133 1/3: Hip Hop Is Dead. Long Live Hip Hop!

How Tacoma’s Revengers (and countless others) will save rap.

I’m looking at the cover of Scraps on the Badlands, the powerful debut disc released last month by the Tacoma hip hop group Revengers. There is little color in the art created by Seth Broman, a.k.a. Grym, just shades of gray and brown. A field of stumps stretches toward a bleak horizon: a barren hill, clouds, a flock of black birds. In the foreground, hands reach out from the remains of slaughtered trees. It is as though people are being swallowed. Or are they being born?

The picture could have accompanied “Wrapping Up,” a recent essay by New Yorker pop music columnist Sasha Frere-Jones that declares, “Hip hop is no longer the avant-garde, or even the timekeeper,
for pop music. Hip hop has relinquished the controls and splintered into a variety of forms.”

Photo by Tim Bostelle.

The hip hop landscape Frere-Jones describes is like the clear-cut on the cover of Badlands, a vast pillaged plain. Manifest destiny is manifest. The West has been won and lost. Many of the victors have retreated to the safety of dance beats and anodyne rhymes. The rest are left to form a new order. “The top spot is not a particularly safe perch,” Frere-Jones writes, “and every vital genre eventually finds shelter lower down…or moves horizontally into combination with other, sturdier forms.”

Hip hop has begun to “atomize”; the conquering forces are disbanding. But Frere-Jones is wrong to assume this will be rap’s demise. It could very well be its salvation.

New movements in American music trace a predictable arc from infancy to maturity, passing through four major stages: insurgence, acceptance, decadence and then either fragmentation or entrenchment. Those that become entrenched — jazz and blues, for example — stop appreciably advancing, choosing the rear guard over the avant-garde, protecting and preserving the ground they’ve gained while waiting for their Ken Burns film. Those that fragment — the way rock did, most notably — disperse into smaller alliances to advance on myriad fronts: emo, prog, punk, metal, folk-rock, lit-rock, roots-rock, power-pop. The twenty-first century avant-garde isn’t a battalion lining up, lowering bayonets and charging. It’s a loose collection of guerrilla bands lobbing grenades from the bushes, each with its own agenda.

Hip hop, having blinged itself silly in a period of decadence to rival any in music history, now finds itself facing fragmentation or entrenchment. Jay-Z, whose new album, The Blueprint 3, is used by Frere-Jones as an example, seems to have chosen, at least for now, to seek shelter in reliable formulas. Others, such as Revengers, are forging ahead on the indie model.  They are the bodies hatching from the wreckage to gather the scraps on the badlands.

Revengers, truth be told, are as much an indie band as a hip hop crew. Their stage show features guitar, bass and drums — no turntables, synths, laptops or hype men. Founding members Dustin Iacobazzi Riecan, Dale Coleman and Eric Quinn, who are joined onstage by guitarist Mason Hargrove and drummer Jeff “Hammer” Berghammer,  grew up together in the middle-class haven of University Place, about as far away from the ’hood as you can get. On Scraps on the Badlands they reference the Clash and Black Flag, as well as Tom Selleck, Wheat Thins and the Battle of the Somme. Riecan’s beats are as likely to sound as much like Motörhead as Motown, and when I ask what they listened to growing up, Coleman tells me, “Oh man, we listened to Weezer and Bjork!”

But Badlands is a hip hop record, with all the urgency and immediacy that marked the peak of the form, if not always the sense of style. Riecan’s compositions swing from the sublime to the severe — the gorgeous piano runs of “Badlands” sparring with the chunky power chords of “Bone River” — while Coleman and Quinn rhyme like they’re out to settle a score.

The record doesn’t sound like a debut but rather the fully realized vision of mature artists, which in fact it is. Coleman, Quinn and Riecan were previously members of Biznautics, a popular and locally influential crew that they formed in high school, and which had ten members at one point during its six-year run. Since Biznautics broke up in 2005, the trio has endured a string of challenges that lend the record unmistakable, if indescribable, weight.

“We like to think of it as celebrating desperation,” says Coleman.

That desperation was compounded when longtime friend and legendary sound man Tom Pfaeffle was shot and killed outside a motel in Twisp, Washington, last July. He had recently finished mixing and mastering Badlands, which Riecan and Quinn recorded at home.  Riecan estimates Pfaeffle spent forty to sixty hours working on each track.

“This record sounds the way it does because of him,” says Quinn.

It sounds like payback, both demanded and offered.

The back cover of Scraps on the Badlands shows a wagon track tailing off in the distance. There’s nothing out there.
Not yet.