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caltropspress · 2 years ago

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FIELD NOTES STRAIGHT FROM THE GLUMS OF NEW JERUZALEM: Fatboi Sharif + noface's Preaching In Havana

[I played the Preaching In Havana cassette on a Panasonic Portable AM/FM Stereo Boombox Model #RX-F9 (manufacturing date circa 1988) at nine predetermined locations around the state of New Jersey—1-2 songs per site location—over several weeks in February and March 2023. Each song was played a minimum of three times (“Notice parables of three in every other inference”). The boombox was battery-powered and preferably set atop a natural surface. No GPS was used to navigate to the sites; a superannuated Rand McNally folding map was utilized. Disorientation was embraced.]

Here is a clad doom.

—Clark Coolidge, “After Morandi” (c. 1984)

Oblivion: walking the edge of insanity sideways…

—Orko the Psykotik Alien, NMS, “Invisible Oblivion” (2003)

All the world had gone unreal, mere foolish play—a shoddy carnival, a magic show; and remembering those who had died…those real severed heads, mouths working in the dirt, those real bodies stretched and torn apart on the rack…

—John Gardner, Freddy’s Book (1980)

[SITE REF. → Holy, Holy, Holy Altar; Mt. Holly, NJ. The Jersey Devil was supposedly chained to the altar within the stone vault. Holy, Holy, Holy is inscribed across the lintel. Track played: “Static Vision.”]

I ask at the altar [paraphrasing Gardner]: WHO IS THIS SAURIAN BEING WITH THE GOATISH SMELL, THIS IDIOT GOD? On “Static Vision,” Fatboi Sharif bemoans the “info drain”—a residual from the age of the Info Kill. Company Flow told us we MUST GET IN SYNC, and Bigg Justoleum led the way as the horns blowed. Behold, in a dark universe Sharif is chasing shadows.

Sharif speaks lowly of the “blood-sucking corporations,” clued into Marx’s diagnoses. “Kapital,” Killah Karl spews, “is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.” Succulent, right, you sucker MCs? We’re frightened into the factories as the “news footage funnel[s] fear.” It’s “death [we] watch”—our own. Our work is “converted into necessaries,” Marxy Marx and the Funky Bunch writes, “by the consumption of which the muscles, nerves, bones, and brains of existing labourers are reproduced.” Yum yum, you Dray and Skoob dum-dums. This is your feast of grotesqueries.

[NB: I will be formatting Fatboi Sharif’s lyrics in a manner suitable to Clark Coolidge’s poetic lines in his 1967 chapbook entitled, confusingly, Clark Coolidge.]

KVU at the engineering deck, the control panel, the console—King Vision Ultra[-magnetizing], if you will—with ineffable efx. Super-scientifikal behind the boards, knob-turning and ear-worming like the Scientist that is/was Hopeton Overton Brown, almighty creator who Rids the World of the Evil Curse of the Vampires (1981). Geng PTP with transformer coils cloying at your cortex, fair listener. His dub-infused engineering fits noface’s krunk-skronk productions and Sharif’s vertiginous vocals into deep-space and crypt-encasement, equally [EQ]. Cryptic, ’cause Sharif’s Sick Wid’ It meanings are entombed:

He’s hanging loose; forget the Smith & Wesson at the Smithsonian—they found a noose! What U See (Is What U Get) now in the xzibit. So raid the tombs of your own mind. Clark Coolidge, too: “Scratch of lines, on a vast hill or prone tomb. / Nothing buckles from them, no sneezed move” (from “After Morandi”).

I ain’t scared no more, Sharif shouts, dry-throated. He gargles holy water and spits. I can’t believe you, he hollers, as dubious as Du Bois staring down the Talented Tenth. Preaching In Havana is Fatboi Sharif penning editorials for The Crisis. Like Eric B. in ’88, he’s never scared. He seeks your AttenCHUN! Larger-than-life, like Bone Crusher on “Never Scared” in 2003: Now the plasma is oozing out of your cerebellum. Snort the bone dust or arrange the remains ritualistically.

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In Charles Chestnutt’s 1899 story “The Gray Wolf’s Ha’nt,” narrator John and his wife are warned by old man Julius about clearing a tract of swampland for agricultural use. “Uncle Julius” regales them with a murder account from slave days about a “conjuh man” who could make “monst’us powe’ful goopher” and used a “mixtry” to exact revenge for his son’s death. Through craft and cunning, the conjure man transforms the murderer into a gray wolf and cons him into killing his wife (similarly duped and transformed into a black cat). By crafty design, Julius’s tale keeps folks off that desirable tract of land with fears of what haunts it. But John is undeterred. He finds no evidence of a wolf’s dwelling there, and if a wolf “had once made his den there, his bones had long since crumbled into dust and gone to fertilize the rank vegetation.” Instead, John discovers a “bee-tree” with an “ample cavity in its trunk” and “stores of honey within.” Julius’s haint warning, it turns out, is nothing more than a ruse to maintain “his monopoly” over the honey stash. “Poison honeycomb, / Sticky situation,” Sharif says on “John Hinckley.”

