Open Mike Eagle - Dark Comedy

Open Mike Eagle

Dark Comedy

10 June 2014

Mello Music Group

 

4 stars out of 5

 

 

Art rapper Michael Eagle II demands that you respect his qualifiers. If you have no idea what a qualifier is, and instead prefer your hip hop with a large dose of bitches, hoes, and bling, you would be well-advised to look elsewhere. Eagle isn’t interested in catering to your needs. This is a rapper who knows how to properly employ the literary term “trope” in a rhyme. If you have no idea what a trope is… (see above). Eagle has a sense of humour, but he isn’t interested in being your dancing clown either. Eagle is a poet with great flow, and he’s interested only in following his muse.

 

“Jay-Z’s been around since the ‘20s,” Eagle says on “Very Much Money (Ice King Dream),” during the course of which he exposes the capitalist dream of money (and more money) as a scam, unimportant to happiness, and lacking in any value. On the album’s comedic centerpiece, “Doug Stamper (Advice Raps),” Eagle again pokes fun at Jay-Z (and by extension Ice-T and 2 Live Crew), acknowledging that “99 Problems” was a great track, but “if you got more than, like, three, then something’s wrong.” On “Sadface Penance Raps,” Eagle boasts about how old and brittle he is and how nothing ever goes right, until the track itself malfunctions in the middle of a line. “Deathmate Black” lays waste to both religion and conspiracy theories with the same anti-capitalist gun, declaring them to be simply an opportunity for profit, and once they stop being profitable, no one will ask you to continue to believe.

 

Dark Comedy isn’t simply the antidote to the hollow, vacant rap of Migos, Young Thug, and the like, it’s the atomic bomb that blasts those uninteresting and annoying MCs off the hip hop landscape. Eagle fights gang bangers with education, and fights money worship with economic dialectic, and wins both battles. And, as an added bonus, it’s got some dope beats too.

 

reviewed by Richard Krueger