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An apophany is defined as a moment where someone sees a connection that doesn’t literally exist. This is a column about those connections.
Hot boys, corner kids, trappers: an outsized amount of attention is paid to young black men working in the illegal economy. This attention has resulted in fetishization and a fascination, but not understanding. What makes the music that comes from the sphere so vital is that close listening reveals details that give us a window into a world we’ve obscured on purpose, despite the fact that everyone who reads this knows someone who has dealt drugs or bought them.
No one would deal drugs without demand to change our brain chemistry. To risk high school philosopher obviousness, that goes from opiates to sugar and caffeine laden frozen coffee drinks. There are oceans of difference between a cup of joe and a double cup of lean, of course. This dynamic is part of why the idea of a ‘therapeutic dose’ exists, why you use codeine for coughs, and why I can’t smoke a blunt a before work but can probably more readily justify a 10mg gummy, which is just one of many reasons I consider gummies bourgeois. (Go to r/washingtondc and see how many people insist on chowing down on a gummy as being a public good instead of dastardly open-air smoking, which carries with it a fear of subaltern unruliness). When people smoke outside with friends, they signal they are not particularly interested in the neo-Victorian obsession with public order and feigned goodness, which is something that serves the modern American consciousness well. That goes doubly so for a city like Washington, DC, that wants you to ride the train with someone for whom any manner of mass death is fine as long as it is not too obviously undergirded by the belief of Western Civilization that all mineral rights are theirs alone.
DC, like any larger American city, is home to citizens from countries we consider piggybanks. Sideshow is from “the T”, Tigray, a mountainous regional state in Ethiopia. I say “in Ethiopia” carefully because that’s not how the Tigrayans have been treated, by and large. The effects of Eritrea and Ethiopia’s invasions during the Tigray War resulted in the displacement of thousands, the rape of Tigrayans, forced starvation. Sideshow raps:
“I got hot nines for settlers tryna get my home back/From Tigray to Palestine, we facin’ cold facts/If you not white with blue eyes, your suffering don’t matter/They tryna wipe us out, they scared we gon’ surpass ’em/We witness gеnocide and pray, I swear we movin’ backwards”.
Sideshow is not in Tigray. He was in Los Angeles, and has moved back to Virginia. He’s paranoid, as he states multiple times on Tigray Funk, but the source of the paranoia is blurry, its features stretched out and soft. Is it an opp around the corner? Is it the lean? Is it the knowledge that as a member of the African diaspora, he’s not only an immigrant, but black?
Tigray Funk has no conceivable answer to its protagonist’s dilemmas: it’s not a rap album designed to make capital letter S statements. Sideshow’s rapping, pitched somewhere between 100s’s throwback mack rap insouciance and Boldy James’s mordant unblinking black comedy, never elevates into Kendrick Lamar maximalist fancy or Playboi Cartian yelping rage. It is startlingly direct. Sideshow raps with a calm surety, like opinions never existed. He won’t judge a young stickup kid because “at least he has ambition”. He’s tried to quit narcotics one hundred times, but he can’t, because “that’s the thing with addiction”. In the 70s he’d be shooting up and playing jazz instead of rapping. Throughout the album, Sideshow returns to a drugged out framing device where he tells a fable about how ‘animals became predators and prey’. Fables use direct language to tell a story with a ‘point’; Sideshow uses a fable and direct language to create innumerable complications in his own story, already complicated by his own promethazine addled perception.
Tigray Funk consists of 32 songs over everything from atmospheric whooshes (“YARDBIRD”) and synth neo-noir (“INVADER JIM”) to Disney film strings with bass rattles (“WRETCHED FROM THE EARTH”) and driving acoustic guitars and claps (“HEART 2 A FEATHER”). Sideshow finds the pocket in every single one. Even more impressive is how even the shortest of songs feels like a complete work, layered with coherent details even while Sideshow’s thoughts jump from trapping to genocide. The aforementioned “HEART 2 A FEATHER” starts as a love song, comparing his paramour to “stolen art”. By the end of a chorus that melts into a verse– this is post MF DOOM rap, after all– Sideshow is explaining that without lean, he’s sick and withdrawn. “I’m feeling beyond lifted, the feelings is gone/the drugs is gone with ‘em”. But when the verse begins, a poetic slip into katabassis takes place, and Sideshow finds himself being judged in the Egyptian afterlife, weighing his heart against the feather of Maat, the Egyptian goddess of morality and justice, hoping his deeds are not heavier than her feather. A more obvious musician might put this album near the back to give a sense of catharsis (and an even more obvious musician wouldn’t have used Egyptian mythology at all). Instead, it comes near the end of the first “disc”, leaving around two dozen songs left to follow Sideshow. Cold facts or not, some questions aren’t so easily answered.
Sideshow’s work here slots along a rough movement of diaspora rappers. This has always been a factor in rap music all the way back to Zimbabwean MF Doom. Today, you could point to its center as the work by Earl Sweatshirt, son of South African poet Keorapetse Kgositsile, who is more important than to be chalked up to a footnote. After all, The Last Poets, one of the forefathers of hip-hop, too their name from his work. Billy woods’s father was part of the Zimbabwean revolution– though the details are shaky, woods’s work never quite escapes his father, which is an absurd expectation for anyone with an outsized father– until he passed and woods and family found themselves trying to understand their new homeland, a country where black people were profiled and treated as lesser, the very situation they fought to avoid. MIKE, a Nigerian rapper, saw his unique lo-fi loop style influence his hero Earl’s work once Earl needed to leave the Odd Future orbit of killing people and burn shit. Now Earl and MIKE have come full circle, releasing Pompeii//Utility together on April 3rd. I’m looking forward to it, and will probably love it. I even made sure to buy my partner and I tickets for the Richmond show (which I didn’t expect, Earl and MIKE feel like acts I should have to drive to DC to see). When I looked at the bill, I was disappointed Sideshow wasn’t opening up, but good for him. Tigray Funk is going to be hard to pass by.
Rap music is inherently political. It is about the effects of an invisible color line in America, and testifies from the other side of that line. The unfortunate side-effect of it becoming a global phenomenon is as the fortunes of its stars change, they begin to implicitly accept narratives about the country that put them in a bad position in the first place. But when hip-hop is at its best, it is, either sonically or linguistically or politically, revolutionary, all things that you are not supposed to be once you buy into the American Dream and begin to work as an endorsement of it. That’s not what Tigray Funk is. Tigray Funk is a journey behind the eyes of one rapper, situated in a painful number of global contexts, and how it was those very corner kids that Huey Newton thought could change everything, once they knew the truth. Tigray Funk is about nothing but the truth.