Half-Year in Review #4: Pink Siifu - NEGRO
Album release date: April 8, 2020
There have been artists before who, immediately following their first taste of success, ambitiously struck out into the artistic unknown and risked alienating their established audience in the name of esoteric innovation, but rapper Pink Siifu’s newest record puts them all to shame. Siifu’s relative fame has remained decidedly underground throughout his past few projects, yet he has nevertheless chosen to abandon the abstract hip hop of his recent ventures in favour of releasing a cruel, unabating wall of noise in the shape of an album. Calling NEGRO a ‘difficult listen’ is showing remarkable restraint, yet somehow the innate desperation of Siifu’s words makes a compelling hook through which the uninitiated can slowly become accustomed to a sound so unforgiving. Its production and lyrics, harsh as they often are, are so blatantly embedded with a piece of the rapper’s soul to the point where the question of why make such a drastic musical shift becomes moot; he clearly felt that this record had to be made, and given the present state of racial violence in America, it’s difficult to argue. In any other political climate, the uncompromising and unsubtle hatred of police Siifu espouses on nearly every track might come off as merely understandable; in our current moment, it’s downright cathartic.
In some ways, despite the obvious import of the message Siifu seeks to impart through his music, the album seems designed to weed out those with frail constitutions as soon as possible. The opener BLACKisGod,A ghetto-sci-fi tribute(_G) is perhaps the harshest piece of literal noise the record has to offer, and the distortion clouding its production only emphasizes its role as a straightforward “fuck you” to anyone who thought they knew what they were getting into. Still, manage to power through the pain and you will find ample reason for Siifu to have referred to NEGRO as a “jazz-punk rap album”; the track is essentially one extended drum solo that crackles and sputters while a cacophony of horns erupts constantly in the foreground (far from the last instrumental here that exposes the rapper’s infatuation with jazz revolutionary Sun Ra). Like much of the early material from abrasive hip hop group Death Grips, NEGRO wears its punk influences and ethos proudly, but Siifu’s comparatively blunt lyrics on tracks like DEADMEAT (recounting a time he was threatened by a black police officer for as minor an offense as hopping a turnstile) hit impossibly hard, and the warped guitars and wailing sirens only further exaggerate the strength of his words.
Siifu understands better than most the long, interconnected lineage of black art and its importance in the development of hip hop, and the primary sources of jazz, punk, and beat poetry which show up here add copious depth to his creations. ON FIRE, PRAY! reproduces the iconic guitar line that powers Black Flag’s Rise Above, and the short interlude myheadHURT., which serves as an ambient, soulful break from the surrounding bedlam, gets its stretched refrain (“The day we parted/I was so broken-hearted”) from a Curtis Mayfield-produced track by The Five Stairsteps. Elsewhere, Siifu interpolates samples from blaxploitation films (SMD) and news broadcasts reporting on racially-motivated murders (ameriKKKa, try no pork); the otherwise morose Nation Tyme. opens with an obscure live recording of a fiery Amiri Baraka composition (whose poem Who Will Survive America is famously quoted on the coda of Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy via a sample of Gil Scott-Heron’s Comment #1). The slurred, self-conscious verse Siifu offers on the song is a stark contrast to the beat poet’s frantic call to arms, but the Alabama-born rapper has earned a moment of introspection: “They treat me like I’m wasted away/I know I’m worth more than they pay”.
More tempered moments like this and the ominous we need mo color. are noted exceptions to the fuzzy, punk-influenced guitar shredding that dominates the majority of the record’s runtime. The one-two punch of SMD into FK outlines Siifu’s program with no room for misinterpretation; the rapper’s first words on the album are “Tell the police he can eat a dick”, and he begins his first proper verse screaming “White man tryna take my shit!”. The same cadence is present in the rapper’s voice on homicide/genocide/ill die, where his proclamations of “I’ll die for my family” are laced with the implicit fear that his blackness may eventually lead to him doing just that. Black empowerment is his main thesis, but Siifu’s bitter anti-cop sentiments provide the record’s driving animus, and he wisely omits the redundant explanations of structural racism in favour of all-out attack (it’s 2020, if you still need to be convinced that all cops are bastards then this album is not for you).
In the same vein, Chris Dorner. gets its title from a former LAPD officer (mentioned earlier on DEADMEAT and here praised by Siifu) who enacted a violent revenge spree on his fellow cops, and run pig run. has the rapper espouse his philosophy on police in in the simplest of terms (“Pig shoot, we shoot”) over a chorus of shrieking synths that (appropriately) almost sound like porcine wailing. The beat in question is experimental artist Slauson Malone’s handiwork; students of underground hip hop will see production credits for names like Malone and Jeremiah Jae as further proof of this record’s deceptive brilliance. As impossible as it is to put a genre label on this album, the constant use of sampled material and patchwork instrumentals (often on tracks produced by Siifu himself under the pseudonym iiye) give much of it a lo-fi, unpolished quality typical of sound collage, including the multi-part closer Black Be Tha God, NEGRO. (wisdom.cipher) where Siifu gets properly personal: “You don’t understand/What more can we bare/See the tears shed skin through the lead/Convos with the dead/Money come and go, remember that”.
Pink Siifu’s newest offering is a confusing, often illegible mess of a record, the stylistic equivalent of yanking the steering wheel as hard to the left as possible and plummeting your vehicle off the edge of a cliff as l’appel du vide takes over your once-rational mind. It is also, bar none, the most important album you will listen to this year. Siifu has created possibly the purest expression of righteous black anger ever put onto a record, and for that alone he deserves much credit, especially considering the timing of its release could not have been much better. NEGRO is the musical personification of the justified animus driving the current wave of American protests, but there’s a reason it predates them by almost two months. It exists as a tribute not just to George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, but to the countless number of black people murdered by a racist, authoritarian country over the course of its bloodied history. Through that lens, Siifu’s exaggerated fury is easily understood; when you’re stuck fighting the same societal ills that outlasted your long-dead heroes, anything less than the overt, utter vitriol displayed on NEGRO is a gross understatement of the problem.
8/10
Favourite Tracks: SMD, FK, steal from the ENEMY