakes again, I’m really struck at how well-crafted it is but what’s also missing for me, compared to their earlier albums, was more eclectic and eccentric energy. I don’t think it’s wild to suggest that this is partly due to the absence of Prince Paul on here since the group had amicably parted ways with him after Buhloone Mindstate. It’s not that there aren’t funny or weird moments on Stakes but it definitely feels more sober than bugged out in the way that Paul’s sensibilities always seemed to bring.

AM: I think that’s very fair. It makes sense to assume that Prince Paul brought that out of these guys, and without him there, they’re taking themselves more seriously. That’s not a bad thing, but it does leech away something that was very unique and important about them. On the other hand, what this album really brought home was how much De La adored old school hip-hop. Park jam choruses are all over this record—chanted refrains, trade-offs. That’s where you hear the joy come through, because they’ve figured out all these ways to update that sound. They’re showing by example how you can push the art into the future but also stay grounded in what was great about the styles and the values of the past.

OW: That makes sense, especially if you saw their live shows back then. A lot of their crowd work seemed directly taken from the ‘70s park jam days. I also remember when they had Biz Markie as their opening DJ on tour; those guys revered Biz! It just occurred to me that Biz probably had more features on De La records than any Native Tongue member, over the years.

AM: Absolutely. Their adoration of the old school really extends all the way into the mid-eighties, which is why Slick Rick, Run-DMC and Biz samples are everywhere. I mean, why is “The Bizness” called “The Bizness”? Presumably because of that one-note sample of Biz beatboxing, which is so subtle that most people probably never noticed it.

OW: Seriously, I never even thought about the title until now but yeah, “The BIZness.” Ok, I get it now, albeit 30 years late.

AM: One other thought about the absence of Prince Paul: he’s a guy who loves stories. I mean, when this album came out he was off working on A Prince Among Thieves, the closest hip-hop has come to a single, Hustler’s Convention-style album-length story. So with Paul gone, perhaps not coincidentally, we get a few verse-length stories, but not whole songs like “Millie Pulled a Pistol on Santa”—one of the greatest narratives in all of hip-hop—or suite-length character-driven joints like “Bitties in the BK Lounge.” And that I miss more than the skits, because De La are fantastic storytellers.

OW: I hear you. I assume the lack of skits was very much a desire to move forward from what folks were used to, and let’s be honest: by 1996, I feel like we had many examples of mediocre skits on albums that just seemed to take up unnecessary space. When De La started doing this in the late ‘80s, it felt novel. By now, too many artists were turning it into a bad gimmick. But to your point, sure, I would have loved a full story song or two on here.

OW: One more broad question before we dig deeper into specific songs: what did you think of the production here? Relistening the other day reminded me of how much I dug the music; it’s very competently done, across the board. What I did notice though, this time around, is that its use of sample-based production leaned away from “check out these cool loops” and more about creating a sound bed. To put it more simply: for those of you who remember the Sample FAQ—the precursor to WhoSampled—there’s not much on this album that had me running to check the database to figure out what-got-used-where unlike with, say, 3 Feet High and Rising or De La Soul Is Dead.

There’s obviously exceptions here but I think what I perceived was either a shift in De La’s sonic sensibilities or maybe it was more indicative of where hip-hop was moving by the latter half of the ‘90s with artists tinkering with new styles of beat-making.

AM: I think it’s a little more subdued, but I don’t think their musical philosophy or their tastes changed dramatically on this record. They’re still using tons of big, crunchy drums, especially the Idris Muhammad-type jazz breaks they always gravitated toward. They’re still re-singing disco classics—it’s Zhane flipping a Sharon Redd song on “4 More,” for example, just like it was Vinia Mojica doing the same thing on “Saturdays”—and drawing liberally from old school hip-hop. Funky blues records are still a chamber they’re ahead of the pack in utilizing—before it was Outlaw Blues Band and Jimmy Reed, and on this album it’s Junior Parker. Their use of vocal samples is still really clever and playful and used as grace notes to fill songs out and make them feel richer—listening again that jumped out at me, especially that Dirtsman “hot this year” on “Itszoeezee.” They still have that deep crate digger’s sense of democracy, where every bin gets scoured and the dollar bin break is no less revered than the $200 45.

