Dope of the Month Club :: Majunely 2025

Moor Mother x SUMAC, Open Mike Eagle, Rhys Langston & 9 more.

I think about rap music more than is healthy probably, and lately have been ruminating on a couple of things.

As it shoots past its fifth decade, it has more branches growing at crazy angles than ever. Younger listeners haven’t grown up on sole-genre diets: algorithmic grazing lets them be open to all kinds of stuff, and musicians are more at ease with combinations and fusions that would’ve previously seemed radically avant garde, or uncool and violating whatever codes of “real hip-hop” might be. It’s also easier and easier to make, distribute and listen to music, and being able to flip and twist an infinite number of samples in an infinite number of ways — monkeys coming up with a Shakespeare beat — means there’s no bottom to new sounds and innovation.

So whatever that whole “post-rap” debate was about was meaningless in part because…what even is “traditional rap” or whatever anymore? (OK, it’s Buck 65. It’s Phiik & Lungs, A-F-R-O. It’s the club stuff, trap, drill, etc. I guess? But there’s so much outside that people vibe with which we would’ve seen as way out there not that long ago.)

Blowing the doors off “rap” as a genre entirely also breaks it out of its arbitrary construction — a pigeonhole which (outside of its distinct definition as an artform), has been used to hold it back on radio, awards, charts and playlists. In the music industry sense, genre is a trap created to rig the game racially, ringfence who listens to what, and maximise profit by demanding and rewarding only the same product over and over.

Separately, but in parallel, has been the whole “why is there no political rap in an age when we need it most?” I went into this in writing about Moor Mother’s The Great Bailout, but I still have questions.

Why is the onus on artists of color, and particularly rappers, to make political statements? Given the social construction of race, and intersectionality, why are artists of color still stuck in the representation trap: their work has to Speak For The Whole Community, make sweeping statements? Whose arbitrary, monolithic concept of “Blackness” are they supposed to represent? Why is its value measured in how much misery and disenfranchisement it mines for its audience’s consumption? It’s not at all my place to say this, but it’s so tiresome.

Given the overall failure of recent protest movements to effect substantial change, alongside the current mask-off racism, genocide and fascism, what makes anyone think “Fight the Power 2025” would be more than a hot summer jam? It didn’t take a nation of millions to hold us back, just a dozen or so virulently racist billionaires, grifters and toxic Christian nationalists.

Old heads like to complain that there’s no protest rap like Public Enemy anymore, despite that a new Public Enemy record comes out about every 1.5 years, and there’s even one out right now. It’s polemical, but its politics are…vague. Immortal Technique is…somewhere, I don’t know what he’s up to. Sighing a lot probably.

And KENDRICK IS NOT GOING TO SUDDENLY MORPH INTO PROFESSOR GRIFF, SHUT UP ALREADY. If Ghais Guevara can go from super-underground, staunchly Communist/dead prez redux type rapper, to being played at the opener of the Super Bowl halftime show in just four years — what’s the impact of making Black Bolshevik if you’re just going to get full-bore corporate commodified for a hot minute and spit out the other end? The Other 2/5ths dropped a month ago. It didn’t make ICE evaporate like a Thanos snap, and it wasn’t championed as our new hip-hop national anthem.

Everything is so shockingly, blatantly repressive and violent, so grotesque and absurd. You can’t be The Coup on that monochromatic Dune slave murder planet. No one wants to be a symbol. And the personal was always political—to be yourself, to be idiosyncratic, find a new lane and a new sound: that’s political, that’s radical, that’s reclaiming and carving out a space that’s not pre-defined by “Blackness” or “Black music” or “conscious hip-hop” and all the heavy historical baggage, expectations and demands.

(But! Moor Mother and Brian Ennals and others are still going to yell at you, no matter what, so that’s something. And you can find plenty of staunchly political rappers if you look for five minutes. Caltrops has a handy primer for a few.)

Moor Mother x SUMAC :: The Film

Every Moor Mother album is completely, totally different from the one before, but every one has the same baseline elements: collaboration and exploration with wide-ranging musicians of any and all stripes, urgency and political rage poetry, and the sense of trying to reach—someone, anyone, everyone—before it’s too late. I was running. The pressure like earth cracked wide. Earthquake breaks. Desert night, I came out, lost, sweating memories.

Public Enemy was the air raid sirens and tests of the Emergency Broadcast System—consider yourself warned; Moor Mother is the aftermath bunker ham radio. Each album is a broadcast, trying to reach the survivors, the rebels, the freedom fighters, the downtrodden and crushed: the message is the same, but coming across on another wavelength of the spectrum, always a different channel. After each album, she twists the dial one megahertz to a different musical backdrop and begins again. Someone is out there, someone will hear this. She’s always giving us lessons, instructions, ways to resist — and hope, even when it feels there isn’t any. There will be blood in the way of our dreams.

The Film couldn’t, sonically, be more different from The Great Bailout, or Jazz Codes, or BRASS, etc., even if it echoes her early Fetish Bones work, her original punk band, and collabs with those like The Body. The music is by noise rock/art metal band SUMAC and others roped in for the mission, all heavy guitars and metallic patina. It’s everything I ever wanted from metal, it’s Rage Against the Machine without the riffs, the posturing, the frat boy testosterone. It’s witchy, spitting brimstone, the clanking of machines and chains echoing The Great Bailout.