[SITE REF. → Sybil’s Cave; Hoboken, NJ. An early 19th century natural spring excavated from the rock wall along the Hudson River; the cave was frequented by tavern-goers. Mary Rogers’ body was discovered in the shallow waters near the site, strangled and sexually abused, and the cave was eventually filled in. Track played: “The Hybrid.”]

I replied my brains in a hybrid of pain, Sharif raps on “The Hybrid,” his syntax clunking and skulking in ways that shouldn’t make sense but do. Let me explaaaaaiiiiin, he begs. Threats loom as “grenades surround ledge” and “PTSD particles” spread. (Cough into your elbow, won’t you?!) Don’t push; we’re close to the edge. Living on shaky grounds; let’s see if Sharif—like Rakim—knows the ledge. I’ve no doubt he does, but he still squeals like a teenybopper on the airport concourse:

“The eight-year-old with a pipe bomb by its privates” sounds like textbook projection. [Rapidly consults the DSM-5.] But let’s bring it back to A HYBRID OF PAIN. It’s Sharif’s term-in-ol-og-y, like Pharoahe Monch on “Bring It On”; he flows awkwardly and incisions are made into the [maggot] brain. Bring it on, motherfucker, bring it on—but also bring the pain like Meth. Sharif came to bring the pain hardcore from the [maggot] brain. We go inside his astral plane.

Brrrrrrriiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiinng! Fatboi Sharif awakens like Bigger Thomas with fantasies of furnaces dancing in his head. [...alarm clock clanged…spring creaked…voice sang…surly grunt sounded…tinny ring of metal…] TURN IT UP! BRING THE NOISE! A certifiable consonantal ruckus—the brawling br-, the stinging /n/, the queasy -ng. KVU’s Pain of Mind (2018) comes to mind, undeniably.

[SITE REF. → Gates of Hell; Clifton, NJ. The “Gates of Hell” are a network of sewage tunnels and underground passageways behind the old Erie-Lackawanna railroad tracks. Devil worshipers frequent the location. Track played: “Sunday School Explosions.”]

Sharif combines elements: “Science with cosmic plague and Hooked On Phonics” (it worked for me!). He steals a complete set from the flea market and magnetizes the cassettes and places slips of Scotch tape over the top slots—write-protection begone and be-damned. He can feel his “pulse risen” at the “silent treatment” he receives from the ferric formulation spirits he summons—a kiss of haunting hiss. He translates “postcards in Arabic” at the “NA meeting” prior to filming a reproduction of the Jets and the Sharks dance-fight as “Cronenberg’s last scene.” What results is a “war world ouija [that] got West Side Story.” Thus, Stephen Sondheim and Leonard Bernstein get flayed and slayed on “Sunday School Explosives.”

I’m still haunted by Fatboi Sharif’s echoey Oh, I’m buggin’? from Gandhi Loves Children’s “I’m Buggin.” It comes to me in my sleep, like the Sandman (“Enter Sandman near banquet,” Sharif raps on “John Hinckley,” and we’re off to Never Neverland Ranch with all the Culkins in Jacko’s bed). Not a hypnagogic vapor wave—but the dissonant hatred of Nicholas Sandmann silently smirking at the ceremonial drum of an Omaha elder as Black Hebrew Israelites shout gay-bashy slogans in the background. “Cronenberg’s last scene” will be as body-horrific as all his previous ones. Sharif feasts on a naked lunch of flesh sandwiches while typing Burroughs-like cut-ups onto a scarab beetle typewriter. He snorts lines of minced and mortared-and-pestled Black Meat—the guts and entrails of Scolopendra gigantea. “Oh, I’m buggin’?” has become an earworm, and Fatboi Sharif is every poor child pulling up to the ER with a cockroach lodged in its ear canal. Ruptured tympanic membranes at every entrance, each exit. To borrow a neologism from k-the-i?, Fatboi Sharif breeds electrobugs.

[SITE REF. → Shell Pile ghost town; Port Norris, NJ. Named for its mountains of oyster shells, a WPA guidebook from 1939 described Shell Pile as “a community of about 1,000 Negroes living in wooden barracks erected on stilts over the salt marshes.” A pathogen known as MSX devastated the local oyster industry in the mid-50s, and the community never recovered. The shell piles remain. Track(s) played: “John Hinckley” and “Sugarcane Plantation.”]

