Image via Roc Marciano/Spotify
Elmattic doesn’t know which 2025 anniversary makes him feel older: The Infamous’ 30th or Jane Austen’s 250th.
When a man is tired of Marcberg, he is tired of life, for there is in Marcberg all that life can afford.
—Samuel Johnson, The Life of Samuel Johnson LL.D. Vol 3
Fifteen years ago, Roc Marciano set a new standard for traditionalist East Coast gangsta rap, and no one’s been able to pull the sword from the stone since. The Hempstead native took hip hop’s formative elements—funk, pimpin’, ballin’, stratospheric luxury, gangstaism, braggadocio, violence—and cut them paper-thin like the prison garlic in Goodfellas. Like all the best albums, it’s one that’s wholly cohesive sound, perfectly formed, and unmistakable.
Marcberg’s lineage traces back to the frayed, dusty, bleak beat of Criminal Minded, Cuban Linx, The Infamous and The War Report. There’s the LI slow-flow of EPMD. The effortless, cold cool cadence of Rakim. Further back, the bad old days of New York. The Deuce, Shaft leather coats, Superfly, Black Dynamite, and The French Connection—those epic, moral/amoral tales of cold-blooded violence, concrete jungles, and cool righteousness. The hustlers and the players and the pimps: that leopard-skin swatch of hip-hop’s patchwork tapestry. The war stories, the bubble goose shellshock, of Prodigy and B.I.G. Roc masters their use of dread by IV drip, their pauses for painful memories.
But you could go further back: the deconstructed and existentialist noir of Le Samourai, Army of Shadows, and their grimier and grimmer descendants with the same cold-eyed, aloof professional criminals with baroque codes of honor: Steve McQueen in The Getaway, James Caan in Thief. The Duke in Escape From New York, A Number One, chandeliers mounted on the hood of the Cadillac. Donald Goines is here as well, Daddy Cool for real.
Marcberg is Japanese calligraphy, each track a single character that says “Across 110th Street,” painted with a musk ox hair brush in blood (yours, not his) on Fendi mulberry paper. His every bar is a hand-tooled Mexican leather holster for a gold-plated .45 with mother-of-pearl inlaid handles. It’s that time Raekwon starred in the kabuki play Yotsuya Kaidan—it’s G shit stylized and traditionalism captured in languid motion.
For Marci it’s the drums. He took out the drums to better fit his wordplay between the fragments of samples. Real kintsugi hours, filling the cracks with gold. It’s part of the stripping away of all that’s superfluous, but also key to his mechanics, interlocking his syllables more tightly in the clockwork of the Patek Phillippe Grandmaster Chimes he’s crafting: light enough for a wrist, precise to a microsecond, iced out luxurious.
Marci talked about his relationship to his beats way back in 2008 to Robbie at Unkut: “I try to just follow the beat, man. I don’t wanna be at war with the beat! Sometimes, I’m warring with the beat, but sometimes I just wanna lay in the cut on it.”
Ka took out the drums so you’d better hear what he was saying, to bring you close; in the same way Roc maintains the same unmodulated monotone, the butter purr and side-of-the-mouth drawl. They are two sides of a dulled coin: where Ka looks down into the gutter and up into heaven, for Marciano there’s only an eternal extravagance and a steely-eyed menace.
Marci is the grandmaster of intricate enjambment, of slant rhymes, of every technical poetic technique including some that don’t yet have names. He switches up his rhyme scheme mid-verse, he rolls the sounds of letters around like dice. Chopped-up strings of nearly unrelated bars, each cut finely.
Look at his 16 on “Tapeworm” where he’s not only rhyming words within lines, but also progressing the end-line words obliquely, from ‘reaction’ to ‘Judge Mathis’ so smoothly and deftly you don’t know how he did it even while paying close watch, like the hands of a three card monte dealer flipping around that red queen.
Marcberg is the origin point of Marci’s move-like-water flow. There’s an intense simplicity, a harmony and focus that charges every joint—and the complete and total authority of his delivery. Because unlike Ka or any others in his lane, Marci elevates central rap components to Platonic plateaus of absolute: including that total, unwavering self-assurance. Ka is sometimes celebratory, regretful; Prodigy and others will be doubtful, bitter.
Aside from a very small selection of joints like “Thug’s Prayer,” Roc Marciano’s poise never blinks: “Exude confidence from my view of the metropolis.” This indomitable ego is the pinnacle of Roc Marciano raps: no fear, no hesitation, no nostalgia. The stare is a thousand leagues, a thousand angels dancing on the head of a pimp.
Of all of Roc’s joints, of all of Marcberg, of all the many songs I find perfect, “Snow” is up there, Kilimanjaro style, the frozen leopard at the top of the House of God. It opens with that fluttering noise, the sound of dirty pigeon wings—you can only hear them after it’s snowed and the city’s squall is muffled. Then that jingling, that sounds to me like a kid with a piece of pipe he’s found on the street, clanking it down a rusty fence.
And then—only then—do the drums come in, those clattering cutthroat drums, Timbs crunching the snow, out to get that paper, move that weight: “On with the show, we used to play the corner for dough, rain…hail…snow.” That chorus is not three words, it’s three separate lines. In the silences, all those hours of hustle. So much of streetcorner dealing is furtive waiting, watching: for 5-0, for whoever’s next coming down the block and might want to cop.
In the mid-’90s I lived on the Lower East Side, teenage heroin dealers occupying all streets between Houston and Delancey, Essex to the FDR, a free fire zone. The cops only came through rolling slow in patrol cars, a halfhearted show of blue, I never once saw one on foot. There was a vacant lot behind my house and they used to shoot a lot of discovering-the-body Law & Order opening scenes out there, it fit the profile. I was The Last Jew on Stanton Street; to flip Isaac Babel, I rode around with spectacles on my nose and snow in my heart.
But no one’s car got broken into, no one got mugged: everyone had to respect their conglomerate. Out in triple fat goose bubble coats in any weather, every hour, Christmas New Year’s Eid Diwali Têt Yom Kippur Fourth of July. Mailmen with different type packages, glassine envelopes with crooked love letters written in poison pen. They dispensed paradise and degradation in tiny packets, $10 each, $80 a bundle of ten. Lean and hungry, immaculate fits, crackling with appetite and youth. I wonder how many of them are still alive.
Roc Marci reminds me of a book on Mondrian I saw once. Mondrian was not just dealing in new ways of seeing, like his homies, the Cubists. Mondrian was after pure abstraction, a new spiritual artistic language, freed entirely from naturalism or representation.
He started out painting normal-ass churches and trees. Then he started taking things out—elements, colors. Curves. Shapes. How much could you take out and still have the essence of the thing? Eventually he got down to just black lines, red, yellow and blue blocks. All the feelings, you can vacuum seal it. Mondrianberg.
That continual compression, stripping out what’s unnecessary—Roc Marciano takes it to the point where it goes well below haiku, outbashes Basho, to drop five-syllable poems. Later records like Mt. Marci and Marcielago distill a decade’s work with his signature blend of smooth and ruthless, of threats and indulgence.But Marcberg is the stone-cold, all-time classic—there will never be another, that’s some Louvre shit that can’t be repeated. Every album that rolls in like a brushed-copper Escalade with butter-leather seats will always turn heads and make jaws drop, but this is the Highlander: there can be only one.
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