The state of UK HipHop…Tear your heart out your chest just to hear your beat

By tdf, January 16, 2016

When I first heard this song…can it be called a song??…far too raw to the femurs of distant brothers from the motherland expressing themselves truly and brilliantly as well as so raw and real that it causes me to find odd solidarity as well as shudder deep down…

And so I am thinking…leaf dog seems consistently an outstanding producer and his rhymes are more often than not, meaningful and delivered upon beats as if word and sound were born as twins.

In terms of menace, and spite, and the brutal reaction to a brutal world, the US hiphop scene has carved out such perfect darkness. Whilst Rodney P and Akala both can hit interesting and worthy of intrigue gold nuggets of culture into beats and peaks, Leaf Dog and Fliptrix and their kinfolk do the same and more…perhaps I simply know their world more intimately in my past.

‘I pull your heart out your chest just to feel your beat’

‘seek the beat as my retainer’

Leaf Dog’s verse is a perfectly delivered bout of macabre aggression offering snippets of sublime poetry of the streets and echoes of real England, known to all of that realm, avoided and left to lurk in the shadows whenever and wherever possible.

Its the sound of a spirit I was always close to, and has become, because of this, hints of my own…spirit. The call of the wild. A grittiness which I simply don’t find here in Melbourne, and continue to believe that suffering is essential towards the inspiration of and for a large portion of the art I enjoy in various mediums, for to suffer is to fight or fall, and if there is fight, something remains after the battle is won, something wise and meaningful, which we carry in our spirit for the rest of our days.

“I’ve got to keep control of my mind state, blood pressure rising like the crime rate, welcome to the life of a glorified primate”

Maybe since leaving my flock, out of a twisted, unhappy wedding of hope and escape and the need to be simply away from everything I know as normal and brutal and drug fuelled, I have forgotten the beautifully honest as the forest grit that this crowd loosen from the bowels of their souls, in both beat and rhyme.