Anti Pop Consortium

Vets of New York's underground hip-hop and poetry scenes, High Priest, Beans, and M. Sayyid formed Antipop Consortium circa 1997 with ambitions of bringing the unbridled creative freedom of the avant-garde—jazz, poetry, who knows—to rap. Though they never exactly broke free from the chains of the form, they went about as far with experimental hip- hop as anybody did in the '90s, or is ever likely to do, with stuttering, uncomfortable beats and torrents of free-associative lyrics that are always just a few quick syllables away from total incomprehensibility.

Tragic Epilogue is a thorough but joyless manifesto of the Antipop philosophy, with deliberately amateurish electronic programming, simple yet uncomfortably off-kilter beats, and abstract, rambling lyrics seemingly straight out of the poetry slam. The pseudoscientific jargon and pretense of futurism gives them a unique way to boast and taunt, but after a while it becomes apparent that they're simply self- satisfied nerds. "The world is flat, ha ha, you fell off/Hoping that the laws of gravity will bring you back to Earth/If not, okay, your words fall lighter than air/So throw it away and disappear to a black hole, son" is a typically shrugworthy line: while impressive in its dense poetics, it's meaningless.

They mended things considerably with Arrhythmia, which manages to be funky and catchy—uh-oh, sounds like pop—without compromising the essential weirdness of their vision. Every line is a nonsequitur, and some of it is even quite funny. "Mega" ends with grandiose operatic cadences, and the rhythm track of "Ping Pong" is built, as though on a dare, around the sound of balls bouncing between the speakers, a trick used by the Beastie Boys in Paul's Boutique but not as cleverly folded into the rhythm as here, a testament to the skills of their producer, Earl Blaize.

The group broke up in mid-2002 but early the next year issued—without Sayyid—a collaboration with Matthew Shipp, one of the most adventuresome jazz pianists to emerge in the '90s. Shipp finds some fascinating points of contact with the slippery Antipop grooves, but for the most part the project is unproductive. Not exactly a tragic epilogue, but an unfortunate one nonetheless. (BEN SISARIO)

From 2004's The New Rolling Stone Album Guide