a belated eulogy for anticon (pt. 3: 2008-2017)
third installment of a 3-part retrospective on the godfather of too-online hip-hop labels, which evidently stopped existing at some point
pt. 1; pt. 2
i guess it was never made particularly clear but i think the thesis of this series has something to do with the legacy of a niche record label that never received timeless cult status in the way something like elephant 6 did. i’ve been thinking about this a lot lately (unrelated to the fact that elephant 6 now has a feature-length doc about its history and every neutral milk hotel song ever recorded was physically .zipped into one massive vinyl set) and it feels really unique to have this pocket of media that still feels so mysterious to me, considering i’ve never stumbled upon any sort of oral history of the label, while the initial come-up took place before it could be easily documented on still-relevant social media channels.
but in 2021 i finally did make the effort to dig a little deeper by spending time with yoni’s podcast wandering wolf, in which he sleepily waxes existential and/or mundane before launching into an hour-or-so-long conversation with friends and peers ranging from a pre-fame lorde to sunny co-creator and avowed why? fan glenn howerton. logically, just about every member of the anticon roster makes an appearance at least once, with episodes featuring the label’s cofounders (including early defector sole, who’s still a little cagey about discussing certain topics related to the label) each sounding less like fan service and more like genuine reconnections with old friends from whom he’d evidently grown somewhat distant.
while it’s fascinating to get that candid glimpse at the early anticon years through the lens of seasoned artists looking back on their nascent output as merely immature—if not downright embarrassing—and largely unable to recognize its merits, and while there’s definitely something touching about hearing these grown men reconnecting like old college friends sharing stories from their youth, there was kind of a crushing feeling to the realization that these guys are so far removed from this fertile period of creativity while i’m still stuck in it—willingly following their present-day output but always with one eye on the past.
even before diving into the podcast, the emotional connection i had to these artists peaked in 2018 when most of the surviving members of the label gathered together to celebrate alias’ life and legacy at a show in LA boasting an insanely stacked lineup including core members why?, dose, jel, and nosdam and more recent additions to the roster like baths and d33j—as well as peripheral figures in the scene such as dntel and fog (not to mention reunions of several projects featuring these folks, like themselves and hymie’s basement). additionally longtime fans of the label joined the bill as special guests, including aceyalone and tunde from tv on the radio, the latter of whom claimed anticon was what inspired him to launch a music career in the first place before jumping into an improv-y set with jel, vaguely claiming that they were working on new music together (any update on this fellas?).
which is all to say that i was a little disheartened to arrive and find that the adopted-hometown show was far from sold out—from what i recall it was a sort of lackluster showing for what quickly revealed itself to be a hastily thrown-together event featuring a slate of musicians who probably hadn’t performed any of this music in years, whether due to moving forward with their music careers or moving away from them altogether (i remember pedestrian was on the bill but never showed—i wonder if it had anything to do with the USC email address he’d emailed me from a few years prior).
which isn’t to say i’d felt cheated. as the night went on and weirdly somber DJ sets from a bed-headed dntel bled into dose performing like it was his last night on stage, if not earth, the event began to shift from a performance to a sort of public family reunion, with fans die-hard enough to give a shit about the label all these years later watching as what was evidently a final spark in the label’s history briefly reignited.
one moment in particular i’ll never forget was when dose tried to coax alias’ widow onstage in the middle of a song. i remember tearing up as she politely refused (several times)—you could see both the deep sadness and the sense of familial belonging she and dose were both feeling in this moment, as if to note the tragic yet inevitable end of a historic era while continually being able to celebrate everything it wrought.
10 crucial releases, 2008-2017
why?, alopecia (2008) i have a distinct memory from high school of driving around town with friends who were shouting along lyrics to, like, death cab songs and thinking ‘damn how do they know the words, i don’t know the lyrics to any of the songs i love’ only to eventually drive home in my subaru outback mouthing every line to alopecia (i absolutely posted ‘sometimes i claim to know a guy but i can’t tell you what his hands look like’ as a FB status at some point)—to this day maybe the only lyrics i can recite. this probably has something to do with the fact that on any given day i have a different lyric from the record coursing through my brain without really realizing it (usually ‘fatalist palmistry,’ in spite of the demented karaoke potential of ‘good friday’). still wild to me that this is so much more popular than any other anticon release which are, arguably, also all news kinds of blues. like how come dose saying ‘this is what the ghost of someone’s dad says’ on ‘the hollows’ didn’t inspire everyone listening to look up themselves. why did no one listen to a nosdam mixtape when it rained.
themselves, crownsdown (2009) not to call alopecia ‘normal’ but i feel like this album dropping a year later is a reminder of just how out-there anticon used to be. seems like there was definitely a lot of hate being directed at the collective for being uhhh educated? and this feels like the opening of the floodgates of dose’s frustration with that, rapping like speed racer in the final minutes of speed racer (2008) with jel’s production somehow managing to keep up (he even raps a full fast-paced verse on one track, which i think may be the first vocal credit he has with the project outside of dose prompting him to say cryptic shit in the middle of a break). additionally marks a strong pivot from the spaced-out ambient of earlier material to glossy, tightly produced pop music as i’m sure it sounds on some distant planet. just A+ shit-talking here—who else drops their full address at the beginning of a track prompting their enemies to (rap-?) battle them in their homes before 30 straight minutes of spitting so fast you can’t even tell whether he’s still talking shit or not.
