https://brckhmptn.bandcamp.com/album/roadrunner-new-light-new-machine
Genre: Hip Hop
Rating: 5/5
released on bandcamp April 9, 2021
Brockhampton are my favorite current hip hop collective. I see them as the fourth major “collective” as I define it (Collective: a hip hop band with at least four members whose names are worth remembering). In chronological order it goes NWA, Wu-Tang Clan, Odd Future, and finally, Brockhampton. If you ask me why I don’t call these bands and don’t save the term collective for real collectives like Project Blowed and the Dungeon Family, it’s coherency: there’s a core seed and a big beautiful tree grows out of it. That’s my semantic reasoning. And that’s the very VERY high regard I have for Brockhampton.
And yes, I love this album, probably second only to iridescence. Fuck, it might be better, time and several close listens will tell us. One of the most important things about Brockhampton is they don’t meander around lost in the flow. They surprise us. They stop everything and do something interesting and psychedelic. They’re not afraid of electro-acoustic collages. And from the get-go that has been the real core of why hip hop is so important big picture wise: because they make the electronic avant garde accessible to the pop music fan. They built on the traditions of Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pauline Oliveros and made it fun music to dance to or to get down to during a long genital slobbing fuck. Brockhampton are fun but what people can’t seem to wrap their tiny fucking heads around is that they’re more fun because they’re more talented and frankly dare to be great. Take Run the Jewels for example, mountains of lyrical skill and more flow than The Mississippi River so everyone takes them seriously except for me. They’re boring af people, admit it. The production is dry. With Brockhampton they do simple tricks like put drastically different effects on different voices. It’s a simple technique, like if you have two blonde chicks on a TV show give them different haircuts or something. Charlie Brown probably has other shirts but he wears that one when he’s working so we don’t have to think twice about who he is.
Serious love to Joba, who shares this in The Light about his father’s suicide:
Think I always will be haunted by the image of a bloody backdrop
Skull fragments in the ceilin’, felt your presence in the room
Heard my mother squealin’
Warmth Highest 