a belated eulogy for anticon (pt. 1: 1999-2004)
first installment of a 3-part retrospective on the godfather of too-online hip-hop labels, which evidently stopped existing at some point
pt. 2; pt. 3
it really caught me off guard the other day when i discovered that the website for the left-field hip-hop label anticon—who haven’t updated the site or posted on any of their socials in over two years, whose bandcamp page vanished shortly before then, who haven’t released any new music since 2018 following the sudden passing of co-founding member alias, who began to dissolve as an artist collective nearly a decade earlier following the departure of one of their co-founders—finally went dark.
i was well aware of the fact that anticon was sputtering out, its remaining co-founders long ago finding new label homes or self-releasing their music while friends of the label began uploading a few early label deepcuts to an in-memorium bandcamp page set up to benefit alias’ family. but i guess it all really hit me when i clicked that dead link. all i wanted was a t-shirt.
anticon’s core artists are an anomaly on my last.fm page in the sense that they’re some of the only names that racked up huge streaming numbers for me back in the late ’00s when i joined the site as a teenager, and that consistently kept that pace up to the present day. i remember discovering sole and the skyrider band through a daily mp3 blog when their debut arrived in 2007, and why? shortly after when that same blog posted ‘the hollows.’ it’s the type of thing that turns me into one of those vh1 talking heads when i think back on it: ‘i remember the first time i hit play on those songs and i was just like woah….what….is…….this,’ etc.
from there, the discography revealed itself to me bit by bit as every new album suggested to me that the next one couldn’t possibly live up to the expectations consistently set by the small fraction of their library i’d already explored. i’d somehow even convinced myself that sole’s solo run for the label wouldn’t live up to what he later did with skyrider, but then i heard bottle of humans and the vacuum-sealed universe of otherworldly sounds it contained—basically a trait of most of the label’s releases—and i was encouraged to keep pushing forward.
i now recognize that the label was founded by a group of guys—sole, alias, and why?’s yoni wolf, along with doseone, jel, odd nosdam, pedestrian, and manager baillie parker—who were fed up with the direction popular music was taking. much in the same way meet me in the bathroom documented how the garage rock revival of that era took matters into their own hands to reroute the trajectory of rock music, these seven artists and the orbiting ensemble of emcees and producers they worked with seemed frustrated with the amount of incredible hip-hop and electronic music coursing through the underground that never quite surfaced in spite of the growing ubiquity of the internet. at their most coherent, many of these artists’ songs touched on this frustration. at their least coherent…..well, i still couldn’t tell you what the no music is all about.
i’m aging into re-embracing the music of my youth and fighting the logic that tells me it’s nostalgia drawing me back to these records, but most of anticon’s releases exist in this space of sounding so steeped in the past while predicting a fascinating future that still hasn’t come to pass that it feels like they’re firmly in a different category. even as i begin to recognize how much those early records pulled from the boom-bap, downtempo, and indietronica of the ’90s, any year i listen to them it feels like a cutting-edge tapestry of sound stitched together from an obscure crate-dig (which, in the case of nosdam, may actually be pretty accurate). even their now-defunct website looked ahead of the curve before it went dark.
when i first stumbled upon those singles 15 years ago i had no context for them and therefore had no idea what sort of cultural imprint the label had at the time (it took me years to learn that alopecia had caught fire on tumblr and beyond)—what’s interesting is that all this time later, and after five years of formally working in music journalism, i still have no idea what their cultural imprint is.
aside from the clout they still seem to hold on early internet forums, i get the impression that these artists became bigger in europe than they ever got here (i swear i’ve seen some lo-res youtube rip of sole, dose, et al’s weird knockoff cribs episode filmed for french tv or something…..or did i dream that?), while cult releases like the clouddead LPs (featuring three of the label’s founders, yet anticon never released any of their music) still have a spot in the periphery of the very-online-person’s consciousness.
by writing this newsletter series i genuinely don’t know if the response will be intrigue from readers new to literally all of these proper nouns i’m listing or more of an ‘oh my god mike shut up we know all about anticon’ type deal. maybe an aggressive ‘jesse what the fuck are you talking about’ situation seems more likely than the former.
anyway, let me know if anyone has any leads on those t-shirts.