In 1990, Tragedy Khadafi (née Intelligent Hoodlum) proposed we arrest the president (NB: Your mother’s buggin’—her mind slanted, he rapped). In 1992, Paris became a Bush Killa, delivering a bullet from the barrel of a Black guerrilla. In 1998, Non Phixion dropped “I Shot Reagan” and Sabac dragged First Lady Nancy into the crosshairs: “His wife’s the hostage, / Her body parts up in a grab-bag.” On “John Hinckley,” Sharif’s ode to POTUS-pistol whippings, he speaks of the “covenant grab-bag.” It’s a covenant signed by Tragedy, Paris, Non Phixion, and now Sharif himself (among many other signees—Chuck D comes to mind as he invokes the Honey Drippers’ nix-Nixon anthem and its foundational drum break on 1987’s “Rebel Without A Pause”: Impeach the president—pulling out my raygun).

“John Hinckley popped that president,” Sharif raps, and he did it with a naked raygun (...throb throb…throb throb…)—a Röhm RG-14. Sharif rap-renders the scene into a 60-second assassination, and he can sympathize with Hinckley—both film buffs, fans of Taxi Driver (1976). Jodie Foster—the child-actor playing child-prostitute—turned into a child-bride in Hinckley’s obsessive mind. Hinckley’s single “We Got That Chemistry” is streaming on all DSPs—I’m searching the liner notes for the Sharif feature; a collab for the ages.

For his assassination plot, Fatboi Sharif readies “gun fire sun visor” with “spinning Budweiser breath.” He’s funky cold medina, cold lampin’, and “coldstone hypnotic.” He opens the “seventh seal,” chopping and playing chess with Myka 9 and Max von Sydow in a seaside “fog of chronic.” This is Sharif’s “daily operation”—peep him on the cover of Gang Starr’s Daily Operation (1992). He’s there—amongst the messy mahogany table covered with money stacks, Elijah Muhammad’s Message to the Black Man in America paperback, typewriter, and skull. He’s there—top-right, hiding behind the mounted boar’s head. He wears it like a mask. The illest brother when he gets his mic check.

He’s ready and willing to go underground—deep cavities and cavernous tunnelways:

After he goes for the headshot (like John Wilkes Booth with his derringer, like those old Rhymesayers cassette tapes…), Sharif’s weapon is a “soul glowing hidden in the briefcase.” The execution is the pulpiest fiction emanating an aura of Diaspora Problems.

In David Gordon Green’s 2000 film George Washington, the character George—young, strange, and Black—“had to be very careful never to get his head wet…”:

See, his fontanel was very, very, very, very soft. Like a baby’s head. And when he soaks it or itches it, it irritates his brain. He don’t like it, ’cause if somebody hit him in his head, he’d probably die.

As George and his group of mangy misfits fool around in a bathroom, another character, Buddy, pushes George and bangs his head against the wall. In retaliation, George pushes Buddy who slips and loses consciousness. When he comes to, blood begins to dribble from a crack in his skull and he ends up slumped in a urine-splashed stall—dead. “Everything’s blue in this world—all fuzzy,” Trent Reznor groans on Nine Inch Nails’ “The Downward Spiral,” “Spilling out of my head,” and from such a tiny little hole.

The character Nasia speaks with a Malick-inspired voiceover. Considering the unsettling tone and disquieting details of the film’s narration, Nasia’s name may as well be “Nausea.” Nas: I’m out for dead presidents to represent me. George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, JFK, Ronald Reagan, et al. In Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984), Nausicaä collects spore samples (like Ced-Gee collected Melvin Bliss records and transformed “Synthetic Substitution” into “Ego Trippin’”) and is eventually revived by Ohmu tentacles. Miyazaki’s ravaged world—his crushed-killed-destroyed eco-stressed landscape—is like Bliss sings: “Synthetic substitution has taken over this land, / There’s no one to blame but man.” Those monstrous Ohmu are roly-polies [Armadillidium vulgare] navigating digable planets. Oh, I’m buggin’?

In Blood and Guts in High School (1978), Kathy Acker’s “mysterious Mr Linker” rhetorically asks: “Where does culture come from? I will tell you. It comes from disease. All the great artists, Goethe, Schiller, and Jean-Paul Sartre—you must read Nausea in the French, in English it is nothing—have said this. They are aware how evil they are. They are aware this life is truly evil; due to this awareness, they are able to go beyond.” [Acker also depicts her protagonist Janey getting assaulted by a man whose “hands ran huge insects down (her) back.” Oh…I’m…buggin’?]

