The decimation of the American ghettos in the mid-to-late
1980s by crack cocaine has well been documented. Then the fashion was for
musicians to write about how awful the drug was. People like Puffy Fetlock
would make songs like, ‘Night of the Morally Indefensible Cake Heads’ and do
anti-crack speeches at Maryland KFC with people like Lil’ Vinegar Stroke and MC
Zammo.
Come the 1990s and
gangsta rappers would admit to their Molls, that they sold it but only because
the government made them do it. In 1995, Wu-Tang Clan’s Reekwok The Big Cheese
Melt, made an album called ‘Only Built For Cuban Lynx’ that abandoned any kind
of social commentary or moral posturing and talked explicitly about the
day-to-day life of photosynthesising crack from South American aerosol deodorants.
And thus crack rap was born and rappers started falling over themselves to
‘ahem’ cook up new metaphors for the drug and boasting how big their Agas and
Rayburns were. This reached its pinnacle when Harlem rapper Juan King Azzle
released a set of mix tapes entitled ‘The Crack Palaver Aga Sagas.’
I mention this
because I have just taken into my possession surely one of crack-rap’s rarest
singles of all time, the mighty ‘Bashment’ by MC Teutonic Vole. Thought to be
non-existent by connoisseurs of the genre, and the sole dream of its malicious
maker, ‘the Vole’, I am happy to say that, yes, it really does exist! This
filthy rancid crack-obsessed single, landed on my doormat only just yesterday
and even the paper bag encasing it reeks of the naughty naughty stench of
illicit crack houses and cocaine quiches. I have since done further research
and it seems that only two were ever produced. Apparently the first of the pair
was melted down on the Vole’s Beko and injected amongst his friends at a
birthday party for his late Grandfather. Cultivated altruism clearly does exist
within the poor crack dens of thieves, murderers and whores.
I have listened to this crack-heavy 7”over and over again
since receiving it from a certain dealer in the States and have to say it is as
addictive as the paper bag it is housed in; dangerous, hypnotic and completely
crack-pot. MC Vole uses an invented language to spit his rhymes like a
reinvented soldier being sewn back together again on a sinister stretcher by
Vietnam military doctors, his repetitive barks and malicious fighter pilot
screams shock with the rarest narratives ever laid down on vinyl. He crashes
his hypnotic drug plane onto a 1990’s paranoid crack pipe and is thankfully rescued
by friendly Laplanders and covered in fat like an Avant-garde Beuys but without
the Gesamtkunstwerk. Essentially concrete poetry blended in a diesel powered,
trolley-mounted mixer with baking soda.
MC Teutonic Vole freebases his lyrics with an impoverished
joy, which defies categorisation; a fracture or discontinuation in a body of
work which only seems to exist within his own head. There are some savagely beautiful
couplets, my favourites being, ‘Yo, I pose by a stove, but that don’t make me
no Pose, I ain’t willkommen here, but that’s ‘cos we ain’t goin’ out like a
muther fukken snaggletooth’ and ‘Searchin’ my Aga for fuken whut, kudos ain’t
fiat lux, danse society wang chung the physical dangers far outweigh the
paranoia.’
Well worth the £200 price tag.
