In the mid-to-late 90s, with his group Company Flow, Brooklyn’s El-P established a verbose style of rapping paired with dark, distorted beats that distinguished him not only from the conventional sounds of the day, but also from any form of experimentalism that had existed in hip-hop until that point. Samples were tweaked to unidentifiable extents and the rhymes packed intelligent references delivered in ferocious bursts of speech that became his signature as an MC.What El-P saw and created in rap music were revolutionary elements that pushed the style further into abstraction while continuing to uphold the strength and bravado that MCs have maintained since the genre’s inception. It was these traits that he sought in other musicians when he founded the Definitive Jux label in 1999. In this collective, there was no softening, no heartfelt emotionality, and any doleful introspection resonated on cold concrete rather than warm earth. Each member stood apart in his own way, testing the bounds of what the lyrical format would allow, from Mr. Lif‘s hard-edged amalgamation of the old school flow to Aesop Rock’s gloomy compound cadences.Following production for the albums of Def Jux artists, including the full load of beats on Cannibal Ox‘s The Cold Vein, El-P dropped his first solo record in 2002. Fantastic Damage was the worldview of El-P undiluted, an abrasive injection of intellectualism that instantly struck a chord with the followers of Def Jux and beyond. It would be five years before his next solo effort, and the quality of Fantastic Damage filled those years with anticipation. When I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead dropped in 2007, the listening world found the same El-P with the same informed, cynical outlook but a matured sense of production and lyricism. The rawness was still there, but the artist had grown.
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