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Earlier in George Washington, Buddy paces a stage in some dilapidated auditorium (all the film's settings are ruinous—real Sharif video shoot environs) with a T-Rex mask on as he recites passages from the Book of Job:

All kinds of pests, like, all over its legs. Oh, that I were as in the months of old, as in the days when God watched over me: When His lamp shone over my head...and by His light I walked through darkness: When I was in my prime: When the friendship of God was upon my tent: When the Almighty was with me: When my children were around me: When my steps were washed with milk...and the rock poured out for me streams of oil.

[SITE REF. → Venusian alien contact location; West Main Street; High Bridge, NJ. Howard Menger purported to bear witness to cosmic lifeforms on his property. Track(s) played: “1999 Hacker Worldwide” and “Parasite.”]

Let transmission commence. Fatboi Sharif bends and adjusts the rabbit ears antenna on “1999 Hacker Worldwide.” Through the snow and noise (talkin’ about static vision, folx) emerges a “televised child slave, / Live at 11” (later, on “Sugarcane Plantation,” it’s the “news at 12” when he’ll “crucify white Jesus” on a live-feed). The commercial break previews what’s coming up next: “Tonight we loot the church.” Yes, loot the church and the monastery, because you know now that the Dalai Lama leaves your boo-boo achin’ like Bambaataa and requests you suck his tongue. Gimme the loot, gimme the loot! Sharif’s a bad, bad boy, in the pitchdown death-voice of Kid Hood on ATCQ’s “Scenario (Remix)”—his opening salvo is a son’s cry as he was murdered just days after recording his verse shirtless in the booth [cut to footage of Sharif performing shirtless]. “He didn’t say hello or nothin’,” Q-Tip told The Source for Hood’s obituary, “he just started rhymin’.” Gimme the loot, gimme the loot! Anthony Iles sees “the suspension of the normal ordering” and “new and unforeseen relations” between objects and behaviors when we loot. “[W]hen looters use a mannequin leg to break a shop window to impose some asset relocation from below we are talking about media as impure means.” Sharif’s got the impurest means and the impurest thoughts.

The carnivalesque catastrophe of Fatboi Sharif’s mind unravels. You know the “economy collapsing” and “fi…nan…cial by…pass…ing”—all that hocus-pocus. [I’m shaping your brain like pot…ter…y, Monch says, his motor temporarily running low on power but only to deconstruct the temporality.] Sharif has access; he’s got the “skeleton key” as he danses macabre, as he speaks “open sesame,” pulling from Antoine Galland’s orientalist Ali Baba and his Forty Thieves (or his Sporty Thievz, but the tomb raiders and grave robbers ain’t getting nada from us). Open Sesame Street to hip-hop. See MC Lyte rock the stoop in her purple sweatsuit. Sharif riding side-saddle on Snuffleupagus with the subwoofer pumping KMD’s “Humrush,” Bert philosophizing Buddhist emptiness (śūnyatā). (Oh, an empty place…a perfect place to practice the exciting art of humming.) Meanwhile, Sharif is on an expedition to “Woodstock 2030.” The brown acid warning still reverberates across space and time and he’s finger-crossed that there’s a few tabs left (the “final acid trip” he growls about on “5G Celsius Cell Tower”).

“1999 Hacker Worldwide” plays like Y2K paranoia—a glitch-hop ode to the millennium bug (Oh, I’m buggin’?). Kool Keith emerged as Black Elvis in 1999 and proceeded to get Lost in Space. The soundbombing of Common and Sadat X on “One-Nine-Nine-Nine” [...inch nails through each one of my eyelids, c. ’99] penetrated RealAudio players, and the Hi-Teknological production set the doom mood. On “Parasite,” Sharif “ride[s] a push on a Greyhound / Searching for a way out” with Dirt McGirt inflections. Behold a Pale Snuffleupagus.

[SITE REF. → VHS Walkway; Fort Lee, NJ. The original motion picture industry in America was located in Fort Lee, and in that spirit, a patio and walkway made up of VHS tapes surrounds a private residence. Track played: “Paging Dr. noface.”]

Fatboi Sharif has an ongoing appointment with his octagonecologyst, but Dr. Octagon isn’t answering his calls. Instead, he pages Dr. noface. And noface’s sonix are aptly described in Gardner’s Freddy’s Book: “Outside someone was again banging metal against metal. The sound was too irregular to be the work of a hammer, and the sound was sometimes loud, sometimes lighter, a mere clink.” noface takes the folk of “If I Had A Hammer” and filters it through his failed state fuzz. Peep him on the PTP cassette cover, his void-face hidden behind a Baphomet mask. He flexes his equilibrium—a sabbatic goat prematurely goated. He’s Black Phillip from Robert Eggers’ The Witch (2015), pacing his pen and passing you a ballpoint pen to sign your deal with the Devil. He doesn’t blink—redaction bars for pupils. “It was true that the Devil could sometimes read one’s mind,” Gardner writes, “that once he’d gotten into you there seemed to be no shaking him; but at least one could in some measure limit the monster’s conversation.” Sharif’s conversation with the listener knows no limits, though. For noface’s Baphomet cosplaying, Gardner’s Devil masquerades as a mule:

“What kind of fool are you, trying to block out the voice of the Devil with your fingers?” the mule scoffed. “Plug your ears with pebbles if it pleases you, and sing at the top of your voice to drown me out. I’ll still be heard!”

noface will still be heard as he activates the widening gyre (peace, Yeats) that is Preaching In Havana.