10 crucial releases, 1999-2004
various artists, music for the advancement of hip-hop (1999) mostly just including this as a proper intro to the collective, tho the core group over the next decade is kinda diluted here by early collaborators (and it’s a pretty weak representation of their stuff minus themselves’ weirdo theme song). aside from the half-baked posse cuts feeling like an unprovoked response to def jux, my only criticism of most of these artists’ early material is all the big words wielded less eloquently than peers like aesop rock or busdriver managed at the time, not to mention all the making fun of people who don’t understand those words—which i think they all kind of realized a bit later (sole seems to be particular merciless re: his pretentious idea for the title of this comp). really gives off the windowless-room feel most of the later stuff does well…..maybe slug’s ‘sunshine’ was an early indicator that he didn’t fit the anticon bill.
deep puddle dynamics, the taste of rain….why kneel (1999) important step for the collective as i imagine it was the record that made them realize that each of these individual artists can hardly contain their bizarre, wordy ideas into a single album, so cramming four emcees on one record is absolute chaos. can mostly be summed up by sole, alias, slug, and doseone all singing ‘row row row your boat’ out of sync (and tune) with each other for some reason on the opener, prophesying how even if their giga singles can be an intellectual overload they’re at least somehow all on the exact same page with their unique surrealist hip-hop manifesto. does contain four of the best songs ever recorded titled ‘june 26,’ and the beats all go stupid. so do dose’s monkey noises.
sole, bottle of humans (2000) first totem of anticon’s peak cerebralism which, yeah, maybe goes a tiny bit too deep into philosophy-student stream-of-conscious, chronic solipsism, and mainstream hip-hop fan bashing….but it also goes extremely hard. perfect bridge from the conventional ’90s boom-bap the label founders were reared on and the weirdo literary/popular-in-europe pocket they inhabited due to their proto-internet-age-electronic-music influence veering towards weirdly depressive vintage sounds. insane how the beats on ‘famous last words,’ the title track, etc can loop 5+ minutes but stay so fresh under tim packing that space with wall-to-wall abstract lyricism. so many great anticon-y lyrics (‘on top of the world yet i ain’t ever left my head’ is an all-timer), tho many of the greatest moments feel interstitial (mic drop of ‘man and woman are all we’ve got and can’t love’).
alias, the other side of the looking glass (2002) second totem of that cerebralism: the less experimental, more homogenized, rainy-day-ier spinoff of bottle of humans (alias produced that album’s title track) swapping sole’s gruff vox for the cleaner tho weirdly cavernous and equally monotone flow of his deep puddle bandmate. speaking of ‘sole’ as far as i know this is the last release alias put out that wasn’t fully instrumental, which is weird because like….he was very good at rapping. underneath all the dark beats this is one of the most jazz-influenced records anticon ever put out, with the piano and percussion on various tracks foreshadowing alias’ collab LP he’d go on to do with his brother ehren a few years later. that and el-p’s instrumental jazz record that dropped soon after, which probably didn’t help the weird tension that existed between him and anticon at the time.
themselves, the no music (2002) absolute splatter painting of hip-hop and a proper intro to the working partnership of doseone’s alien vox and jel’s immaculate production. love the way the record nearly coalesces into something resembling conventional hip-hop on ‘poison pit’ before veering into weird ambient directions before ultimately landing on a deadpan call and response between dose and jel that is the crux of the anticon collab: a guy saying weird shit (surprising) and having that weird shit responded to with even weirder shit from a second guy (doubly surprising). actually there’s another track that gets even closer to convention hip-hop but ‘demo’ is in its title as if to say ‘we haven’t finished dismantling it’ (there’s also screaming buried deep in the mix throughout?). elsewhere ‘out in the open’ contains certain sounds that feel lifted from the elephant 6 universe and the closer naturally concludes the record with an impressively vivid recitation of a dream about dead cats and j-ing/o.