OW: Fair enough. I’m also wondering what you think of the fact that this is the first De La album where they begin inviting outside producers? Besides Dilla with “Stakes Is High,” you have Spearhead X producing “Dinninnit,” O. Gee co-producing “4 More” and Skeff “he gets props too” Anslem handling “Big Brother Beat.” Personally, the whole album has so much consistency that it never has that “produced by committee” unevenness that many albums by the late ‘90s and early 2000s suffered from because you had 10 different producers across 14 songs.

AM: Until this very moment, I had no idea there was outside production from anybody except Dilla on “Stakes.” Wow. Uh… their contributions mesh very well. And on a quasi-related note, people talk about Illmatic as the birth of the lineup-of-super-producers album, but Queen Latifah’s debut All Hail the Queen is actually the album that set it off.

OW: Sure: Illmatic wasn’t the first album to be produced by a team of folks but the main difference, from my recollection, is that, before Illmatic, we weren’t really being sold albums based on allstar production team. It wasn’t just “yo, Nas is the second coming” but it was also “look at everyone lining up to make beats for him!” I could be wrong but I don’t think The Source was talking about the production squad on All Hail the Queen the same way in ‘89.

AM: I can’t believe you’re not going to acknowledge my Set It Off pun.

OW: Ha ha ha, and now I have to face the wrath of your madness. *rim shot*

OW: We’ve started to get into the title track so let’s go all the way in, especially since “Stakes Is High” was the first commercial single off the album. I think it’s still absolutely brilliant. On the one hand, you have Pos gliding in from jump with an audaciously clever line like “the instamatic focal point bringin’ damage to your borough,” but then Dave’s first set of verses are all about what he’s sick of: “bitches shakin’ asses,” “Versace glasses,” “cocaine and crack, bringing sickness to Blacks,” etc. All that over an undeniably majestic track courtesy of J-Dilla who was still relatively unknown at the time. I suppose it makes sense since it is the title song but “Stakes Is High” really is a kind of distillation of the entire album’s themes and thrust.

AM: De La really thought about the statement they wanted to make, and how to structure their argument. They start with “I’m sick of this, I’m sick of that,” but then they move into Let’s talk about structural inequality and why the projects are insidious government experiments. They hook you with something you can viscerally agree with, but they’re not going to leave you there; by the end of the song they’re not just indicting misguided artists, they’re indicting a government and a society that redlines neighborhoods, reifies housing inequality, creates ghettos, and profits from Black incarceration and death—then has the audacity to blame the victims as if they created those conditions. It’s rhetorically quite brilliant.

And it’s worth pointing out that the Long Island of Pos, Dave and Maseo’s childhood was not just a place where Black families moved when they could afford to leave Brooklyn or the Bronx—it was also a place where pernicious redlining and housing discrimination were only just starting to get dismantled, on a town by town basis. So this isn’t just global and national, it’s also locally felt and understood.

By the way, did you find it weird that “Stakes Is High” was the second-to-last song, before “Sunshine” closes it out?

OW: I had forgotten that it was the penultimate song until my re-listen. And I agree: it does feel odd—based on conventional sequencing—to “bury” your title track all the way near the end, especially since it is such a statement song. What do you think the effect of it is, to hear it after a full hour of music before it?

AM: I’m going to answer this one as a novelist, if I may, because there’s something to be said sometimes for hiding the ball—building your scaffolding and slowly unfolding your ideas through character and plot and dialogue before you reveal your thesis. I wonder if that’s the intention here, like: “if we start with a mission statement, we risk telling instead of showing—but if we give people an album that is full of the kind of richness and vulnerability and reflection that we want to see in hip-hop, and then make our most pointed critique of what’s missing, it lands a little differently.”

