Food for Animals- Grapes (from Belly, 2007)
Noz’ great post on the avant noise-rap of Death Grips over at The Fader earlier this week got me mildly nostalgic for the brutalist underground rap that came up in the 00s. Noz namechecked Dalek, and the anticon. and Def Jux dudes were occasionally mining similar ground, but Food for Animals also were doing great things in this specific niche of underground rap. I don’t know too much about Food for Animals outside of the fact they were a D.C.-Maryland area rap group, and I saw them live once when this album came out and they murdered the soundsystem with deep and heavy glitch-hop beats.
While Dalek often sounded like a free-jazz leaning metal band trying to make a hiphop album, Food for Animals were more akin to a jazz drummer that was recording from inside a broken Atari, and this track is a perfect example of that. The rhymes were always more to accentuate the overall atmospherics, but they do add to that crushing, psychedelic sound. Belly is an album I seriously enjoyed for a summer, then forgot about and really wish I hadn’t; its still as unique sounding today as it was then. It’d be superinteresting to hear our current crop of out there rap weirdos like Lil B or Green Ova play around with a more dangerous dynamic like this. SAH is definitely a big supporter of any experimental rap that can be described as “blunted”, but sometimes you just want to thrash around. Odd Future does in a very remote and indirect way, but a From Based Mouths of Gods and Griots (Rare Secrete Edition) would be pretty dope.
-Flex