themselves, thefreehoudini (2009) trying not to double up on artists in these but i feel like i gotta mention this one—closest thing to a label comp anticon did in later years, with nearly every core (and distant) member of the clique (past and then-present) hopping on a song (like that 2004 sampler it even features rough audio of dose freestyling at the end of a couple tracks). guys like buck 65 and slug who kinda went their separate ways years ago return to the fold (aesop rock and busdriver also appear here, tho to my knowledge there was no prior crossover between them and anticon aside from a dose feature on an early aes album), while the serengeti track precedes his fruitful collabs with jel and nosdam on the summer-iest of tracks on this weirdly very summer-y mixtape (also notable: clouddead’s anticon debut and dose closing the extended version by rapping sole’s ‘tourist trap’ for some reason). just a bunch of weirdos who hate landlords, what’s not to love here.
bike for three!, more heart than brains (2009) extremely moody concept album about falling in love with someone over the internet written years before twitter crushes became a thing. kinda the same compositional concept as the alias and tarsier album only this one’s buck 65 and a belgian producer called greetings from tuskan (two artists who i believe had actually never met irl at that point?). buck’s lyrics here are so visceral, and tuskan’s instrumentals perfectly match those intense emotional highs and lows….easily the most emotional anticon release and probably the only one that makes me gd sob (that synth swell at the end of the ‘no idea how’—paired with buck saying ‘sometimes it’s pretty when things are destroyed’—feels like such a stark moment of realizing the finality of a relationship that it makes me need to sit down). lord only knows why they thought a fairly reverent cover of ‘MC space’ wouldn’t stand out in the middle of all this.
s / s / s, beak & claw (2011) been over a decade and it still feels like a fever dream every time i remember serengeti teamed up with sufjan stevens (and oscar nom son lux) for a song about going to prom with the octomom. even fever-ier is the fact that this EP contains some of serengeti’s most heartbreaking lyrics (‘museum day’) while sufie’s at his adz-iest, auto-tunedly wailing over glitchy instrumentals. such a bizarre concept but works surprisingly well—even my brightest diamond and dose manage to fit into this wonky equation. favorite recurring bit within the anticon extended universe is rappers missing their cue coming in on the first verse.
serengeti, c.a.r. (2012) highlighted family & friends in my ‘best of 2011’ newsletter so figured i’d include the second best geti anticon album and, additionally, one of the best nosdam/jel releases as well. love the contrast of the often-over-the-top production with geti’s just-kinda-talking lyrics hopping back and forth from whimsical kenny-dennis-type stuff he was on the verge of reviving to the heavy existentialism of its predecessor (see: the first 5 mins)—i guess up until ‘peekaboo’ when that contrast turns legitimately dark. was it just a running joke at the label that yoni was carrying everybody?
jel, late pass (2013) first and only jel LP (jel-P?) to my knowledge with vox on most tracks which is weird because it’s easily my fav of his releases—kinda reminds of when, like, the bassist from a band does their first solo record and you hear their singing voice for the first time. always felt a little underwhelmed with his beat tapes and previous albums feeling so fragmented but this reeeeally picks up with ‘steady,’ which mutates from an extremely-jel instrumental into a full-fledged bummer-rap banger which sets the tone for most of the rest of the album, which is less early-anticon navel-gaze opus and more modern-life-malaise realist statement. ‘look up’ is an all-timer paranoia anthem, love how it leads into the smoke-break instrumental ‘breathe.’ wonder if he ever got a cease and desist from nike for his late pass merch.
young fathers, dead (2014) peak weird young dads—still my fav of their releases even if the overwhelming weird that this is (‘i’mma take a shit in your palace’) is pretty far removed from the specific established weird of anticon. do love how committed to weird the label was once they started opening their doors to buzz bands, and love even more to see projects like YF take off after anticon put out their most out-there stuff. wish they did more tracks as intense as ‘paying’ tho i really respect this album’s formula where each song is just a guy shouting bizarre shit and then some gunshots and then another guy gently sings the chorus over like…..a deflating bagpipe. sometimes presbyterian men are liberian men too.
pictureplane, technomancer (2015) apologies to all post-physicalists out there but this is hands down my fav pictureplane album. feel like travis and i get way too excited about all the same stuff (cronenberg, black metal, hackers) so of course he’s an anticon head—similar territory as late label stuff like d33j but none of those other projects reach the walking-on-clouds level of production heard on tracks like ‘joyrider’ or ‘harsh realm’ after the insanely hard whiplash beat switch. always felt like PP was to electronic music (as if you can classify this as anything) what jpegmafia is to rap—as if it isn’t enough that these are the two most interesting producers of our lifetime their vocals pair perfectly with their music. they also both wear very cool fingerless gloves.
slugabed, inherit the earth (2017) mainly love this album for being that like….early-’10s electronic-producer music with falsetto and baby voice sounds that drives me crazy only instead of trying to be sexy this is just as weird as absolute hell—it’s like TNGHT only instead of riffing on get-pumped jock rap it’s riffing on something smoother. i remember being stoked about anticon again when this dropped, obviously having no idea it would be one of the last records they ever put out (and as far as i know the last slugabed record that wasn’t like….off-the-deep-end wonk?). video for ‘infinite wave’ is a stone-cold classic; ‘earth is gone sorry’ is an all-timer track title and a perfect note to go out on