We also have to mention the ultimate solution De La offers after all the analysis, which is “that’s why the Native Tongues have officially been REINSTATED,” which both MCs say together, something I don’t think you find anywhere else on the album. That’s really important, because the fracturing of that crew—De La, A Tribe Called Quest, Jungle Brothers, Queen Latifah, Monie Love, Black Sheep, Chi Ali—was painful for them and painful for us to watch, and you could really argue that as that joyful, quirky, deeply creative crew stops collaborating, all of hip-hop suffers; the overall tenor of hip-hop suffers. We as listeners never really knew what happened, but we caught crumbs, like when Pos says “Jungle Brothers on the run” on “Breakadawn” from Buhloone Mindstate, turning one of the JBeez song titles into a diss. As a fan of both groups, it was just fucking sad to hear that. I remember interviewing the Jungle Brothers back then, and I couldn’t bring myself to ask about the beef, because it felt like prying into family business. So all that to say: the reinstatement felt like a huge announcement. But it rang a little hollow, because… where were they, then? Why aren’t any of them here, on this album?

OW: You raise a good point though I know I never stopped to ask that back then because, to be frank, as a clique, they actually didn’t do that many “all family” collaborations or features with each other outside a handful of prominent examples like De La’s “Buddy” or the Jungle Brothers’ “Doin’ Our Own Dang.” The closest we got around this time wasn’t until 1997’s remix of “How Ya Want It?” by the JBeez. My point being: I wasn’t actually anticipating a Native Tongues reunion despite that line. Would have been cool on here though!

AM: This is the moment when Mike G and Afrika are supposed to come out from behind the curtain and Latifah, like, swings down on a rope from the balcony, and Dres pulls up on a motorcycle, and Q-Tip rappels down from a helicopter, and they all save hip-hop. But in retrospect, I wonder if the line was more of an offering than a statement. Maybe they were throwing the Bat Signal in the air and the rest of the crew was supposed to heed the call.

OW: Ok, “Stakes Is High” was the first song I wanted us to talk about. Your turn; what track really struck you on here?

AM: I want to talk about “Betta Listen,” because I think there are some interesting and subtle things happening lyrically, all revolving around the chopped up “listen all you fellas… you betta listen” Junior Parker vocal sample. This is a riff on a classic hip-hop trope: the ribald or semi-ribald story about meeting and trying to bag a girl, told by a dude in an all-male, barbershop-type setting. That kind of story can go in all kinds of directions: success, failure, surprise twist, self-deprecation. But what I think is cool here is that over the course of the song, De La sort of shifts and evolves the meaning, so instead of gather round, fellas, you betta listen to this story… it becomes fellas, you betta listen… to women, if you want them to give you the time of day. The song is still sexy and playful, but it’s based on our narrators being vulnerable, talking about their children, seeing women as people instead of objects. On one hand, all that is basic, but in a hip-hop moment when a supposedly “conscious” rapper like Jeru is next door calling women harlots and scandalous temptresses and policing what they wear, this is both a ray of sunshine and a quietly revolutionary little joint.

OW: I mean…Dave also called out “bitches shakin’ asses” on “Stakes Is High” but perhaps less obnoxiously than Jeru’s super-patriarchal take on “respectable femininity” on either “Da Bitchez” or “Me or the Papes.”

AM: We’re all works in progress, O-Dub.

OW: Ha, fair enough. Meanwhile, as for “Betta Listen,” I think this track was on the “cool but not a fave” tier for me, partly because I found the beat to be a bit anemic. This is what I was alluding to earlier about the shift in production style: I guess I’m a fan of the “chop up the soul” school of beat-making where loops and samples are more prominent. “Betta Listen” is a great example of how you can make a well-crafted track using samples in a more subtle way but for me, it’s also forgettable for that same reason. I will say though, in listening to this again, I realized how much Pos’s story verse in the middle reminds me of what Mos Def would do a few years later with “Ms. Fat Booty” but I guess Rakim was already laying down this style back with “Mahogany.” My point being, you were saying earlier how you were missing full story-songs on here, which you attributed to Paul’s influence, but you get a little bit of it here.

