Richmond, Ca artist Mani Draper releases his latest album Ft. Boogie Smith, Dylan G., Hayley Zuercher, IAMSU, Jasmine Nichol, Ozzy & Strut, & Theodis Ealey, This 14 track LP is a trip into the mind of a genius who happens to be very Distinct.
Thiswae Promo
Wednesday, November 13, 2013
New Music: Distinct LP by Mani Draper
Richmond, Ca artist Mani Draper releases his latest album Ft. Boogie Smith, Dylan G., Hayley Zuercher, IAMSU, Jasmine Nichol, Ozzy & Strut, & Theodis Ealey, This 14 track LP is a trip into the mind of a genius who happens to be very Distinct.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Mani Draper's release: DISTINCT LP is a ghostly manifestation of very unghostly lives and deaths. With a supple word speed which implies he is neither too busy to spend time with you, nor too busy to digress his scintillating musical artistry arrives just in time!
ReplyDeleteThe lives he speaks of are "our" lives. The sense of commonality available from music derived in Oakland (and thus the sense of the "we") contends with a rich and flavorful local history which has attained nation wide notoriety and acclaim for the attempt to standardize Ebonics, among other things. The world knows Oakland is hot... small yet mighty, and in many senses a constant transcendence of paradox. To me, his music speaks about how the living strands of social history have become so enrooted in typhonic change that we-the-changing can have as many good surprises as bad. Mani signals a change toward an urban future that is coming into an awareness of accountability. In one verse he tenderly reclaims the "I know" of the guilty-pusher, the person who knows they are passing along a one way ticket to the gates at the University of Hard Knocks. In another verse he asks regarding the soul he knows (he anticipates from experience) will be waiting in line to throw their lives away for his sister's knot. Seemingly every level of the rich Bay Area inheritance and advantage are on offer in these rhymes. An awareness of the oblique aspect to culture codes, how the tropes, meanings and ideas seem to slip off from them at an angle upon impact, that is, the very ideas one is coordinating in one's effort to survive and thrive in an ever shifting symbolic and eco-systemic matrix of possibility, are the very same ideas which were our shameful world inheritance, until we further refined them. In a song about his father he admirably states his one goal is to be "better than" he. Mani uses a cool off hand style to bring to light difficult truths and investigative concerns (what IS change: the DISTINCT LP seems to ask, not HOW does it occur) which other rappers might find daunting. He does this without much fanfare making it doubly delicious. Your own personal discovery and secret, the "chance encounter".
Well produced and with music to rival the lyric sophistication one can only hope this dude keeps at it. Very rarely does one find an artist willing to question so much, with such ease. Mani Draper proves voices do not have to resonate loudly to be heralded as strong, nor that the time spent on a record should be pervasive, necessarily. The DISTINCT LP, while quietly unrelenting, still ventillates its own discursive space, with careful alternations of respect and sadness and bravery. It provides a personal record of a mind closely following the culture's journey up Purgatory Mountain.
The theistic idea available seems to be similar in structure to Sacred Atheism. An idea which is catching on which values the morals of religious ideals without troubling itself directly with the pursuit of certainty in one's idea of God, other than, if God does NOT exist, the sacred still may... providing we create it.
----- Stanley Gemmell