#endofearth

(review) Unsurprisingly, listening to Antwon’s fantastic new album, End of Earth, only seems to hint at what the rising East Bay rapper means to convey with his gauzy brand of hip-hop. As an album that eschews explicit expression for sake of something ambiguously layered and subversive, understanding EoE is matter of looking at the big picture while reading between the lines, urging its listeners to both zoom in on and dolly away from their preconceptions about what modern hip-hop is supposed to mean (if anything at all). Whether or not its intentional seems to defeat the purpose: Antwon has crafted and dropped something arresting, strange, and important. Antwon’s most immediately striking quality is his flow, a sleepy-eyed tenor that manages to paint the Oakland native equal parts affable and unfettered, a slacker wiseman with a pronounced affinity for weed, women, and malt liquor. While the subject of EoE’s nine tracks rarely stray from details of his various sexual and chemical escapades, they nonetheless come off as intimate and sincere, a welcome divergence from contemporary hip-hop’s sloppy nihilism and ironic qualification, the novelty of which have well worn away and rusted. This isn’t party rap in the traditional sense, but it’s also a far cry from the wordy intellectualism that has long served as its most obvious alternative. Antwon manages to tap into a particularly genuine vein of grinning hedonism reminiscent of The Beastie Boys or MF Doom--he’s partying for all the right reasons. It’s obvious that End of Earth is about more than the music itself--it’s about the process of putting an album together and distributing it in the twitter/tumblr/bandcamp era. The beats were produced by a number of promising local acts, curated (one would guess) by Antwon himself. Antwon has the wherewithal to move away from the mic for extended periods of time, letting his collaborators' beats into the spotlight. Big Baby Gandhi’s “SITTIN IN HELL” is subtle, sunsoaked minimalism, the product of a beatmaker with a surgeon’s practiced sleight of hand. “GIVE ME MY $$$,” by Aj Suede, moans and churns like a melancholy memory, and Antwon gives it plenty of room to breathe. This is an artist that respects the hip-hop experience in its entirety. It’s less about swag--and all the unapologetic narcissism the term warrants and implies--and more about the collaboration, the smartly routed stream of consciousness, the finished product. The album has a couple of small aesthetic flaws, sure, but in light of the album’s humble origin’s, these concerns are not only forgivable--they seem somehow irrelevant. End of Earth, in addition to being a fun collection of tracks, is vagrant proof that we live in a new world, one that ebbs and flows both a millisecond in front of and behind hip-hop, where tumblr posts make and break microcareers, where content is created and distributed as voraciously as it's listened to--a world where something as seemingly flimsy as “social media capital” earns you the leverage necessary to put out something honest and uncompromised. End of Earth is an album that needs to be heard and considered. As its title implies, the album coincides with the subtle dismantling and replacing of the traditional distribution terrafirma that artists have relied on for ages. We’ve gone ahead and replaced the earth with a complex spiderweb we like to call the internet. Though the strands are still relatively weak, they’re strengthening by the day--and burgeoning acrobats, like Antwon and the rest of the Nature Boy Gang, are using their tightrope savvy to make some really important art. Fuck the message--all hail the medium.