AM: You do, for sure. It’s just not as high-concept. Or maybe it’s more mature. I guess both those things can be true.

OW: What’s strange about Stakes Is High to me is that, on most other albums, I can instantly pinpoint a list of favorites but for whatever reason, I don’t have the same relationship with Stakes besides the title track. But one song that always brings a smile to my face, at least, is “4 More” which is one of the better examples of an R&B-laced hip-hop song that doesn’t feel like what Dave was clowning, i.e. “R&B bitches over bullshit tracks.” De La and Zhane are like chocolate and peanut butter here.

AM: I think that’s because it isn’t R&B-laced hip-hop—it’s disco-laced hip-hop. The way that hard, super-clean blues drum break meshes so seamlessly with the re-sung Sharon Redd chorus is sublime and speaks to the way a hip-hop ear, a vinyl mixologist’s ear, knows how to cross-stitch sounds across genres in ways that make total sense. I didn’t know the song this is based on back then, any more than I knew the Instant Funk song when “Saturdays” dropped, but of course I had to hunt them both down. It’s always worth reminding folks that hip-hop back then was incessantly expanding our palates as listeners, because we’d hear some hot shit and obsessively figure out the sample and dig for it. Our musical literacy as a generation is so deeply indebted to that process, and so is our intellectual curiosity. The “don’t front” sample—from the Jungle Brothers’ “Jimbrowski”—was maybe a little bit of Native Tongues repair? And “got a way with women so I got away with yours” is another example of the new style of wordplay I mentioned earlier in regards to “Supa Emcees.”

OW: We were talking offline about one of your other favorites, “Pony Ride.” While this is also in the back half of the album, it’s another track that I always liked too. Partly, it’s that very distinctive beat and its echo effects plus I also liked hearing Truth Enola on here. His deep baritone(?) sounds especially resonant. I suspect your love for the song is more than just on the aural level though.

AM: All due respect to Truth Enola, what’s interesting to me is mostly Posdnuos’s verse. I remember being struck by Pos rhyming, “I recall kissin on my lady, talkin’ bout makin’ babies/ Now we made the baby, but cannot connect as legal spouses/Now me and my daughter reside in different houses.” Pos’s whole verse is so raw. He’s reflecting on his own shortcomings, the relationship’s failures, the sadness he feels at being apart from his kid. It’s not an attack on his ex, although he doesn’t shy away from casting some blame camouflaged in a bit of abstraction. I remember being really struck by this verse, because what rappers in 1996 were talking about divorce? Honest question. I can’t think of any.

OW: I can’t either even though I’m sure there’s probably some example folks nerdier than us will recall. From my recollection, what we began calling “confessional rap” really felt more commonplace in the 2000s than in the ‘90s though, as I’m saying, I’m sure there were exceptions. I’d just point out that De La already set the precedent of sorts on Buhloone Mindstate with “I Am I Be” which isn’t quite confessional in the same way you’re talking here but that song felt unexpectedly vulnerable in terms of how Pos talks about the loss of his mom, the unplanned pregnancy that produced his daughter, and so forth.

I think we often think of Pos as the more cerebral rapper compared to Dave but maybe we need to give him more love for finding ways to be deeply personal without making it feel navel-gazing or solipsistic. It’s an underrated skill.

AM: Then Pos closes with “no tricks in ‘96, it’s time to build” which I read as both a personal goal and a challenge to hip-hop, because on this album De La is operating on three levels, conflating the personal with the hip-hop nation with the world and concluding that it’s time to reclaim and remake all of them. That line is also a referendum on how much building we’ve been doing since his fellow Long Islander Rakim spit that iconic line a decade earlier—for Ra, of course, “build” also has another meaning drawn from the Supreme Alphabet of the Nation of Gods and Earths. But regardless, for Pos the answer is not enough.

