Tommy Wright III feat Playa Fly - Angry Souls (On the Run, 1998)
For my contribution to this extended Memphis weekend, I’m taking a selection off of Tommy Wright III’s classic murder-rap epic On the Run, “Angry Souls”. “Angry Souls” is an interesting track in that it only features TW3 in production status only, as all the raps laid down on the track come from fellow Memphis legend Playa Fly, yet it appears on a TW3 release (Killah Priest-style).
Tommy (and a couple other guys like Playa Fly, DJ Zirk, Evil Pimp, etc.) have been the most enduring part of keeping the Memphis sound alive. While Paul and Juicy J have recently gotten back to making the proto-crunk, minor-key terror raps of old after diversions into rock (with Good Charlotte) and techno (with Tiesto), Tommy Wright never left. They continued to refine and work the lo-fi, brutalist Memphis aesthetic past relevance and into transcendence. This track is one of my favorites because it balances the bizarre and avant-garde sampling tendencies that dudes like Zirk and Triple 6 were working in the early days with some unusually prolific verses, including perhaps my single favorite rap simile ever, “sober as a Holy Ghost”. The lonesome string samples combined with Fly’s insistence that “now I got you hot” turns into something terribly desperate. As Twankle and Glisten once wrote, “I can’t help but imagine Tommy sitting in some blood-spattered dungeon slamming Old E 40s and listening to Bartok.”
The thing about Memphis rap is that it remains the only clearly defined rap subgenre that has mostly avoided label pigeonholing. “Proto-crunk” and “murder-rap” work as good descriptors but only in comparison to sounds that came later. The whole city was on some other level in the mid-90s, and at its weirdest, it was something wholly unique to electronic and sampled music overall. It’s a sound that at its most pure hasn’t been touched since. I’ve often thought that someone needs to make a documentary or write a book in a similar vein to all the academic and journalistic work that’s been spent on Norwegian black metal, not only because of the sound but also because the community surrounding the music seems like the source of a vast number of interesting stories. Where did such an inspired, insane music come from? What about Memphis made it flourish? When a whole city of artists engages in a 20+ year long binge of art that is intensely aggressive or depressive, yet totally unique and immediate, it deserves a closer look.
-Flex
