“Blood on the Fitting Room Floor,” from the new album The Devil and the Deluge by New Haven-based hip-hop artists Kevlar Kohleone & DoSe, is a rumination on fashion that starts with a nod to the people who paved the way. Over a swinging, soulful beat, we hear from Harlem fashion icon Dapper Dan, who helped define the look that accompanied the sound of hip hop starting in the early 1980s. “Fresh is a word that spans generations,” Dan says. “That word is so suitable for hip hop, because hip hop has to stay fresh. And so fresh to me means that which is most hip and current to whatever’s going on at the moment.”
The quote is taken from an interview with Dapper Dan in the short video Forever Fresh that looks back on his decades of contributions to hip hop and fashion. Kohleone’s and DoSe’s sampling of it — and riffing on it in the bars that follow — puts a spin on its meaning. It’s a reminder first that hip hop is about more than the music. It’s about dancing, visual arts, and fashion, too; it’s an aesthetic, a lifestyle. It also suggests that staying current means knowing your history. You have to know what came before in order to recognize something new, and not simply repeat the past.
As in art, so in life, is one of the messages of The Devil and the Deluge, which takes a look back at the 1980s to understand where we are today. The cover art — with its image of Reagan and Oliver North, lines of coke, and the rolls of cash that refer simultaneously to the War on Drugs and the Iran-Contra Affair — gives the first clue. It’s backed up by the album itself, starting with the music, which partakes of the boom-bap of old-school beats and samples but doesn’t sound old. The harmonic density, the moodiness, gives it a fresh edge.
But mostly it’s there in the lyrics, as the rappers talk about much more than fashion. Over the course of The Devil and the Deluge, they takes in the legacy of the Reagan administration and the War on Drugs and the widening gap between rich and poor — not as dispassionate observers, but as people who have lived in the maw of that legacy in New Haven. The opening track, “The Merchant of Death,” talks about just how widespread selling drugs has been among youth, with both the promise of money and the serious danger and social damage that accompanies it. On The Devil and the Deluge, it’s a trap to escape, a hole to crawl out of that, and part of that comes from awareness of society and self. So “To the Crown Be the Glory” takes aim at Yale’s secret societies, in which elitism is passed from generation to generation, while also talking about the need for self-discipline to to uplift the self, family, and friends. “The Devil and the Deluge” is about knowing how the societal cards are stacked.
Then the album takes a turn, focusing on what the rappers are doing for themselves, turning all that awareness into action. That involves working hard and hustling for tangible financial benefit. It’s also, however, about making art, in the form of this very album. Putting their lived reality into words, sharpening it with rhythm, is part of what helps them move forward. That puts the brag raps near the end of the album in context; they feel both earned, for the people speaking them coming as far as they have, and aspirational, soaked in knowing just how much further they want to go, in art, in wealth, and in life.
“I’m trying to find my way out. I’m just betting on me, betting on me,” goes the refrain of “The Book of Emory,” near the end of the album. It’s a fitting mantra for the album as a whole, which ultimately settles on the idea that fixing the problems you see in the world and fixing the problems you see in yourself are all part of the same thing — and that improving yourself amplifies the help you can give to others.
Not Bad. But this is what I call The Stream Of Consciousness.
Cashflow Harlem - Stay Woke (Video)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjl3yNEXwzc
X Clan - Heed The Word Of The Brother (Video)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qOpoZXxbBQ