Funcrusher Plus

We Say...

Review by Jess Harvell

Only two (very wordy) minutes into their debut album, 1997's Funcrusher Plus, Company Flow make their anti-pop, anti-materialist aesthetic plain: "In one verse we prove we can rip all signed big budget motherfuckers." At the time, Co Flow were the mean-mugging marquee stars of ugly, uncommercial avant-rap; during a late-decade renaissance for independent hip-hop, they moved the music further away from plain ol' pleasure than any of their smoother, cipher-reared peers, abandoning the lingering Tribe-esque party vibes to batter their audience with full-on bellicosity. You were either down, or on the wrong side of the debate.

Funcrusher was also a grim admonishment aimed at any rapper who'd dilute their art to court radio programmers or sponsorship cash at the onset of our most recent gilded age. Where could these poor-but-hungry outcasts find fame? "In Bizarro World, where Co Flow is the new pop sensation," as founding member El-P sniped on "Legends."

Well, sort of. The re-released Funcrusher comes after a restless, fecund decade of activity on hip-hop's margins. Whole schools and scenes sprung from the album's example, and what the children of Co Flow sacrificed in mass appeal, they gained back as a freedom to mutate the music's formulas for an unwavering audience of refuseniks. (A trap, but a benign one.) Heard now, long after its template of defiantly unpruned rhymes over grimy minimalist beats became part of the indie-rap language, Funcrusher is more familiar, but still too raw (and patchy) to be easily digested.

Musically the album's bleak and sometimes whisper-quiet, clanking zombie-like behind the rappers' aggro bluster. Only occasionally does Co Flow throw up a hook that's a spasm of noise or jazz or both. Funcrusher's beats loop weary, near-inaudible melodies in enervating circles ("Blind"); scorch almost arrythmic drum patterns with flamethrower plumes of too-loud sitar ("The Fire In Which You Burn"); and shrink basslines until they're mean jokes played on Jeep owners ("Vital Nerve").

Dominating these sinister scratch-scapes, rapper Big Juss (nominally) swings where his mic cohort El-P defiantly sputters. El's contentious flow isn't quite as funk-free as haters may grouse, but you do have to strain to catch his more vicious punch lines and moments of emotional vulnerability (the bleak domestic violence drama "Last Good Sleep") amidst the non-stop (and sometimes exhausting) strings of show-off disses. Funcrusher's not perfect, and its coherence-disdaining excesses are as responsible for its highs as its lows. But it's a perfect snapshot of an era when the importance of intellect, swagger, and snotty punchlines were viciously reaffirmed.