Clairy

clipping

La slaps for gym

From the upcoming album "Dark Comedy," available June 10th from Mello Music Group.

ABOUT THE ALBUM:
One famous Oscar Wilde aphorism claimed: “if you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise, they’ll kill you.” Open Mike Eagle lacks the capacity to tell anything but the truth. In a nation that prizes self-aggrandizing buffoons and artful liars, morbid humor might be the sanest response—a tourniquet to stop the toxicity from spreading. 

If this sounds heavy, it’s probably because it is. Dark Comedy, the Mello Music debut from the critically revered Los Angeles rapper, is mostly about the failure of Karl Marx’s Proletariat Revolution. Yet its brilliance stems less from the novelty of its ideas than from the ingenuity of its wordplay, its caustic whimsy, and infectious melodies. 

Opening track “Dark Comedy Morning Show” operates as a shorthand manifesto. For those who haven’t heard, Eagle’s bad at sarcasm, so he works in absurdity (when trying not to wish death on the upper class). The airing of grievances includes racial stereotypes, inner-city warfare and Facebook logging all of his favorite sandwiches. It’s Slug’s “Modern Man’s Hustle” if the Atmosophere frontman had been haunted by James Baldwin’s ghost instead of heavily tattooed exes. 

Lead single “Qualifiers” finds Eagle subverting the notions of traditional rap braggadocio and lyrical terrain. His revolution isn’t just some abstract political ideals, but at the crux of his approach to art. This is intended to dump Coconut Water and whiskey on the unsuspecting heads of those with false ideas of authenticity or what rap should be.  

Lest you mistake him for a meditating yoga-panted rapper, the rapper raised on the Southside of Chicago, wields wordplay as sharp and weird as any of his peers. He proclaims himself “the King of all rappers who don’t condone date rape.” Molotov Cocktails are helpfully tossed from fellow conspirators Kool AD and comedian, Hannibal Burress.

Former hockey star Luc Robataille is rhymed with the Kobra Kai Dojo from Karate Kid. In the same breath, Eagle cracks about being too old to die. It’s absurdity in the sense that Joseph Heller deployed it in Catch 22. He will live forever or die in the attempt. 

If you’re just tuning into Eagle’s stellar career on album number four, the LA Weekly anointed him last year as the hottest thing in indie rap. Pitchfork called him a “whiz with matching easy-going hooks to intimate personal reflection.” But Dark Comedy could be the best thing he’s ever done—a record that captures the perennial struggle between art and commerce, the last half-century of widening class rift, and the need to be funny or die. 


Open Mike Eagle - Dark Comedy Morning Show (feat. Toy Light)

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

It's been an incredible year for Open Mike Eagle, first he signed a multi-album deal with Mello Music Group, then he released the critically acclaimed album "Dark Comedy," and after months of touring North America, he is off for his first ever European Tour.  Oh, and he has an incredible new podcast called "Secret Skin" that is on the Infinite Guests network of American Public Media.  Here's an end of the year reminder of why he should be on you radar: Late Show, produced by Exile, starring Open Mike Eagle (side note, this will appear on the annual Mello Music Group compilation out in early 2015).

Open Mike Eagle - "Dark Comedy Late Show" (prod. Exile)

It’s a huge honor to have had Thom rework this track. After alt-J mentioned liking our music in an interview a few months back, we contacted them and they asked to trade remixes. You can hear our version of  “Hunger Of The Pine” on their SoundCloud page (soundcloud.com/alt-j/story-4-sleeplessly-embracing-a-remix-by-clipping). We dig the weird skittery rhythm of Thom’s “Inside Out”. He’s a really sophisticated percussionist and his remix has such an alien sense of time. 

Inside Out (Thom alt-J Remx)

from the upcoming "A Special Episode of" - EP (2/3)
prod. by lo-phi / mastered by Brian "Big Bass" Gardner


Open Mike Eagle - Raps For When It's Just You And The Abyss

James Franco

Sticks And Stones

Song For An Actress

from the new Open Mike Eagle "A Special Episode of - EP"
https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/a-special-episode-ep/id961827159

produced by GOLD PANDA
vocals by OPEN MIKE EAGLE

"Sounds Beautiful Like The Truth"
Mello Music Group, 2015

Open Mike Eagle feat. Gold Panda - "Ziggy Starfish (Anti-Anxiety Raps)

Open Mike Eagle and Serengeti are Cavanaugh.

produced by Open Mike Eagle
vocals by Open Mike Eagle & Serengeti

Today, Stereogum has premiered "Typecast," the latest from Cavanaugh, Open Mike Eagle and Serengeti's new group.  The track features verses from P.O.S, Busdriver and Hemlock Ernst (Sam Herring from Future Islands).  http://www.stereogum.com/1844458/cavanaugh-typecast-feat-p-o-s-hemlock-ernst-busdriver-stereogum-premiere/mp3s/

Though Serengeti and Mike Eagle have known each other for many years and went to Southern Illinois University together, Cavanaugh is their first fully collaborative project.  It's also the first album that Mike has produced in its entirety.  Their debut album, Time and Materials is available at midnight- order now. http://geni.us/Cavanaugh


Cavanaugh - Typecast (feat. P.O.S., Hemlock Ernst, & Busdriver)

I JUST BOUGHT ME A FERRARI !

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CLPPNG

Inside Out

shooter (charge it to the game remx)



<a href="https://theartistunion.com/tracks/874b70" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Download for free on The Artist Union</a>

Free Download

PARTYNEXTDOOR - Buzzin' ( feat. Lil Yachty )

booty > titties

Bentley Coupe

Lil Yachty ft. Gucci Mane - Bently Coupe

Prod. Helluvalife

#MigosMondays

'Culture' coming soon.

Pull Up (Prod. By Helluvalife)

Hoodie Allen- You Are Not A Robot
Download your free copy at http://www.timeforthepeprally.com

You Are Not A Robot

Hoodie Allen - C.R.A.V.E.
Download your free copy at http://www.timeforthepeprally.com

Inside Out

clipping.