Art by Evan Solano
Miguelito is a senior reporter at Stone Turntable.
It’s easy to nod along because the analysis is correct. We’ve become post-curious. A homogenous culture that seeks to absorb all difference still exists, but it’s losing ground to the comfort of siloed niches and micro-communities. We’re being seduced by the sleekest cultural product of VC sorcery or content with a parcel of land somewhere in the endless field of “-core” sub-genres. Too bad no one’s reading all that. If it’s pointless to give thoughts relative permanence in text, even if read over crisp, at moments dazzling, production, then words about words, text about text, should be stopped before it even forms into thought.
The knowledge you pick up from Armand Hammer bars is always familiar. It’s understood or it would’ve gone over your head, like Socrates’ discussion with Meno except Armand Hammer aren’t bullshitting like the gadfly. They traffic in an understanding that makes sense at the point of reception, but become illegible when you try to codify it. It’s the “Iran-Contra cadence” Elucid describes, only it works at the conceptual level too. It’s okay to ask, “Why call this track ‘Peshawar’?” because it’s obviously choked with meaning. The mistake is thinking you’ll find a sufficient answer. Mercy, and any Armand Hammer album, isn’t a puzzle, even if it’s often structured like one. Approaching the wisdom they speak as if it were jokes isn’t fully accurate either, but it gets closer to the truth. We are dealing with people who treat carrying mid as sneak diss.
The scenes woods and Elucid describe—or more precisely the trajectories they graph—across Mercy don’t get “brighter” in any conventional sense. There are “bodies on bodies on bodies” strewn among artillery fallout (“u know my body”), waves of isolation and insecurity (“It’s always where you going/never just I’m right here with you”) and concern over the machinations of intelligence agencies (“Went to sleep and dreamed of exploding beepers”).
Some of these anxieties have haunted Armand Hammer’s work since their inception and intersect in both rapper’s catalogues. The use of water and its imagery has been a constant, particularly for billy woods. “Calypso Gene” is more explicit and has a redemptive tone borrowed from its clear gospel inspiration, but there’s always fear the same water that absolves you will shift into a sinister current. From far away, woods can’t tell which direction a corpse will float on “Scandinavia,” perhaps losing it in the same undertow that keeps “piles of dope” safe on “Windhoek” from 2019’s Terror Management. Leisurely swims in the river are flanked by snipers with hair triggers. The sloshing bathwater heard at the end of GOLLIWOG‘s “BLK XMAS” still echoes through your mind. Is it a gentle splash, like a parent bathing their child, or the plot of Diabolique?
Armand Hammer gave a definitive statement of our apocalypse on 2017’s Rome and they’ve since been parsing how to live among fallen edifices that should still be there and stubborn facades that won’t budge. Even with that understanding, Elucid chooses to spend precious bars on his child’s face “shining like new pennies” and the tasting notes of the day’s ambrosia. He wants to make sure you hug your family and finish the fruit sitting at the bottom of the sangria too. His verses explore the liberatory side of the self-amputation woods described on “Maquiladoras” earlier this year. It’s refreshing to hear a rapper that can still feel his hands dry-up thinking about washing them “a thousand times a shift.”
The recurring motifs in Armand Hammer’s work are the result of lifelong fixations. Their obsessions don’t mosey around the ether but seep down to the level of the syllable. “Crisis Phone” has woods roaming through familiar consonant interplays like “spider hole in the cubicle.” The last song, “Super Nintendo,” features a dizzying sequence from Elucid that skips from “peculiar and wild” to “cast shadow like sundial” and ending with an updated version of “ta-da.”
Their collaborations with The Alchemist and his sample-heavy style work because the beats give them space to transmit their signals clearly. I used to be more invested in tracking down sample sources, but Mercy‘s instrumentals work best when you let them exist on their own. Wherever they were pulled from, their utility as dressing for Armand Hammer’s ideas and images is the main concern. That’s not slipping into “post-curiosity” malaise—I did hunt down a few unfamiliar ones—but coming to terms with how important cohesion is to a great rap album. “Super Nintendo” has a subtle bounce to it that captures something inherent to side-scrolling video games. There’s no subscription or tiered Go Pass or brand collaboration, just buttons to press.
That world doesn’t exist anymore but Armand Hammer aren’t sulking. Their music contains solemn requiems alongside soundtracks to the birth pangs of whatever comes next. When you sit with Mercy for a bit it starts to take the form of a salve for those caught in the interstition. Elucid and woods bottle the feeling of watching a food delivery robot roll by and realizing it absorbed all your biometric features while flashing an LED smile and asking you to press the button for the crosswalk. Or the solemnity of noticing “No War But Class War” written on the sidewalk and being stuck thinking how easily chalk gets washed away.
When Armand Hammer performed with The Alchemist at the end of October, they opened with Mercy‘s first track “Laraaji,” the one where billy woods calls writing futile. No one had heard the track yet and anyone who did couldn’t have known it very well. By the time woods made his pronouncement, the crowd was already “alive with pleasure” as the pair likes to say, screaming approval at the masterpiece they were witnessing. It’s not the whole world, but the room did turn for their words that night.
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