As from its title, it’s meant to be listened to in one sitting, each scene moving to the next. Low desert skies, black sand, crumbling mountains. I was running, sky falling, the sky is falling: it’s the fourth film in the Koyaanisqatsi trilogy, for our present moment where people are passing out from the heat at baseball games and college graduations, masked agents of the state are grabbing people off the street, bombs are falling every day, AI data centers are drinking our water like Daniel Plainview, choking us with their knee on our necks like Derek Chauvin: “how come I can’t breathe?” They don’t want us to breathe. I want my breath back.

Open Mike Eagle :: Neighbourhood Gods Unlimited

It’s Majunely, and I’m tired. It’s 2025, and I’m tired. It’s the 21st century, and I’m tired. It’s the Anthropocene, and I’m tired.

Open Mike Eagle was one of the first to make rap that was deeper and personal, funny but not jokey; to process and express his experience without posturing or masking. To be self-deprecating, wry and dry, smart and playful, honest—but never narcissistic, never at the expense of a wider context and political awareness. Songs about the financial crisis, as well as the joy of school picture day. It’s always been trauma, but also anime and divorce; brick body kids, but also daydreaming; hella personal film festivals, but no red carpet.

On Neighbourhood Gods, he wakes up knowing everything, good morning samsara, Dr. Manhattan’s making coffee and eggs. It’s subversively summery sounding. But the album is about the fractured self, all the ways he has to split himself into different souls, in public, in private, in his music — like Art Rap Superman ducking out from work, he’s his own Dr. Frankenstein, he’s like Ice King with bad memories compartmentalized. Like a broken phone screen suddenly cracks off a part of you: a glass of rhymes, shattering, as Kool Keith once said. And on “contraband (the plug has bags of me),” how he’s chopped up, bagged and sold his personality, his life, into tracks that get moved on the corner of Spotify Ave. & Bandcamp St. Everything that you see is for sale.

Identity, self, the inner and outer — they’re all stereo components that need the right RCA cords, they’re all jigsaw puzzle pieces and we don’t know how many might’ve gotten lost in the carpet. Yeah, Mike Eagle’s yelling fuck that even when I find myself, but he’s still looking, he’s still checking his reflection in the broken mirror shards he carries in his briefcase.

Rhys Langston :: Pale Black Negative

Rhys Langston started from the jump outside of traditions, standards — he describes his decade-deep, twenty project discography as ‘genre abolition:’ he’s always been a freak of the industry. (Yeah yeah, there’s no more industry, we know.) As he writes in his Language Arts Unit book: This is an attempt to pioneer when the idea of no idea being original is unoriginal. This is to propose that originality is to be found in a newfound combination…

PBN combines him playing multiple instruments as well as singing, rapping, spoken word. But it’s not what used to be called “college rap”— safer, more palatable, easier listening—yet it’s not so full-on deep “art rap” that you can’t groove on it or find a way in. Maybe Langston wears his heart on its sleeve, but it’s more tucked up the cuff. He’s the sovereign of Langstónia, all liberty, no Libertarian.

Black identity trapeze artist, Pale Black Negative, expressionist compartments — creating music that blurs genres is something of an act of resistance, a refusal to be constrained or conform. And Langston does pull off a high-wire act here, balancing bluesy, jazzy, blended-genre music with deeply embedded wordplay like: I type beat unjustifiable, blocked, chained as Lawrence Ferlinghetti of Araabmuzik, Zoroaster of the South Central food deserts. (I mean, it’s not impossible to understand that at all, it just needs unpacking and you’re not gonna catch it all on the first listen.)

In a time without mass movements, heroes, or anything much to rally behind, combined with fractured, tiny musical scenes where every artist feels like they’re a tiny squeak in a hurricane…well, there’s nothing else but to do what’s right, do yourself, don’t compromise. Make that squeak yours, whether it’s an idiosyncratic unclassifiable album like this, or making Jeff Bezos move his wedding with the threat of inflatable crocodiles, or just show up to protest ICE.

Newish & Noddable

I ran out of words today, but these are all good eating for your earholes.

Buck 65 :: Keep Moving

Thus Spit Buckathustra, or, the Eternal Return of the Boom Bap.

Cappo :: HOUSES

Check out the story to the glory and the gory of the real estate.

Defcee x Parallel Thought :: Other Blues

Defcee’s run of pair ups with elite producers with their own distinct sound is pretty unparalleled, is my thought.

doseone x Height Keech :: Wood Teeth

George Washington was a hero to most, but he never meant shit to me. Straight up racist, that cracker was simple and plain, motherfuck him and his wood teeth.

August Fanon :: Just Workin’

He never stops. He just keeps firing off bangers that don’t miss like John Wick’s headshots.

ialive :: Quietism

RIYL if you like lyrics about giving no fucks and external hard drives.

Jason Griff x Alaska :: Gerasco

No country for grumpy old men.

Jason Griff x Rapswell :: Heart of Gold

Amazing they got a guest verse from Academy Award™ winner Sissy Spacek, that’s wild.

Sacco x Vanzetti :: Kill Your Own Snakes

Real keep-your-head up type joints, vital and defiant. If you got one breath left, blow it hard.

Previously…

• Janubrary edition

• Smarch edition

FAQ

Q: Why is it called Dope of the Month Club if it doesn’t come out every month?

A) Does time feel like it’s passing in a normal way to you anymore? Doesn’t it seem like Brat Summer was in 1985? That Biden was president when Friends was still on? That Cam’ron fought in the Korean War? If that’s just me, OK then.

B) That’s the joke, fam.

See you in…I don’t know, Augtember or Octvember. Don’t hassle me.