Furthermore, the album is a set of interlocking spirals—a helix, a hex. Spin yourself silly on a spiral staircase to Hell—ride a helicoid to the void. Listen as you’re yeah-boyee’d by the endless [eternal and infernal] echo of Flavor Flav—voices whirlpooling the River Styx. Eyes pierced by an unwound spiral notebook containing handwritten transcriptions of Malleus Maleficarum. noface’s productions aren’t beats; they’re dungeon bludgeonings. His loops are spirals, deranged and ceaselessly spinning out of control. A loop begins linear but soon goes labyrinthine. In Dante’s Inferno, his circles of suffering—circles and circles, oodles and oodles and oodles of o’s—from embryo to man and back again, form a downward spiral. Reznor razor-wire torture. “Slow it behoveth our descent to be,” the Italian in the Black medallion (no gold) writes. According to him, we have to acclimate “to the sad blast”—but I prefer to get dizzy from the disorientation.

In an interview with Fatboi Sharif for The Next Movement podcast, co-host E. Fortson precisely sketches Preaching In Havana’s lineage to Divine Styler’s Spiral Walls Containing Autumns of Light (1992). On Preaching In Havana, she tells Sharif, it feels as if we’re granted access to his mind: “We’re hearing your internal thoughts, and we can witness how you’re processing them.” On Styler’s “Heaven Don’t Want Me and Hell’s Afraid I’ll Take Over,” the message blares like a Network nervous breakdown: “NEWS, NEWS, AND NEWS! MORE BLUESY NEWS!!!” Sharif adopts the mantle of the mad prophet of the airwaves.

Fatboi Sharif holds not a conch to his ear but a nautilus—a mollusk with musical musculature. What Bob James calls the “atmospheric orchestration” of “Nautilus” (1974) unravels as an infinite scroll for sample use—hordes of hip-hop producers synthesizing and submerging the oceanic depths Bob James chose to navigate. They abide by the spells Sharif proposes on “Sugarcane Plantation”: a “PCP posted, / Psychedelic relic, / Road atlas.” Their stems create helices of recorded sound—much like noface. Preaching In Havana devolves into a Wichita Vortex Sutra in an Allen Ginsberg mode, only to reveal the Beat poet’s affiliation with NAMBLA and how he squeezed my uncle’s thigh once at a book signing hoping for lemon juice to run down his leg.

Oh, the places you’ll go! Suessian spirals lead us to the Final Whorl Front. We link galaxy arms across the universe—needle our way through the Realm of the Nebulae. We crack the human genome with DNAlysis and hogtie James Watson in the process. Evocations of the inventor’s spring, of horrific histories like the lynch mob’s corkscrew used on Luther Holbert in 1904 in Doddsville, Mississippi to bore holes into his body and extract, in the words of the Vicksburg Evening Post, “quivering flesh.” On “Sugarcane Plantation,” Sharif is howling—he “yell[s] terrorist threats, / The coldest spirit, / In pig Latin” (emphasis on pig). His anti-rhymes coordinate with Lune TNS’s “Plantation Rhymes.” Pliny the Elder described comets as “knot[s] of fire” with an appearance that was “twisted like a spiral.” We’re fired up. Sharif’s got incendiary comments for daze, and each hits like a Molotov.

Sharif paints with a Tesla coil—streamer arcs and brush discharges. Voltage flashing from his cranium. As Kool Keith says, he’s “Eveready, like a battery—charged, / [He’s] worth the alkaline.” Ultramagnetic, indeed. Play Preaching In Havana backwards. Watch Fatboi Sharif perform: a human Fraser spiral illusion—hypnotic, fuck up your optics like ELUCID fucks up electronics. Misalignments and distortions. Ha, Sharif is sicker than your average. Can’t you see? Sometimes his words just hypnotize you. Or, as Archimedes wrote in On Spirals circa 225 BC:

I say that the area added by the spiral in the third revolution will be double of that added in the second, that in the fourth three times, that in the fifth four times, and generally the areas added in the later revolutions will be multiples of that added in the second revolution according to the successive numbers, while the area bounded by the spiral in the first revolution is a sixth part of that added in the second revolution.

