So, like 2005(ish). John and I are listening to someone--maybe Aesop Rock--and marveling over how Def Jux owns the underground. Anyone worth talking about, if they aren't on Def Jux, they sound like they're on Def Jux. Building off the Company Flow framework, sparse beats are countered by incredibly dense lyrics and and stirred with a huge dose of self-righteousness. So what happened after that?
On Float, as in a lot of undie hip-hop at the time, Aesop finds himself the only guy who sees what's going on. He's just trying to get by, he's willing to accept things as long as they're reasonable, but some of this shit is just too fucking wrong for the man to just stand by and watch. He drops Company Flow's attacks on all the signed, big-label motherfuckers, but only because there are too many other, bigger problems to address.
Def Jux took post-punk moralizing and anti-commercialism and transposed it to hip-hop, because Corporate Shit Sucks. One of my favorite comparisons from the early 2000s pointed out that mainstream hip-hop then was like mainstream rock in the late 80s: all about showing off how much money you have and how hot the girls are that you're nailing. I like this, since it makes the Def Jux crew 80s indie rock--low budget and DIY, but serious about what they're doing and with more and better ideas.
This idea was presented, though, in a "the ground is being laid for a Nirvana" kind of way. Someone was going to come along and mainstream these incredibly intense things burbling under the surface of hip-hop. Looking back at it now, it looks like the hip-hop Kurt Cobain was Will.I.Am. Ouch. It would be tough to imagine a route for the genre to take that would be more opposed to Def Jux.
Jux is still around, but at least in my life doesn't hold the cachet it once did. Like everything else, it seems to me that the internet has helped the scene splinter a million times over, letting quasi-mainstream weirdos like Kool Keith, mainstream weirdos like Lil Wayne, and bedroom geniuses like Prefuse 73 and Edan exist in the same world. "Independent as Fuck" just isn't as confrontational or as meaningful as it once was.
Of course, I'm old too. Is someone now building off of what Jux did? Has a Matador taken over for Sub-Pop as "coolest label around"? Let me know.
__________
Next time: Afro-Cabbie & Aix Em Klemm
