Yoni Wolf, aka Why?, is the greatest rapper in the world. (Look, Rakim’s best work is 20 years behind him.) His new record, Alopecia (Anticon), is a masterpiece; you can tell because anyone you play it for—even potheads—will excuse themselves to get another beer and never come back. But I’m a fucking weirdo, and I had a soul-puncturing epiphany the first time I heard the second track, “Good Friday.” Over a looping guitar arpeggio, a sparse beatbox, and not much else, Wolf deadpans rhymes that breach your comfort zone and back you into a corner. It’s not that he expresses some deep metaphysical truth—it’s the je ne sais quoi of his experience, so alien to mine: “Jerking off in an art museum john ’til my dick hurts / The kind of shit I won’t admit to my headshrinker / Not even in a whisper to my own little sister / I just act like a dick and talk shit when I’m with her / Aught-six, I’ll say the Friday before Easter / Was not good, I cried to myself in the pisser.” It could be complete bullshit, even, but it somehow opens my eyes to the interconnectedness between strangers, and what a miracle it is that this can happen through a clumsy medium like language. —J. Niimi
― omar little, Thursday, 3 April 2008 22:30 (sixteen years ago) link
lol I saw this dude at reckless records talking to the cashier once. i know it was him because he mentioned how he wrote a book on REM and pointed to it
― deej, Thursday, 3 April 2008 22:34 (sixteen years ago) link
J Niimi i mean, not Why?
?? http://youtube.com/watch?v=Hoz7mVC03LE
― jaxon, Thursday, 3 April 2008 22:43 (sixteen years ago) link
love this dude <3
― gr8080, Thursday, 3 April 2008 23:05 (sixteen years ago) link
jesus
― omar little, Thursday, 3 April 2008 23:08 (sixteen years ago) link
WWBDKD?
Kick this guy in his asscrack is what.
― Oilyrags, Thursday, 3 April 2008 23:10 (sixteen years ago) link
It's interesting to listen to the original of Good Friday vs the remix - there's an ambiguity in the delivery that seems different depending on the backing track. The original, to me, has a bit of a "my god, what have I done?" vibe, whereas the BOC remix seeems much more defiant.
Mostly, though, it makes me wish Boards of Canada did more tracks with rappers.
― ecuador_with_a_c, Friday, 4 April 2008 00:03 (sixteen years ago) link
"fatalist palmistry" is great
i also love his last album (elephant eyelash) a lot for unexplainable reasons
i don't really think of him as a rapper though i guess he is some of the time
― ciderpress, Friday, 4 April 2008 02:03 (sixteen years ago) link
Well, he is a rapper, and a great one at that. Just not the best. Still, love his quirk.
Oh, how I long for the glory days of nerd rap. (0_0)
― brightscreamer, Friday, 4 April 2008 02:19 (sixteen years ago) link
I like their Sarah Cass photos.
― St3ve Go1db3rg, Friday, 4 April 2008 03:42 (sixteen years ago) link
-- brightscreamer, Thursday, April 3, 2008 10:19 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Link
I don't know who you are, but I'd venture that this is a post very much in character.
― Hurting 2, Friday, 4 April 2008 04:00 (sixteen years ago) link
why? does this why? asshole keep smearing himself all over indie music i might otherwise enjoy?
― electricsound, Friday, 4 April 2008 04:26 (sixteen years ago) link
i can't get enough of 'alopecia' & 'elephant eyelash' lately; these albums have appeared & disappeared & reappeared in my life over the past two decades at certain points and just feel... idk. as clumsy and as weird as the words are at times, these songs elicit vignettes of a particular kind of personal dissociation to me... perhaps a loneliness when in the company of somebody you admire. or maybe just a regular alienation. at any rate i feel the arrangements and musicianship are so overlooked in these albums...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knxBBGQ6QUc
― maelin, Thursday, 20 June 2024 02:06 (six months ago) link
This reminded me that there's a new album? I'll have to check it out.
― husked, tonal wails (irrational), Thursday, 20 June 2024 15:40 (six months ago) link