#fishcale

Spellbound Fishscale True, 2020

In rotation

     When I think of a typical Ghostface Killah song I think about gritty street scenes of Staten Island projects, cooking crack, voluptuous women, botched drug deals, and stick ups. Although the trope of New York crack dealer turned rapper has become a cliché in the hip hop world, Ghostface and Raekwon are well recognized as originators of the style. That's what captivates me so much about this song. It's the furthest thing from typical Ghostface subject matter - rather than guns and coke its mermaids and underwater mosques. Despite this, it's one of the most mesmerizing songs on the album, and really highlights the fact that it doesn't matter what Ghost raps about. Whether "Underwater" is a vision or a dream or a hallucination, no one can tell a story or paint a scene quite like Tony Starks.