Having spent the past two months working a soul-crushing dead-end job, listening to mostly the same 10 corporate pop songs for seven continuous hours because, according to my boss, KCPR is weird and messes with your vibes (I’m not kidding — KCPR actually threatens my boss and his poor, perverted vibes), my body and brain have been slowly dying. It takes a lot more effort than I could have imagined to not take a huge bite out of my wrists.
Having just spent a weekend in Vegas myself, it’s not hard to see this album as a paranoid soundtrack of the city, which operates on a mob mentality that is sustained by individual sacrifice to every one of the seven deadly sins. This album, too, somehow sustains the sexiness of Las Vegas by the giving of Gonjasufi’s analog soul to the sinful complexity of the synthetic.
As a final note, apparently this is a man who has been called many weird, yet oddly descriptive things. He has, according to Malik Meer from The Guardian, been known as “hip-hop mystic,” “nomad soul,” even “Method Man aged 95.” I guess Gonjasufi has, however, decided that he is more of an “electro Hendrix.” And throughout the smoky drawl of the album, you can hear and feel the influence of his idol, which has inspired a more enlightened approach to music.
Now, I am fully aware how silly some (or all) of this may sound to you. It sounds just as silly to me, I assure you. But before you dismiss all this as some sort of cracked-out rant for the case of universal consciousness or some other bullshit, give the album a quick listen and you’ll hear what sexiness mixed with sincerity sounds like.