Right? Right. (Oh, you buggin’?)

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Like the dark and droney ambience of Bobby Krlic’s Haxan Cloak moniker, noface fashions his own Excavation Musick, digging deep only to resurface, bedraggled and cloak tattered. Krlic (also noted for his role as an Ari Aster collaborator) described his first album as “a person’s decline towards death.” His follow-up was described as a “journey [to] a different plane.”

The 1922 silent film Hӓxan, directed by Benjamin Christensen [“hӓxan”: Swedish for witch], plays like watching Fatboi Sharif perform live on mute. Christensen’s goal was to “throw light on the psychological causes of…witch trials by demonstrating their connections with certain abnormalities of the human psyche, abnormalities which have existed throughout history and still exist in our midst.” Such abnormalities exist—gloriously—on Preaching In Havana.

One of Hӓxan’s intertitles details “the terrible confessions” that can be “forced from [a victim] in less than a minute” by using the thumbscrew [tumskruv]. (The thumbscrew, naturally, being yet another spiral.) The brevity of the songs on Preaching In Havana have the same excruciating effect.

[SITE REF. → Bergwald Nazi Bund Camp; Federal Hill; Bloomingdale, NJ. The ruins of a Nazi Youth camp that was shut down by the FBI in 1941. The remnants of a stone cistern, storage silo, cabinets, and iron grates are still visible. Track played: “Nazi Needle Marks.”]

Outspoken about his adoration for Gonjasufi, Sharif channels his die-verse-ified voice often. We could compare his timbral offerings to Gonjasufi’s delivery on “Venom” from 2012’s MU.ZZ.LE. It’s not “singing” we hear, per se—it’s [sin]ging, it’s [singe]ing—transgressive, burning; a vicious and venomous flow. Sharif’s baritone [bury-tone] is throat-scourged. Liken it to the outro on Busta Rhymes’ When Disaster Strikes… (1997) where Busta screams and talks, stalks and fiends—“rap” as emceeing; “rap” as talking. Give me that ol’ “Preparation for the Final World[/Whorl] Front” religion.

On “Nazi Needle Marks,” Sharif raps in “nauseous nasal chalk-line intervals,” to use his own phrase. The French Revolution comes for the Queen in b-boy style: “Exorcism Antoinette headspin.” The guillotine uprocks and downrocks until Marie’s dome rolls off the platform and into the crowd. Regan projectile vomits the greenest sticky-icky as she goes full Rock Steady on the 180-degree rotation. “Death of a salesman,” Sharif mutters with anti-consumerist ire. In Sharif’s looney-tune universe, Arthur Miller dicks down Marilyn Monroe before penning the final pages of his play—post-coital when he sends Willy Loman’s Studebaker speeding into a suicide machine. As for Marilyn, maybe it’s the “poison dart slumped her.”

Sharif says a prayer at the altar of the Beastie Boys’ prank-calling “Cooky Puss” (1983):

These pussy crumbs are making me itch! Sharif and the ill-communicating saboteurs are capable of making our skin crawl, not unlike El-P pontificating about how he “could suck a cookie out a pussy, no question” on Co Flow’s “Definitive.” Sick fux. Before long, Sharif is back inhaling John Brown’s vaporizer and riding a white steed. He’s gonna “burn [the] village in search of [his] masterrrrr.” Torches, pitchforks, and hedge-shears in his holster. Fighting fire with fire to the point of self-immolation is a necessity for survival. Kathy Acker shows us what we’re up against:

One of the landlords burned down his building so he could collect the insurance money. Two families and one pimp were sleeping in this building when it burned down. The landlord sold the charred lot for lots of money to McDonald’s, a multinational fast food concern. This is how poor people become transformed into hamburger meat.

Or, as Sharif would versify it:

Ridin’ filthy-mangy-grimy-raunchy-dirty out of Rahway, bumping the Dead Kennedys’ “Nazi Punks Fuck Off” in the lemon. Screaming, lung-top, with Jello Biafra: We ain’t trying to be police. “The Nazi showed his needle marks” like the NJ state trooper showed his “Blood Honor” neck tats on his driver’s license photo ID.

[SITE REF. → Ong’s Hat village; Pemberton Township, NJ. Deep in the Pine Barrens, a group known as the Moorish Science Ashram established an Institute of Chaos Studies in Ong’s Hat and opened a portal to another dimension. Track played: “5G Celsius Cell Tower.”]

