Greydon Square is a forty-something rapper from Compton who belongs to the time-honored lineage of wrinkled-forehead, pressured-speech word-nerd rappers. Suppose your Aesop Rocks, your Gift of Gabs, your Ras Kasses—anybody whose raps may fall right into a tag cloud of “third eye,” “the plan,” and/or “the singularity.” The title of his newest album, Kind 4: Metropolis on the Kind of Ceaselessly, seemingly refers back to the basic Harlan Ellison-penned 1967 Star Trek episode “The Metropolis on the Fringe of Ceaselessly,” wherein Captain Kirk should let Joan Collins die with a view to by some means cease Hitler (it’s sophisticated), and because the “Kind 4” hints, it belongs to a collection—on this case, a “quadrilogy” of albums impressed by the Kardashev Scale, which was invented by the Russian astronomer Nikolai Kardoshev in 1964 to measure a society’s skill to harness its know-how. It’s… lots, and so are the rapper’s verses— “Cosmic accosted/Obelisk hostage/monolith possibility from the ominous doctrine” is an extremely consultant stretch of rhymes.
And but it’s a testomony to Greydon, aka Eddie Collins, that even his nonsensical traces sound compelling. “I guess you didn’t even know that colours may transfer, did you?” he asks on the title monitor, and his baritone is so commanding that you just may end up reflexively shaking your head: No, Greydon, I merely had no thought. Along with his deep, glassy monotone, he sounds a bit like if Guru binged too many YouTube documentaries, and this easy voice anchors him throughout some uneven waters the place you’re not totally certain what societal ills he’s addressing—complacency? Lack of empathy? Manufactured consent? (Most likely all of these.) Greydon Sq. understands and exploits what I’ll name the Lupe Loophole, which holds that even your preposterously half-baked concepts will ring true should you stream slickly sufficient.
Earnestly didactic hip-hop on this vein is simple to mock however extremely laborious to do nicely: At its greatest, galaxy-brain “acutely aware” rap encourages you to make connections between disparate concepts not a lot by means of demonstration as by suggestion. What does a stray shot like “open vary, damaged with nothin’ however hope and alter” (from album spotlight “Hindsight”) say, precisely, concerning the unfulfilled guarantees of the Obama years? I don’t know, however the urgency in Collins’ voice makes me ponder the query for half a beat longer than I might if he lectured me straight, as does the truth that he’s onto one thing else within the very subsequent bar.
Like a variety of acutely aware rappers, Collins’ music feels most magnetic when he retains the outlines of his critiques broad, permitting his music to stay slippery, allusive, suggestive. The manufacturing, from a lot of sources together with Collins himself, helps, wreathing his voice in profundity-boosting astral synths that heighten the environment greater than any single bar. The narcotic pull of conspiracy theorizing, in any case, has nothing in any respect to do with particulars and every thing to do with that heady sensation that your whole troubles are linked in a sample whose broad outlines are simply turning into seen. Or, in different phrases: No one knows what it means, but it’s provocative; it gets the people going.
Collins is an enchanting character—a army vet who served within the Iraq conflict; a fierce atheist who repeatedly discusses the topic on speak reveals; a former physics main and an outspoken antinatalist, or somebody who believes fervently in not having kids. He’s dropped a lot of songs straight espousing these beliefs, laying out highly effective arguments that in all probability matter very a lot to folks caught up within the debate however have restricted use exterior these arenas. He dials again that tendency on Kind 4, however on “sixth,” for instance, he raps fairly straight about his political disillusionment, railing in opposition to the “false duopoly” of the political system, the tokenizing paternalism of “limousine liberals,” the hypocrisy of “company socialism,” the fruitlessness of voter-shaming a disenfranchised populace. All cogent factors, and but I discover there isn’t a lot to do with them apart from to shrug and say “yeah.” In the meantime, when he raps, “There within the crease, we buried it—a imaginative and prescient, lifted into place/A neo-view, typically too vivid! I’m the illest to ever convert oxygen into CO2,” I’m left awestruck, the afterimage of the phrases (a neo-view, too vivid!) dancing throughout my mind.
