Music Box | I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead

Mike Newmark Arts Editor

El-P
I'll Sleep When You're Dead
[Definitive Jux]

Hip-hop was becoming a tired institution when El-P, Bigg Jus and Mr. Len (under the moniker Company Flow) recorded one of the most stunning hip-hop albums of the ’90s. Bleak, raw, and verbally devastating, 1997’s Funcrusher Plus provided a real alternative to G-funk as the three fireball emcees rapped about war, corporate greed and extraterrestrial evil over bargain-basement beats and unsettling ambience. Over the next few years, El-P built up his Definitive Jux label and released a stream of high-quality recordings by some of the most vital emcees in the game, nearly all of whom used Funcrusher Plus as a blueprint to varying degrees. The label had gone quiet in 2007 when rumors of a new El-P record finally surfaced, sending excited twitters through the underground community. Some questioned the rapper’s intent when they found out that the album would feature collaborations with Trent Reznor (“hmm”), The Mars Volta (“uh…”), and Chan Marshall of Cat Power (“are you serious?”), but most were fairly certain that it would pulverize in typical El-P fashion.

And pulverize it does. I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead feels absolutely ferocious; it’s the roaring, heavy metal counterpart to Funcrusher Plus’s skeletal hardcore punk, and it takes no prisoners from its galvanizing start to its death knell of an ending. Songs are packed to the gills with weird, ungodly noises, melodies appear and disappear like holographs, and dense yet nuanced rhymes roll atop percussion that could have been created by actual weaponry. Indeed, there’s so much violence on this record that it should be traumatic to drink in, but El-P’s skill and insight on the mic, his studio perfectionism and his flair for idiosyncratic drum programming keep the proceedings as gripping as a 13-car pileup.

Deeper listening reveals that Sleep thrives on a couple of paradoxes. First, the album maintains its focus and cohesion even as it spins off in many different directions. The doomy atmosphere of “Tasmanian Pain Coaster” doesn’t sound much like the Brooklynese bounce of “EMG” or the almost operatic “Poisenville Kids No Wins,” but even with the diversity (which is inevitable, what with the hundreds of sounds being employed), it’s clear that there is a particular aural agenda at work. I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead sounds uncannily like a comic book, which isn’t to knock it; after all, comic books these days attain a level of darkness and extremity that filmmakers are often too risk-averse to attempt. Imagine swarms of robotic flying insects in the Invader Zim cartoon from your worst nightmare raining down machine gun fire and you’re getting close.

The second paradox has to do with El-P’s lyrics, which attend to personal and universal problems as though they’re both part of the same sick plan for humanity that was doomed from the very beginning. While Clipse’s Malice and Pusha T believe that a worldly issue (coke dealing) affected their personal states (thickly obfuscated misery), El-P flips the algorithm: He views every act of savagery—from speeding cars to sexual abuse—as indicative of the world’s endemic evil. Though it’s clear that he doesn’t want any part of it, he admits has no choice. He calls himself the “son of urban confusion hatched in a pit where brutes live” and “half a robotic monkey ugly born of a viral agent.” Like Nas on his classic Illmatic, El-P simply speaks about what he sees and uses his observations as a form of social protest, reinforcing the idea that the most affecting hip-hop finds a middle ground between slouching back in the seat of a flashy convertible and trying to change the world. His raps have slowed down a bit from his previous work to become part of the rich milieu and to let us latch onto every grim metaphor he hurls our way, but don’t worry; El-P’s flow will still knock you out of your chair.

And the collaborations? They’re all excellent, probably because El-P isn’t concerned about flattering his guests, writing his songs his way and using Reznor, Marshall, Rodriguez-Lopez and Bixler-Zavala purely as filigree. The Mars Volta caps off the blitzkrieg “Tasmanian Pain Coaster” with an a funereal trudge, Marshall lends her emphatic torch singing to the chorus of “Poisenville Kids No Wins,” and Reznor’s sinister cackle seems form-fitted to the electronic torture chamber of “Flyentology.” Though they do seem like unorthodox choices, especially compared to Def Jux labelmates Cage and Aesop Rock, all of these artists deal with depravity in their own music (albeit in different ways), and after a few listens, their additions on this album click oddly into place.

I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead is an utterly urgent recording, something that (unfortunately) feels appropriate for our perpetual state of emergency. Nas once famously spit, “I never sleep, ’cause sleep is the cousin of death,” to which El-P eventually paid tribute: “The timepiece must’ve read early morning at least, so I laid death’s cousin, woken by the silence of the peace.” The title of this record, then, seems like less of a threat and more of a helpless prayer to a deaf higher power. Something tells me that, deep down, El-P wishes that there wasn’t any need for him to enter the rap world and do what he does. But as long as we live on Earth, this record is as good a warning as any to sleep with one eye open.