Spaceghostpurrrp - B.M.W. (Black Mans Wealth) (2012)
I've recently read Michel Houllebecq's essay on H.P. Lovecraft ''Against The World, Against Life'' which is probably why an unlikely comparison between the master of gothic-scientific horror and Spaceghostpurrrp occurred to me while listening to Purrrp's latest mixtape. Obviously Purrrp doesn't rap about terrifying alien beings from other dimensions emerging from maddening fissures in space-time to remind human beings how puny and inconsequential they are by suffocating them with a thousand non-Euclidean tentacles - he raps about pimping and shooting muthafuckas and all that good stuff. What really reminds me of Lovecraft in his music, though, isn't the content but the atmosphere of heavy - almost too-heavy - dread.
The piling on of air raid sirens howling like wolves, grotty swamp-like textures, bass-lines that boom and thud like Great Cthulu getting up in the night for a non-Euclidean slash in his incomprehensible toilet: all this laying on thick to create dread, this reminds me of Lovecraft and his infamous good/bad style, wherein everything is described using numerous tremulous adjectives - a ''horrific, grisly, nightmarish sight'' a ''insane, gibbering, chittering'' noise. To use a horrocore comparison, Necro's beats, which are just cheap and trashy, are like a slasher film or a low-budget exploitation film in which eyes are drilled and fingers are chopped off to become rubber fingers, whereas Purrrp's beats are something closer to the lurking dread of Lovecraft's hammy clammy universe.
Of course, many will say that Purrrp is just ripping off Three Six Mafia and Memphis rap in general, which is fair enough. But from the little I've heard of that stuff, it doesn't quite lay on the spectral sludge as thickly as Purrrp does with his use of ambient effects. Like Lovecraft's style, it is easy to dismiss Purrrp's music as try-hard bilge if you want, but if you go with it there really isn't any denying how strong a mood it creates. The other comparison between the two would perhaps be in their apparent channelling of misanthropy into art - in any case, as off as this comparison might be, it is interesting to me because I've always been into horror films and fiction and also nasty, violent rap music, and I think that both those things satisfy latent desires and urges that belong in the same bloody, claw-footed goblet.