OW: Ok, last question: listening back to this now, how do you think Stakes has aged for you? For me, I think this album still completely holds up but not just as “here’s an album I still enjoy listening to.” I don’t want to abuse the term “timeless” but let’s just say that some albums still sound fairly fresh no matter how long time has passed vs. those that, as good as they are, still feel very much of a moment. In that regard, especially compared to some of the other efforts from back then that were all critiquing the “state of hip-hop,” Stakes Is High doesn’t feel nearly as dated. And to me, that just goes back to how well-crafted and executed the album is, overall. We don’t need to get into whether this is the “best” De La album in their catalog—that feels like a whole other convo entirely!—but my point here is that Stakes absolutely holds up, even 30 years later…not despite its desire to speak to the cultural moment then but partly because it does in such nuanced ways.

If anything, our exchange is making me wonder if I’ve underappreciated the album all these years despite always thinking “yeah, this was really good.” Again, I don’t want to open up a can of worms here, so close to finishing things up, but comparing this with A Tribe Called Quest’s fourth album, released the same year, Beats, Rhymes, and LIfe, would be a rather lively discussion as well because much as I think that LP sounds much better to me now than when it first came out, I don’t think it’s anywhere near as consistent.

Actually, this feels very apropos but I just caught this snippet from Questlove interviewing Pos and Mase and Pos is talking about how much he and the group were paying attention to what Tribe was doing—presumably this was after Midnight Marauders—and feeling competitive, in a friendly way. And for real, I’ve always loved this about De La: they admit this stuff all the time! I remember reading, I think in URB years ago, about Pos hearing “Electric Relaxation” for the first time and feeling like “oh shit, there’s new levels to this.” It’s like how members of both The Beatles and Beach Boys admit that they were totally listening to each other’s albums and trying to find ways of one-upping each other.

That’s not beef. That’s not saying “I establish my greatness by impugning yours.” That’s some “game recognize game” candor about judging yourself by the work of your peers. I think most of us can relate to that but because of how egos work in hip-hop, it feels extraordinary when a rapper actually admits, “yeah, I listen to other people’s music and that pushes me to up my game.” My point being, if Stakes Is High was one such product of that competitive spirit, we all benefitted from it. How has the LP aged for you?

AM: I still love this album, and I think the reason it’s aged so well is that it’s not just a critique. There’s a positive vision, undergirded by clear values that the album itself puts on display. Like, just to work in one final lyric I’ve been wanting to talk about, from “Dog Eat Dog:” Pos says “why the blunder, Wonder? Could’ve G’d today/So you can put up some swings for your seed to play/But a swing ain’t that important when the park’s around the corner.” That’s the ethos: integrity over money, community over isolation. Digable Planets can name-check Marx and Mao all they want, but this right here is not just the closest you’re gonna come to a wholesale rejection of capitalism in hip-hop, it’s also the most compelling.

1996 was a hugely competitive year, and this album is easily a top three personal favorite for me, along with Reasonable Doubt and Heltah Skeltah’s album Nocturnal. But of the three, it’s the only one I’d play around my kids.

OW: Ha, “Gen X parent-approved”! My top three would keep Stakes and Reasonable Doubt and I’d swap out Heltah Skeltah for ATLiens, though that’s with the benefit of hindsight because I wasn’t bumping OutKast like that in ‘96. So many albums to revisit, so little time. Let’s end it here: if you had to pick another album—at least 25 years or older—to revisit, what would it be?

AM: Oh, man. I’m going with KMD. Mr. Hood. You?

OW: Interesting choice! I like Mr. Hood but am more of a Black Bastards fan. Besides the aforementioned Beats, Rhymes, and LIfe by ATCQ, I think it’d be worthwhile to revisit double albums like the Wu-Tang’s Forever or Biggie’s Life After Death. The basic thesis: sometimes, more is less, but that’s a conversation for another time…