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Music

Ten Great Old El-P Productions

In celebration of El-P and Killer Mike's 'Run the Jewels,' we take a look back at some of El-P's great work that you might not be familiar with.

Killer Mike and El-P’s Run the Jewels dropped this week on Fool’s Gold Records and not surprisingly, it’s pretty great. Mike and El’s partnership is one of the great stories of rap right now. A decade ago, the professional distance between the Dungeon Family and the Def Jux crew made this collaboration inconceivable; not that the two didn’t know and respect each other’s music, but experimental New York underground rappers and creative pop-savvy Atlanta hustlers might as well have been in separate dimensions. Things have changed and rap music is better for it.

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The sheer brilliance of Run the Jewels (and R.A.P. Music before it) overshadows how great it is that El-P is still making defiant, relevant hip-hop. Almost 20 years ago Company Flow (El-P, Big Juss and Mr. Len) were indie rap pioneers and helped establish Rawkus Records as a home for forward-thinking hip-hop. When Rawkus fell apart, El started Def Jux (Definitive Jux officially, thanks to a lawsuit from Russell Simmons and friends) and helped make the likes of Aesop Rock and RJD2 household names. Simultaneously El started releasing his solo projects, pairing his signature lo-fi aesthetic with his paranoid raps. 2002’s Fantastic Damage was good, but 2007’s I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead was even better.

But most importantly, El-P survived a couple of years in which rap—especially indie rap—was stagnant. A lot of household names from the 00’s either stopped rapping or stopped making music that anyone outside the rap game really cared about. There were a lot of reasons for this shift; a big one was a new generation of fans who openly embraced the South and had absolutely no interest (or comprehension) of the “real hip-hop” mentality that had dominated for so long. (That could literally be an article in and of itself). But unlike many of his peers, El-P is still here and still doing the brilliant shit that made him a big deal in the first place.

El-P has been around long enough that a lot of you kids probably haven’t heard some of his older work. These tracks were my shit. El-P started off on the strangest fringes of New York rap and then, through Def Jux, created a cottage industry making rap music that captured the nihilistic American zeitgeist during the Dubya Bush years. Here’s 10 of my favorite early El-P productions and some words about them.

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Indelible MC’s - “Fire In Which You Burn” (1997)

“Fire In Which You Burn” is a strange, minimal beat featuring off-kilter drums and a sitar and not much else and it’s iconic to rap nerds of a certain age. Indelibles were a kind of supergroup that combined Company Flow with The Juggaknots and J-Treds; rap nerds of a certain age also recognize J-Treds saying “I got more presence than attendance in a class of schizophrenics, here here” as probably the best punchline of all time.

Sir Menelink - “Night Work” (1997)

Kool Keith protégé Sir Menelink combined Keith’s bizarre sci-fi persona with late–90’s Wu-Tang extended family haphazard mythology. El-P did this beat for him.

Company Flow - “End to End Burners” (1998)

Graffiti is still played out (die paint drips, die!) but “End to End Burners” aged well because both the song and the video are almost hostile to unfamiliar eyes and ears. It’s really easy to draw a parallel between the thick walls of Heiroglyphic tags and illegible wildstyle pieces of the 90’s and El and Juss’s impenitrable raps. El-P’s beat is dusty funk but with the dystopian spin that seperates him from your average crate digger.

Cannibal Ox - “Iron Galaxy” (2001)

The first release on Def Jux was a double 12”: Company Flow’s self-proclaimed last record before they split up, and Cannibal Ox’s debut single. “Iron Galaxy” was the A-Side and it’s hard to explain how floored we were when we heard it. (First spins were off an extremely janky RealAudio stream on the once-great HipHopSite.com—this was a looooong time ago.) 90’s rappers loved to compare the hood to a war zone, but El-P’s production for “Galaxy” (and the whole Cold Vein LP) set the tone for emcees Vast and Vordul to paint the darker corners of Giuliani-era Manhattan as a desolate, failed space colony.

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El-P - “Deep Space 9MM” (2002)

This is as good a time as any to mention the aesthetic connection between El-P and The Bomb Squad (who did all of Public Enemy’s classic shit and also a bunch of Ice Cube’s). “Deep Space 9MM” was the first single from his solo debut Fantastic Damage and it’s built from the same collage of funk and noise. While Chuck D fought the power, El-P fights the paranoia and frustration endemic to post–9/11 New York and catastrophic industry bullshit. “9MM” is one of El’s more quotable records, but the video (in which everybody in New York holds a bright orange gun to his head) is viscerally disturbing. Keep smiling!

Cage - “Holdin a Jar 2” (2003)

Cage’s 2003 album Movies for the Blind is a secretly great exception that proves the rule for Eminem-style shenanigan rap. While Em was rapping about doing a lot of drugs, being crazy and getting topped off by Paula Jones, Cage was doing ALL the drugs, name-dropping actual psych wards and pimping out runaways. He would later sign to Def Jux and do a whole album, but his first collab with El-P is “Holdin A Jar 2.” Cage and his daughter rampage through a possibly-post-apocolyptic New York, in the missing shadow of the twin towers. It was an unsettling time and “Jar” speaks to that, just as “Deep Space 9MM” did.

Aesop Rock - “Nickel Plated Pockets” (2001)

The B-side to Aes Rock’s breakout single “Daylight” was more millenial New York gloom, but on a micro-scale; one person’s struggle in contrast with someone else’s. To fit the vibe, El-P swaps out the aggressive thump of “9MM” and “Jar” for something a little more chill, or at least less outwardly hostile.

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Mr. Lif feat. El-P, Jean Grae and Akrobatik - “Post Mortem” (2002)

Mr. Lif’s I, Phantom is a ridiculous, proggy concept album that follows (if I remember correctly) a man through rock-bottom, recovery, suburban ennui, marriage problems, and finally the end of the world. The liner notes folded out into a board game. It’s not as ponderous as it sounds but it’s still some shit that would make Emerson, Lake and Palmer proud. “Post Mortem” is the last song on the album and it’s a surprisingly small track. El-P’s beat could have been grandiose as fuck given that it’s the first-hand accounts of survivors of a nuclear holocaust, but instead he does less and makes the track more. He also starts his verse calling the blast a “gentle fission kiss.”

Cannibal Ox feat. Breeze Brewin - “Life’s Ill” (2001)

“Life’s Ill” is a scorching track built around a triumphant but troubled synth riff that stands alone as the hook. Synthesizers were retrofuturistic in their own right, electronics designed to replace traditional instruments, a sample of a synth is a degree beyond that, and whatever studio magic El-P uses to get his sounds so raw pushes this kind of (ok, cliched) idea to another level. The song is best known for Vast Aire’s shots at Will High, probably the first time internet beef spilled over onto actual wax, which is it’s own kind of retrofuturism.

Fondle Em Fossils (Breeze Brewin, Godfather Don, J-Treds, MF Doom, Q-Unique) - “Fondle Em Fossils (El-P remix)” (2001)

Stretch and Bobbito’s Fondle Em (a division of Tickle Em, a subsidiary of Squeeze Em, etc) was the first label to put rappers like Cage, the Arsonists and some guy named MF Doom (as a solo artist) on wax. In 2001, the label officially shut its doors and they put out a collection of hits and b-sides (through Def Jux) to say goodbye. They got the band back together one more time for a posse cut and El-P did a remix for it. I just like this track a lot and it reminds me of “Life’s Ill.”

Skinny Friedman is a writer and DJ living in Brooklyn. He's on Twitter - @skinny412