sage francis, personal journals (2002) probably not a coincidence that my fav sage francis LP happens to be the only one he put out on anticon (as much as i love the production from label regs, two of the best tracks here are the slammed poem and weird live-band rock song at the end which i do not have enough context for). sage’s vox are in the same wheelhouse as sole or alias or slug tho the subject matter here bounces back and forth between grim realism and fun creative-writing-class wordplay which is pretty unique to the label’s other output at the time (which, unfortunately, ages it more as a work of media transparently released when ‘gay’ was our culture’s favorite punchline). elsewhere lyrics seem to playfully hinge on ironic references to hip-hop lexicon and devastating realities of domestic unrest, namely on the nosdam-produced ‘eviction notice.’ i remember leo dicaprio pointing the first time i ever saw magnolia and heard phil baker hall say ‘your mother would like to hear from you.’
why?, oaklandazulasylum (2003) had the realization recently that pre-alopecia why? (when it was just yoni rather than a full-band thing) is basically pre-domino alex g—bedroom pop experiments full of bizarre effects and samples (in the case of this album, notably, that plastic barn toy we all grew up with in the ’90s (?)) and quirky songs about pets (‘darla’ from the early whitney EP is basically ‘harvey’). obviously doesn’t reach the peak of solo-stuff yoni (elephant eyelash, objectively) or full-band why? (alopecia, objectively) but ‘dirty glass’ is a great minimalist cut and ‘bad entropy’ is an incredible early rap effort (even the weird ‘pink triangle’ rip off rules (to say nothing of the ‘and all the other women i know like dose’ punchline)). guess this also kinda explains how those sj esau records fit into the label’s equation.
sole, selling live water (2003) couldn’t really pick between bottle of humans and this one so i just did both—pacing on this one feels much more comfortable, while it also feels way less navel-gazey (inspired by chomsky and other post-9/11 thinkers and also white girl suicide bombers) and consistently has the best and most unique beats of any anticon release (more aggressively sample-based than bottle of humans), from the stupid-hard ‘plutonium’ and ‘sebago’ to the blown-out lo-fi interlude ‘hope you like my stupid painting’ to the god-tier vangelis sample on ‘tepee on a highway blues’ leading into the even godder-tier title track. no offense but this is possibly my fav hip-hop album of all time.
odd nosdam, your american bonus. buy odd nosdam. (2004) not to be confused with the ‘untitleds’ ‘1’ and ‘2’ that appeared on burner the following year. two-song single that balances nosdam’s ’60s-sourced (?) tv/radio (?) commercial and/or instructional video (?) samples with heavy beats over the course of 10 minutes of jarring left turns. EP wasn’t on bandcamp so i grabbed my fav track from burner for the embed instead. it’s fine. it’s ok. i’m allowed.
passage, the forcefield kids (2004) really just ending things here with an agent of chaos—passage kinda just runs the whole gamut of anticon’s hip-hop, electronic, and lo-fi influences and odd samples mashing them together in surprising ways with a b-movie sci-fi aesthetic and a punky ‘long tracklist with tons of songs’ structure to make it even harder to find your bearings on his only LP with the label (/ever?). similar to those themselves and why? albums it’s a lot of glitchy weirdness intercut with some serious fairly conventional bangers (‘unstrung harp,’ ‘poem to the hospital,’ ‘the kareoki (sp?) kiss ass’ (sic (lol))). similar to the direction sole started taking post-bottle of humans the biggest inspo here seems to be bush (president, not band). above all else gets to the bottom of how and why white boys invented radiation. always thought the ‘poor sportsman of the apocalypse’ was a cool line, turns out it’s just an ep of the jeff foxworthy show.