In an age when hip-hop has become synonymous with bling and bravado, it has become easy for those experimenting at the margins to be utterly ignored by the mainstream. Yet since the emergence of pioneering rap groups like Company Flow in the late 90s, hip-hop has continued to spawn innumerable experimental poets, beat-makers and genre-crossers, whose diverse musical output is often collectively called ‘avant-garde hip-hop’.
One group who continues to defy easy classification and produce multi-faceted, experimental beats and rhymes is the Anticon collective. An independent record label formed in the San Francisco Bay Area by Sole and pedestrian in ’98, it has become the bedroom DJ’s benchmark for experimental hip-hop, containing a fluctuating stable of artists who are constantly playing with and challenging the genre’s traditional boundaries.
I first came across Anticon through the album ‘The No Music’ (2002), a collaborative effort by two of its members, doseone and Jel, working under the appellation ‘Themselves’. The frenetic, constantly shifting beatwork (played by Jel on an SP-1200) provides a strong backdrop for doseone’s convoluted, nasal, often breakneck speed poetics. The deeply personal, highly metaphorical character of his raps invites confusion and misapprehension, but also provokes moments of extraordinary clarity. This was not just bling.
Constant collaboration between their artists is a hallmark of the anticon enterprise, with rappers juggling solo careers and membership of several bands simultaneously. Witness the aforementioned doseone of Themselves, who in 2000 came together with fellow label-members Why? and Odd Nosdam to form a group called cLOUDDEAD, releasing their self-titled first album in 2001. The album is is a patchwork of shifting textures, mixing dirty beats with ambiguous, fuzzy soundscapes. The music is at once ethereal and gritty, as moments of soothing ambience change up into almost noise-music textures, and video games samples are cut up to form raw, bubbling beats.
Since the beginning Anticon have proved a focus of controversy amongst hip-hop heads. Caught up in a petty feud with el-p of Company Flow, they have been cut-off from the New York underground, and old school hip-hop fans have often denied them recognition, treating them as pretencious art-school dropouts lost in a mire of self-indulgent surrealism. This is unfair. Experimentation is essential to avoid atrophy, and if the quality of their output varies, well, that is the nature of experimenting. When they get it right however, their music is varied and subtle, their raps closer to avant-garde poetry, full of the fractured uncertainties of the post-modern ego. This is a hip-hop for our time.