On “5G Celsius Cell Tower,” the cell tower sprouts polystyrene branches and the drones surveil the 5G conspiracists—they wouldn’t dare. Sharif says things have become “ice storm hazardous,” with the soul-lift of Godfather Don—we’re talking about a hellofasong. Fever-inducing frequencies are emitted, so Sharif raps like he’s caught an ague—he’s “breaking atoms.” The cover of Main Source’s Breaking Atoms (1991), which includes a spiral-in-the-making comprised of protons, neutrons, electrons [read it in the tone of Prince Po’s insight, foresight, more sight from OK’s “Releasing Hypnotical Gases”—yes, hypnotical], flashes across our mind’s eye.

“Jacob’s ladder staggered on” as a symbol of numbskull persistence. Sharif trudges through the stagger grass [a man from the meadows], swaggering like Stagolee, and he’s stopping for an intermission to stream one of his fave films: Jacob’s Ladder (1990). His physical form atomizes as he hallucinates the rungs of Jacob’s ladder twist and deform and become a helix. (William Blake’s 1805 watercolor shows a spiraling ascent.) Sharif cannonballs instead into the Boogiemonsters’ “Old Man Jacob’s Well” (1994)—a well where souls dwell. “I got the cravings again of the wicked,” and child abductions are the only answer. Demented, sick, and vile. Climb Jacob’s jaundiced ladder from well-to-cell tower.

The temperature’s rising on the “5G Celsius Cell Tower,” and we’ve got our culprit for coronaviruses, microchip implants, and mind control. But what you’ve really got to be concerned with—many people are saying—is that havoc-causing Havana syndrome. Fatboi Sharif is here to get idiopathic for you idiots. He’s hunkered down at the U.S. embassy in Cuba while the C.I.A. (Criminals In Action) claims Fidel Castro’s corpse is responsible. Someone somewhere under some top-secret security clearance is whispering about Sharif, and his ears ring out with tinnitus intensity. Ours, too.

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By now you know Fatboi Sharif is an atrocity exhibitionist who’d have the PMRC’s panties in a bunch, an MC whose processional route is the Stations of the Crass. Just as Chuck D’s voice from “Bring the Noise” (Once again, back, it’s the incredible…) reverberates through time, Fatboi Sharif’s tone pongs within the popcorn walls of our mind [substitute diabolical for incredible, though]. His white noise machine is a gnash teeth-grinder, perfection for fist-fucking fascists ’til they see shuriken stars between their eyes. I’m reminded of the caustic words of upfromsumdirt—his poem “Orisha Obsidious”:

this embryo of dark / black space spiral / virile midnight swirling / this onyx wet and non-unctuous vaginal and oleaginous this / this magnetic venom rancid with non-white wonder / rancid with non-white vocabulary self-servile, reverse-transcendent - pagan and perversely reported with discarded veins throbbing in black omniscience / chews its own adventure

In the “Static Vision” video, Sharif wears a fencing mask like a soiled diaper, a MU.ZZ.LE on loan from Gonjasufi. Olaudah Equiano was familiar:

I had seen a black woman slave…and the poor creature was cruelly loaded with various kinds of iron machines; she had one particularly on her head, which locked her mouth so fast that she could scarcely speak, and could not eat or drink….I afterwards learned [it] was called the iron muzzle.

The muzzle Equiano describes is depicted on Gonjasufi’s album cover, albeit shaded and spectrummed. He and Sharif both rupture the iron muzzle with punctuated flashes of resistance, hence the cleaving periods [MU.ZZ.LE]—they’ve got the makings of an ellipsis.

[SITE REF. → Mary’s Tower; Flemington, NJ. A dilapidated edifice in a wooded area off a county road. “Mary” committed suicide in a third story bedroom and her red-eyed specter haunts the tower. Track(s) played: “Smells Like Autopsy” and “Fentanyl Firing Squad.”]

I’m gonna allow Kathy Acker to set the scene for “Fentanyl Firing Squad”:

We had heard that this rock band called THE CONTORTIONS was gonna play in a redneck town in New Jersey and the white head singer thought he was James Brown. The rest of the band would be too drunk to stop the rednecks from beating up Brown.

James Brown was crawling baby-style across the floor. The rednecks were jerking their cocks off in a corner. James Brown crawled up to the redneck's boot. The redneck, confused, jumped James. Everyone in the club started hitting each other. I heard cops' sirens. I ran.

Acker writes Blood and Guts in High School in blood and guts—smeared and splattered. (L7 tossed tampon tricks and theatrics. Find yourself hungry for stink.) Picture “pig” painted in blood on Sharon Tate’s white front door by the Manson Family—the recording location of NIN’s The Downward Spiral [“spiral,” motherfucker, spiral!]. Reznor seethes on “Piggy”: “Black and blue and broken bones, / You left me here, I’m all alone.” Tally two hog heads for the haram tableau:

Sharif surely strikes a vital nerve, proving he’s been the nastiest one since birth [auto/matic…]. He can “purple haze testify” to that—and with the Fuzz Face pedal helping him power through what nixed Hendrix: a puke puddle; axed down by Vesperax. “Smells Like Autopsy,” hmm? Not like Teen Spirit scrrrawled by Kathleen Hanna on Kurdt’s wall. noface detours through The Caretaker’s haunted ballroom. That must be the ghost of electricity howling in the bones of his [no]face.

