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8:00 pm
K-the-I???—Broken Love Letter (2005)
After waiting another hour, the invisible man finally decides that his date isn't coming so he pays the bill and he goes outside. Ducking into a nearby alley, he strips off all his clothes like some sort of reverse super hero and stashes them in a box, next to a doorway, behind a dumpster, in the cleanest corner of the alley that he can find. Now truly undetectable to the human eye, he does what he often does to relieve stress: he runs. The sun has just disappeared behind the downtown canyon walls as he starts, and he darts through a group of Red Hat Society ladies leaving each of them with only a vague notion that one of their companions may have bumped into them. He zigzags along partially clogged sidewalks, through clouds of fractured conversation and zoetrope-like movements, past high-end chain stores and tourist-trap restaurants, under el trains and through snarled traffic. He fills his lungs with oxygen then exhales. Fills then exhales. Lost in the rhythms of breathing and transparent feet pounding on cement, he vanishes further still into simple motion of the urban machine, pushing himself forward as the cityscape flickers by on all sides.
Appropriately for this situation, the album begin with a track entitled "Miss Gof
uckyourself", which sounds like a whirlwind of heartbreak and is built on top of a looped sample of Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds' "Cannibal's Hymn". It's a suitable introduction to this swirling maelstrom of an album, which feels more like the stomach-churning emotional turmoil of a recent breakup than any music I've ever heard in my life. Even when it's not immediately apparent what the lyrics are specifically referring to, there's this sense that we as listeners are on an out-of-control psychic train ride that could at any moment jump the track. Beats pound at us and then skitter away. Samples of everything from super-crazy record scratching to jazz to 70s-style analog synths to Italian folk to psychedelic rock to Portishead to the aforementioned Nick Cave echo in and out of this broken heart, courtesy of Thavius Beck. Bitter lyrics bang their way through the abstraction as K-the-I??? repeatedly reminds us in quiet moments that, "You're not that beautiful." It's not until the title track, three-quarters of the way through the album that things settle down in a groove that resembles normal hip hop, but that track is so angry and emotional that normal rap posturing is left sobbing in the dust.
Kiki Ceacz—the man behind this music—is the Jackson Pollock of rapping, his words splattering around in abstract patterns that nevertheless communicate something deep and human and raw. It's kind of an amazing feat when you think about it. Hip hop is so much about rhythm after all, but Ceacz's music somehow works by eschewing all that. Sure there are beats, but they don't necessarily line up with the words he's spitting or the enormous wall of noise that typically provides the backdrop. In some ways this feels more like a spoken word album than hip hop album—but really, really good spoken word. Spoken word that's on some level of emotion that's never even been considered in any coffee shop built by humans. Spoken word that will find your heart under that flinty exterior and bang the hell out of it with a tack hammer.