Here's Johnny

"Little Johnny's not here to scare you," says Company Flow MC ElProducto, pointing at a doll hanging from the ceiling|. "He's your friend."Little Johnny, a creepy plastic toddler dressed in a surgical mask, lookslike Dr. Chucky Howser M.D. As Johnny hangs over his head, El-P, hypes the Cambridge, Mass. crowd for the release of CoFlow's new album, Johnny From the Hospital: Breaks End Instrumentals Vol. 1.

As the record's title suggests, the album has no words. It's a sonicmigration for the group, who are best known for lyrical tracks like thesingle "8 Steps to Perfection" and "Patriotism" from the SoundbombingII compilation. "It's on some creativity shit for us," El-P explains."This isn't one of those albums where we're checking SoundScan [to measurerecord sales]. I think this is something that real hip-hop kids will pickup. We're not really pushing this like it's some sort of a big commercialrelease." Neither is Company Flow's record label, Rawkus. In the U.S., thealbum will be released on vinyl only, while European listeners get both CDsand wax.

For El-P this record is an opportunity to take back some turf in thelyric-less world. "There are so many instrumental records out," he says,"and it's all quote-unquote trip-hop. And it's all done by quote-unquotealternative beat-makers. On one level, I just wanted to claim this shit forhip hop."

The whole concept for Johnny developed as a joke between El-P and hisDJ Mr. Len. As the duo joked, they created a whole mythology behind the"Little Johnny" character before taking the ideas into the studio. "LittleJohnny is a twisted bastard," says El-P, his eyes lighting up and a huge grincrossing his face. "He's laced on pharmaceuticals all day. He lives in abubble, essentially. He lives in a small environment with a lot of stimulusfrom the television set in the corner of his room."

El-P calls the album a metaphor for the lives of Americans. Many of thesongs also dabble in metaphor and storytelling, like El's favorite track,"Worker and Uprise," which compares an ant colony with the struggle ofAmerican workers. "Worker ants are the most oppressed bastards on theplanet," he says. "It's a proletarian metaphor." What El-P likes most aboutthe track is that he took a story and expressed it through music, mixingemotion in with the beats-a new accomplishment for him. Another track thatEl-P felt was an accomplishment is "Suzi Pulled a Pistol on Henry," a darktale about a man who takes advantage of a young girl and pays the price forit. El-P says the moral is simple, "Evil fucks around. Be evil and get shot."

So where will CoFlow go from here? Are they now permanently lyric-free? "Asartists, we're always moving in a direction. It coincides with where yourlife is and it's not something that's necessarily tangible. For us we'rejust trying to find a way of just, just being more," he stammers, then givesup and says flatly, "we're just in love with music."

This was more than obvious at the Cambridge gig when freestyled alongsideBoston rapper, Mr. Lif, who celebrated the release of his new album on Brickrecords. The pair battled like schoolchildren on a playground, joking andpoking at each other, overlapping and scrapping over Len's jagged beats. Onthis evening, however, the show was all about Johnny, which El-P grabbed atthe end of the show and yelled to the crowd, "Give it up for Johnny! He'sfrom the Hospital!" - Eric Gillin