Music

Remarking that US hip hop and drug culture are inextricably intertwined is rather like noting that the motor vehicle and oil industries are linked, or that the Bush administration and the NRA are in close alliance; their relationship is not so much co-dependent as plain parasitic. The latest album by Virginia Beach duo Clipse, however, takes the portrayal of drug culture by hip hop to a new (ahem) high. So much so, that a new genre has been somewhat unimaginitively named in their honour: cocaine rap.
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‘Hell Hath No Fury’ is the second LP from Thornton siblings Terrence (aka Pusha T – for ‘Ton’, geddit?) and his elder brother, Gene (aka Malice). Almost exclusively, its subject matter is the dealing of coke as a career and its consumption as part of a lifestyle choice. The album thus features a blizzard of references to the drug, many of them almost impenetrable without a dictionary of very specific hip hop slang to hand. Whether dusting the lyrics with single words like ‘work’ or ‘weight’ (a parcel of cocaine) and ‘keys’ (as in kilos) or going the whole rhyming hog with lines like ‘Ice on my neck, so I don’t get nauseous/While I’m shovelling the snow, man, call me Frosty’, ‘Hell Hath No Fury’ is at times almost comical in its obsessive documenting of the dark and plain dangerous lives Clipse were living before fellow Virginia Beach boy Pharrell Williams helped them on to the ladder out of obscurity.

On the surface, ‘Hell Hath No Fury’ aligns Clipse with contemporary gangsta rap and its narrow, crack ’n’ Cristal confinement but, sonically, it sets its sights far higher. In fact, it’s a deep and darkly dazzling, street rap tour de force which matches uncompromising, sharply witty rhymes that both brag and tell the (often unpalatable) truth against The Neptunes’ audaciously minimal production and thrillingly irregular beats, making it a definite contender for hip hop album of the year.

Clipse aren’t celebrating coke per se or expressing remorse (save for the self-explanatory ‘Momma I’m So Sorry’, which fan John Cale described to Time Out earlier this year as an ‘amazing piece of minimalism… it’s like, whoah!’), they’re simply doing what the very best rhyme spitters – from Big Daddy Kane to KRS-One and Rakim – have always done: speaking directly about their own experience. So is it galling to be regarded simply as flashy ambassadors of coke rap? Malice agrees, though isn’t overly bothered. ‘Streets talk and if that’s what people say, that’s what they say,’ he sighs. ‘But I don’t take to that. All that trap rappin’ and coke rappin’, that’s part of the lyrics, definitely, but in the rhymes we spit, there’s a lot more food for thought than just coke, certainly.

‘We’re far from being these one-dimensional rappers,’ he adds. ‘Coke is a theme for the Clipse and we definitely did it honest, but if people say, “Oh, they’re coke rap”, then along with that, they usually also say we’re the better lyricists. I do see that people need to take something and label it, just to be able to identify with it, so I don’t really have a problem. At least they’re saying we’re among the best that do it. If you’re gonna do something, at least be good at it!’

With its brutally clipped rhythms and bright, cold production sheen placing emphasis on the top end, ‘Hell Hath No Fury’ seems to prove the theory that it’s this sound that coked-up ears want to hear and it stands in marked contrast to the hip hop production style which dominated the ’90s, defined by Dr Dre’s benchmark 1992 LP ‘The Chronic’. That popularised both gangsta and the smoother, easy-swinging, West Coast hip hop style known as G-funk and took as its title the slang term for hydroponic cannabis. Stoned ears, so the theory has it, prefer to hear warm, bass-heavy sounds, close up. Would Malice agree? ‘I have no idea. I don’t know what it’s like to be coked-up!’

So he and his brother dealt coke for a living but never did it themselves?

‘Listen to me when I tell you,’ he says, gravely. ‘Malice doesn’t do and never has done coke.’

Of course, the Clipse (their name is a short form of ‘eclipse’, which is what they claim to do to other rap talent) are hardly the first act to have leaned heavily on cocaine culture for inspiration. Artists from The Last Poets and Grandmaster Flash (with his infamous ‘White Lines’) to Jay-Z, Ghostface (whose recent ‘Fishscale’ LP is another giant of coke rap) and Rick Ross have depicted its highs and lows, but all stopped short of describing what it’s like to cook the stuff, as Clipse do, in detail, on latest single, ‘Wamp Wamp (What It Do?)’ – ‘When I move it, it’s still damp/Mildew-ish when I heat it, it turns blue-ish/It cools to a tight wad/I get paper, it seems I get foolish/ Take it to Jacob and play, “Which hue’s the bluest?”’

Does Malice agree that there’s at least a little celebration of cocaine’s perceived cool alongside the admonishments? And that there’s plenty of bling illuminating the album’s darkness, in the form of designer namechecks? ‘Definitely. But, y’know, there’s nothing cool about coke; that’s one of the things about the Clipse. We look back to the first album, “Exclusive Audio Footage”, which never came out – it was shelved by Elektra – but that was our content even back then. Our chemistry has never changed; it’s just something that we know about, so that’s why the subject is so prevalent within our music. There are a lot of lessons to be learned that go along with that and “Momma I’m So Sorry” is definitely an apology for when we used to be so obnoxious.’

So, the roll-call of Charles Jourdan, Pucci, BMW and the rest is just wry humour? ‘A little, but it’s not just humorous. Y’know, all the kids from the hood, that’s what they want. That’s the whole dream for a lot of people coming from nothing – to have something. They want to have a nice house, nice car, nice jewellery. The whole lifestyle with the money and the flamboyance, the showiness, just wanting to be fly and flashy… that’s what we were all about back in the day.’

And now? ‘We are very relevant to hip hop,’ he declares, ‘ and our formula is real, authentic and genuine. It’s not manufactured in any way. Our fans respect the fact that Clipse have a certain level of integrity with our music. There are things we will not do. Even with the label, we don’t just take what they give us. We stay the underdogs and that’s why our fans appreciate us – they like a fighter.’ He laughs: ‘We all love Rocky!’

Clipse play Shepherd’s Bush Empire on Thursday. ‘Hell Hath No Fury’ is out now on Re-Up Gang Recordings/Arista.