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Poet Phillip B. Williams introduces a Black hauntology, one of creaky floorboards and box fans that whisper in their manufacturing of wind. Williams calls each haunting “a loop of existence.” In “Haunting, Blackness, and Algorithmic Thought,” an essay that appears in a 2021 issue of e-flux journal, Ezekiel Dixon-Román reminds us of Derrida’s insight that “in every being there is a haunting.” Dixon-Román sees possibility in this. He conceives an “operation of Black techno-conjuring [as] a technological force that has the potential to reroute and alter the logic of the system.” With Fatboi Sharif’s steady output of discursive, deviant deviations, you can’t tell me he isn’t the prime mover of such potentialities. It’s not all so gravitationally heavy, though, seeing as how Sharif floats and flits about with the wreckless abandon of Slimer.

ANEC[/ANTI]DOTE 1:

I wanted to completely unhinge the language and then see if I could put it, if that would make an energy that would then hook up in some other way, like a magnet, like resistance—poles pushing and coming together…. There wasn’t any system of structures. The space between words became very important. How close together they were…. [Y]ou know what loop-players are? You make a loop of tape and there are these tape machines that have one play-back head and a single drive-wheel and you can put a loop on it and it has a rheostat knob so you can change the speed. I was doing these experiments…. I put a couple of words, or even one word at first, one each on two loops and put them both on, and I’d vary the times. And I swear that I could see…in fact, I wish that someone would scientifically follow this up, it was interesting. Let’s say that you had “of this”,—you had “of” on one tape and “this” on another, and you would change the times until they came closer together in time and farther away, and I swear that you could join and become a phrase, and one millisecond on either side of that they don’t, they’re disembodied, and I got fascinated with that. I had this thing, I made a tape out of it, where they went in and out of phrase with each other for a half hour period so you could follow this, and I thought, well, hey, that’s interesting…. You really began to feel there was a magnetic force in language.

—Clark Coolidge interview with FRICTION magazine, Number 7 (1984)

[sample pack from Clark Coolidge, 1967]

ANEC[/ANTI]DOTE 2:

For Joy Division’s “She’s Lost Control” (1979), drummer Stephen Morris sprayed an aerosol can of tape head cleaner into a microphone to produce a drum sound (that’s a KVU move if I’ve ever seen one). Morris nearly passed out from the fumes. Fatboi Sharif has timewarped and is in that recording booth as a willing huffer of chlorofluorocarbons. What he produces as a result is a babbling brook of jabberwocky jargons:

Sharif clearly audited classes at Clark Coolidge’s School of Disembodied Poetics—body-the-track training, if you will. His method isn’t just sheer madness. He takes rumors of “bad blood’ and infusions of syphilis to the face. He spins plastic bendy straws into gold but not before sucking a spiral of backwashed spit from his cauldron. Wu-Tang is for the children, but Sharif is here to scare the children with his fury and fairy tales. Just accept it. After all, “our brains been programmed for so loooong!”

Images:

Le Sabbat des sorcières, Hans Baldung Grien, c. 1508-10 (detail) | Holy, Holy, Holy Altar (screenshot, via YouTube) | The Scientist Rids the World of the Evil Curse of the Vampires, 1981 (album cover) | Gates of Hell (screenshot, via YouTube) | Hooked on Phonics cassette set | Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, dir. Hayao Miyazaki, 1984 (screenshot) | George Washington, dir. David Gordon Green, 2000 (screenshot) | Venusian alien contact location (screenshot, via YouTube) | Apple Lisa Workshop not accepting Y2K date | "The Sabbatic Goat" from Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie, Éliphas Lévi (1856) | Drawing by Nikola Tesla showing stages in his evolution of the high frequency resonant transformer used in his Tesla coil (1899) | Haxän, dir. Benjamin Christensen, 1922 (screenshot) | Carvel "Cookie Puss" TV commercial (1985) | Jacob's Dream, William Blake (c. 1805) | "Slave with Iron Muzzle," illustration from Souvenirs d'un aveugle, Jacques Etienne Victor Arago (1839) | Mary's Tower (screenshot, via YouTube) | Haxän, dir. Benjamin Christensen, 1922 (screenshot) | Le Sabbat des sorcières, Hans Baldung Grien, c. 1508-10 (detail)

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