CANON
AlbumEl-P, 2002
Fantastic Damage
ABOUT THE WORK
Fantastic Damage sounds like a city after something has gone wrong.
The machinery still works, but badly. Sirens, static, collapsing drums, voices fighting to make themselves heard through concrete and interference. There’s nothing to do but yell. El-P had already established himself with Company Flow, but his first solo album feels like the moment we learn his entire worldview. The psyche becomes audible.
The density is the point. Production and language pile on top of each other until paranoia becomes architecture. “Deep Space 9mm,” “Stepfather Factory,” “Truancy”: the music is interested in surveillance, labor, technology, violence, alienation and what happens to people living inside a system’s remnants after collapse. Part of its fun comes from the ingenuity required to survive chaos.
Fantastic Damage also helps explain Definitive Jux. It’s a high-water mark for the type of catharsis the fans wanted. The label proved that difficulty, trauma, experimentation, philosophy, and abrasion could themselves form the center of a serious hip-hop culture.
Fantastic Damage was the match that lit a path for a new type of emerging hip-hop and Def Jux.
The machinery still works, but badly. Sirens, static, collapsing drums, voices fighting to make themselves heard through concrete and interference. There’s nothing to do but yell. El-P had already established himself with Company Flow, but his first solo album feels like the moment we learn his entire worldview. The psyche becomes audible.
The density is the point. Production and language pile on top of each other until paranoia becomes architecture. “Deep Space 9mm,” “Stepfather Factory,” “Truancy”: the music is interested in surveillance, labor, technology, violence, alienation and what happens to people living inside a system’s remnants after collapse. Part of its fun comes from the ingenuity required to survive chaos.
Fantastic Damage also helps explain Definitive Jux. It’s a high-water mark for the type of catharsis the fans wanted. The label proved that difficulty, trauma, experimentation, philosophy, and abrasion could themselves form the center of a serious hip-hop culture.
Fantastic Damage was the match that lit a path for a new type of emerging hip-hop and Def Jux.