Recently at my local used and eclectic record shop in New Jersey, I picked up a rap release that seemed interesting, just from the cover art alone.
It depicted a young male on a thick carpet floor, laying sideways, blood dripping out of his mouth. Clutching a porcelain unicorn, a single rainbow tear drop trickles down his face.
One doesn’t encounter a cover of this sort very often, and I instantly plopped $5 on the counter for this local artist, Foie Gras.
Getting the disc home I was amazed to find the tightest five cuts of avant-garde rap to ever rise from the seedy landfills of the Garden State.
Not only is the production incredible, but this kid has content erupting from every clogged pore in his epidermis.
The first track, “Lisa Frank’s Cotillion,” is a conceptual piece about a magical kingdom where the candy never stops falling from the sky and every bed comes with an “attack chinchilla douve cover.”
Foie Gras doesn’t only dabble in fantasy-oriented dreamscapes, but also social commentary delivered via unorthodox metaphors.
On the song entitled “Getting’ dome in my Yugo,” he perfectly exemplifies his perverse outlook on the current state of automobiles: “Henry you have to change the water before you mop the conveyer belt / the way the pickup truck flaps advertise my most secret desires.” This kid’s so crazy sometimes he doesn’t even rhyme.
Another banger on the disc is “The Exhaustive Pleasure of Burying Yourself.” It is an off the wall track which seems to contain no subject matter beyond one’s subjective opinions.
These lines really hit me hard, as if I were in a batting cage with no helmet on: “Your Grandma just died / and you’re in the middle of the supermarket aisle / but you don’t know which marinara sauce to buy.”
These off-kilter palpitations are unique for the main reason that some of Foie Gras’ rhymes are almost anti-content. As if these metaphors and figurative meanderings only exist to fulfill whichever motive your dear heart desires.
To say its totally based on interpretation is an understatement. It only means something if you want it to. The subtext is blatant and simultaneously densely concealed.
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‘Foie Gras:’ no usual dish of underground New Jersey hip-hop
October 23, 2002
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