Album Cover via Tokyo Cigar/Instagram
Son Raw wants you to know that there are no unused record label names left with “Sub” as the prefix.
For all of its drama and maximalism, hip-hop never fully embraced the narrative concept album. That’s not to say there aren’t classics – Prince Paul and Breeze Brewin’s groundbreaking Prince Among Thieves, Deltron 3030’s sci-fi debut and Masta Ace’s mid-career classics, among others, all demand acknowledgement – but rap never went full The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway or The Wall. That’s for the best, as anyone who’s suffered through MTV’s Carmen or the Geneva Convention violating torture that is Hamilton knows that in the wrong hands the “Hip Hopera” is cornier than high fructose syrup: theater kid runoff masquerading as elevated art.
Not so, Raymond, a collaboration between Maryland emcee Tokyo Cigar and underground experimentalist beatmaker August Fanon. Whereas lesser musicians might string together a tortured narrative with an overly obvious message, never taking risks for fear of losing the listener, Raymond is the rap equivalent of a film shot entirely in close ups, one more concerned with its subject’s interior life than dramatic twists and turns.
Raymond’s elevator pitch is decidedly simple: what happened to Raymond K. Hessel, the shop owner Tyler Durden holds up at gun point in Fight Club, after the cameras stopped rolling? What if he was a real person, with his own history and problems, suddenly caught up in a situation that only got 3 minutes of screen time? From that simple concept, Tokyo and Fanon craft a meditative look at trauma, friendship, familial bonds and the fine line between randomness and meaning. Bold without being bombastic, it’s an album that finds its best moments sketching out scenes that most rappers and filmmakers might ignore.
Take opener “Cathedral Of Ravens.” Over Fanon’s soulful keys, Tokyo paints a hyper detailed portrait of Raymond’s shitty basement apartment, lingering over his subject’s, rusted light fixtures, bare drywall, peeling tiles and how a dresser doubles as a seat when guests come over. A couple of bars touch on the protagonist disappointing his parents, but there’s far more showing than telling, an approach that amplifies the relatability: unless you’re a nepo baby, chances are you’ve lived in an apartment just like this at some point in your life, trying to figure your shit out. Unlike Raymond however, you were probably never held up by Brad Pitt at gun point.
From there, the record zigs and zags from situation to psychosis, ping ponging between Raymond’s PTSD and coping mechanisms, slowly filling in the details of this middle-aged everyman’s life. We find out about his dead brother, we experience the uncontrolled trauma response inherent to nearly losing your life to gun violence, and we get a plot summary for an 80s cop show he ends up watching to take his mind off of things, before he gets in a fistfight with a friend. At some point the focus leaves Raymond entirely to follow said friend who bumps into… our narrator Tokyo Cigar. It’s wild and heady stuff, a rap album for cinephiles who prefer oddball indies than summer blockbuster tentpoles.
Throughout, August Fanon delivers a selection of beats exploring the liminal space between jazz noir and dusted psychedelia. Best known for his work for underground heavyweights Mach-Hommy and Armand Hammer, he’s a producer’s producer, doing less with more but never going for a simple formula. For his part, Tokyo Cigar zeroed in a particularly cinematic crop of beats – mood setters for each scene instead of rousing attention seekers. This allows the writing to shine through: Tokyo’s rhyming can initially be a lot to take in, think Wu-Tang at their most abstract and you’re halfway there, but the tiny details he focuses on all add up, and by the time the album’s done, you’ve got a real sense of who Raymond is, and where he might go from here.
One of hip-hop’s more fascinating character studies, Raymond revels in its tight focus and interiority, an album that claims that it’s the moments in between our life defining highs and lows that truly define us. It’s without a doubt, a way better look than pretending dead presidents were battle rappers.
We rely on your support to keep POW alive. Please take a second to donate on Patreon!
