I Actually Like: 5 O’Clock Shadowboxers’ The Slow Twilight

 

 

Here’s a big question: Is is possible to sample indie rock or indie pop without making hipster rap? Sampling an artist like Cat Power, like producer Douglas Martin AKA Blurry Drones does on the 5 O’Clock Shadowboxers album The Slow Twilight, can’t help but result in hipster rap, right? Before that “soulful” snoozefest The Greatest and that second covers album and the diamond commercials, Cat Power was an indie darling and for good reason. If you could appreciate the beauty in a mostly slow and mostly bleak album like Moon Pix, it meant you were a different kind of music fan, one who was more sensitive and discerning than the average person who just buys what they hear on the radio. I certainly felt this way my senior year of high school, when I used to walk around the neighborhood near my high school during study hall, listening to Belle and Sebastian and Cat Power and Elliott Smith and getting off on how cool and different I was.

 

But this is a silly fallacy and we all know it. And yet so much of the excitement revolving around hipster rap (Kanye loves Thom Yorke’s Eraser album! Kid Cudi samples Band of Horses on his mixtapes! Q-Tip did a song with Lykke Li!) seems to promote the idea that liking indie music makes you a cooler, more interesting artist. Do we really need a Pitchfork news item every time a rapper name checks Radiohead? “Hipster rap” needs to be judged on the same standards all rap is judged by, and not given a free pass because it’s wearing horn rim glasses and has Fleet Foxes on its iPod. But by the same token, quality rap music that samples indie rock shouldn’t be penalized because of the stigma associated with “hipster rap.”

 

Which brings me to the 5 O’Clock Shadowboxers album. A duo comprised of Philly MC Zilla Rocca and Seattle producer Douglas Martin (who, full disclosure, is a good friend of this blog), the Shadowboxers are a wholly Internet creation, with neither artist ever having met or even talked on the phone (!) to the other. Starting their correspondence through Jeff Weiss’ Passion of the Weiss blog, the two have put together one of the best rap albums of the year and one that happens to include a ton of indie rock and indie pop samples, including flips of The Velvet Underground’s “Black European Death Song,” Espers’ “Dead Queen,” Cat Power’s “He War,” and Elliott Smith’s “A Distorted Reality Is Now a Necessity to Be Free.”

 

Martin isn’t trying to hide the fact that he’s sampling these songs; on “Eric Lindros,” he uses “He War” mostly how you’d expect, sampling the main guitar riff for the verses and using the bridge’s awesome circular guitar line for the chorus (there is also a drone that keeps popping up here and there). But disliking Cat Power or any of the artists sampled shouldn’t hurt your appreciation of this album; I don’t like the Alan Parsons Project (well, “Sirius” is pretty great), but that doesn’t stop me from liking songs that sample them, like Black Milk’s “Losing Out” or Kanye’s “Heartless.” You certainly don’t have to be an Espers fan to appreciate the way Martin turns the band’s dirgey Renaissance Faire psych-folk song “Dead Queen” (complete with Tibetan singing bowls) into the creepy but bumpin’ “Dead Queen” of The Slow Twilight.

 

Besides great beats, what elevates The Slow Twilight above just another rap album you can get for free on the Internet is Zilla Rocca. When two thousand new MCs seem to appear on the scene everyday, it’s extremely difficult to shine, but I know talent when I hear it. Zilla deftly brings you into the world of a college educated, service job working smartass with pop culture punchlines for days and an underlying commitment to making great rap. Able to move from the black helicopter paranoia fantasies of “No Resolutions” to the underground rapper real-talk of “Eric Lindros” to the break-up tales of “Stay Clean” without sounding like three different rappers, Zilla is truly a rapper to be reckoned with. 

 

The Slow Twilight is available for free on June 23rd on Zilla’s Clap Cowards blog–I highly, highly recommend it.

 

The 5 O’Clock Shadowboxers – Eric Lindros