El-P, "Up All Night"

El-P isn’t built for a stampede. And he admits it. He’s “too preachy.” If you’re looking for a bustle, a rampage about town, skip to the last five seconds when he distorts his voice into unintelligible, digitized muck. El-P spends the rest of this track sulking at the back of his drum’s thumping, insistence pack. He’s a tour guide for the dispossessed, cracking wise and smashing around -  but also taking the time to sit down.

Not that he lacks the right to pillage. Bred into a “vandal bedrock” of “garbage,” El-P makes prognostication, no matter how brief, grim, and poignant. Perhaps it’s because the world turned him into a “mutant.”  Out of apathy or despair, he demurs to the world of “dirt” which he has inherited. And it’s the same vast, inclusive world promised us in childhood. We’re all equally “deranged.” Hooray.

And yet: ever conspiratorial, El-P suggests the influence of an “implant” - Governmental control? Corporate influences? It isn’t like him to serve, to call for “Daddy.” The intended effect, a wobbling reminiscent of whatever intergalactic reverberation he translocated, is to unsettle. He wants us there with him, after all. If you are unfamiliar with El-P’s work, “Up All Night” is stunningly succinct - yet still properly adroit. Hardly any complete sentences. Hardly any Biblical references, though I’ll credit him for the apocalyptic “Hi, Horsemen.”

And while some of the aforementioned imagery is quite forced, the rest he leaves to our imaginations. I’ll try first: Picture a young man, a little lost and bedraggled, sitting down, facing a wall of graffiti. He picks up a tennis ball. He bounces it, with a slight backspin, toward the wall.

“I’m a young man.

I want happy.”

There goes the ball, smacking the wall, crackling off at an unexpected angle. He watches the ball go. And it rolls on.

“We deserve that

dream collapsing.”

As a metaphor for hope, a ball is, at best, wimpy. Perhaps that was unoriginal, but I’ve been up awhile - surely, El-P understands.