9. ClipseHell Hath No Fury
I go through periods of bingeing on genres. I don’t only listen to hip-hop at some point but, yeah, that Clipse one in particular, it’s been out for about eight years now and every year I’ll go for about a month where I listen to it constantly and then I get really sick of it. Then I think I don’t ever want to hear it again, maybe it’s actually a bad album. But then, like clockwork, the year will go by and I’ll find myself getting back into it, every track. It’s a very powerful record.
The production [by The Neptunes] is so weird, it’s so deliberately thin and hollowed-out, and I don’t know if that was intentional but it adds to this kind of atmosphere where they’re almost like the Patrick Batemans of hip-hop, it’s so openly materialistic. The lyrics just conjure up this cold world of materialism and hollow ambition. What makes it amazing is every now and then there’s a snatch of regret and pain and you realise they’re just cataloguing a very fucked-up world. Whether it’s true or not, I think they’re amazing storytellers. I’m not one of these people that need to have good lyrics to like a beat, but the beats in themselves tell a story. I’d love to hear an instrumental of Hell Hath No Fury. Yeah, just go back to it again and again.
If you listen to ‘Ride Around Shining’ it’s just an amazing idea, it’s just a harp being strummed really out of tune and a beat with hardly any bass in it, but loads of knock and it’s a very disorientating sound. They’ve kind of been beset by problems as a band but they still made completely compelling music all the way.
