midcity

REMXNG

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Our new track “Knees On The Ground” might benefit from an explanation. This is the most unguarded I ever intend to be when writing about Clipping.

What had happened was this: our very brief UK/Europe trip got called-off the day before we were supposed to get on a plane to London. Since we didn’t have any other plans, we met up in the studio with an idea to crank out a new track. On our list of songs to finish was one particular piece aimed directly at the club (or, at least, our twisted idea of what clubs should play). But none of us were in the mood for it. Each of us had spent the previous several days following the news of protests in Ferguson, MO. It was the only thing on our minds. We couldn’t bring ourselves to think about anything else, so we decided to direct our fear, our revulsion, our heartbreak into a new track.

The problem was that we’d defined our band — in interviews and to each other — as decidedly-not-an-activist-project. Diggs’s lyrics have been criticized for seeming apolitical, at least in comparison to what many listeners (perhaps rightly) expect to hear from an ‘experimental’ rap group. I have many times said (perhaps naïvely) that our politics lie in our structures, in our formal engagement with the rap genre. We love its conventions, its clichés, and we’re not above them. We see our participation in rap as something resembling an old punk flyer — an out-of-context collage of charged images with an fractured, contradictory, multiple point-of-view. I hope that our more dedicated listeners hear this and understand that we’re not interested in spoon-feeding them a position. At the same time, I’ve always assumed that they pretty much agree with us on most issues anyway. (We have yet to meet the misogynist, homophobic, white supremacist Clipping fan with an MBA and an NRA membership).

So what do we do when all we can think about, all we can feel, is a profound injustice — yet another young unarmed person of color is murdered by a police officer? How does a band, which overtly rejects affect and the emotions, address something that is, for its authors, a deeply felt, deeply affecting topic? Well, we don’t entirely know. But the fact is: there’s more truth in Diggs’s lyrics than we generally let on. “Inside Out” describes a drive-by shooting in Oakland, “Chain” is about three stick-ups. They are presented with a lot of detail and specificity (perhaps the result of personal experience). But at the same time, they represent archetypal scenarios within rap music. One trope we had yet to explore as Clipping was the anti-police rap — the lineage of Public Enemy, NWA and Paris, straight through The Coup, and all the way into the ‘stop snitching’ panic of the early 2000s. “Knees On The Ground” is a paradigmatic white-cop-kills-an-unarmed-black-kid-and-gets-away-with-it tale — a story that happens all the fucking time in the US. What we have learned — from our first hand experience in Oakland in 2009, and from the media coverage of Ferguson in 2014 — is that the second part of this story involves a police response better suited to a war zone than to an American city. Cops think they’re playing Call Of Duty when they’re supposed to be part of a community. If Ferguson were in Iraq, Obama would have sent in an airstrike already.

This is the least obtuse Diggs’s lyrics will ever get. We’re embarrassed by the timeliness of this track. We do not intend to capitalize on what is, undoubtedly, a terrible tragedy. But journalists make think-pieces and we make songs. Writers write what they know, and this is what we know right fucking now.

— William Hutson, Clipping.

Knees On The Ground

Run It

Keep Pushing

Dead Channel Sky

Intro

Code

Dominator

Change the Channel

Dodger

Ask What Happened

"From Bright Bodies" (Interlude)

Polaroids

Kanga is a promising young producer/beat-maker/singer/writer/everything. Definitely check out her stuff for some cold gothy pop. Her take on “Body & Blood” is clubby and danceable but at the same time totally eerie. Hard-as-fuck beats and the vocals are on some summoning-occult-demons-type-shit.

kanga

Body&Blood (Kanga Remx)

RP Boo is a goddamn legend. We are so honored that he wanted to do this remix for us. Footwork — the genre he (arguably) invented — is known for its jittery, hyper-active rhythms, and RP’s flip of “Tonight” showcases his signature drum programming skills, transforming our hook into a Chicago house-party-ready sex anthem. We sincerely hope this track gets somebody laid one day.

Tonight (RP Boo Remx)

Welcome Home Warrior (feat. Aesop Rock)

Dead Channel Sky Plus

Mirrorshades pt. 1

Forever War

Hard-Eyes

Night of Heaven (feat. Counterfeit Madison & Kid Koala)

Rind is the solo project of singer/musician/artist Lee Relvas. Relvas composes and performs solo operas, and also produces a wide array of visual work (drawings, paintings, comics, etc.). When she agreed to do this remix, we asked her to please make sure she sang on it, at least a little bit, because we love her voice. And she really delivered with this slowly creeping interpretation of B&B, which builds into a powerful vocal crescendo.


Body&Blood (Rind Remx)

Terminal 11 is an amazing breakcore artist—seriously, he’s got records on Phthalo, Cock Rock Disco, and Hymen—who was once the sole audience member at a Clipping show in Scottsdale, Arizona. It was embarrassing, but he’s a nice guy and he agreed to do this remix for us anyway (maybe out of pity).

Get Up (Terminal 11 Remx)

It’s a cliché to say that somebody needs no introduction, but sometimes it’s true. Sleeparchive’s "Hospital Tracks" was a massive inspiration to us. That album taught us that if you painstakingly build four perfect sounds, a track might only need four sounds in it. We don’t necessarily always take this advice ourselves, but it remains a core tenet. It’s an honor to have been remixed by this guy. This track should be on vinyl.

clipping.

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