DISPATCHES: Still Life with Vinnie Paz

I woke up this morning with a weird inclination to browse some rap videos. This is not the sort of thing I usually do. For some reason I happened upon a couple of Army of the Pharaohs tracks, a battle rap type group of somewhat well known and other relatively unknown rappers who probably have known Vinnie Paz or Vinnie Paz has thought them worthy of featuring on various songs. Fairly quickly, I found myself belting out laughing louder than I usually do on a hungover Saturday morning...

But first a bit of backstory.

I discovered Jedi Mind Tricks, Vinnie Paz’s first successful enterprise with Jus Allah and Stoupe the Enemy of Mankind, a long, long time ago on the advice of a mall Sam Goody employee who had an uncharacteristic knowledge of good underground hip hop. I think I was 13 or 14 and buzzing off of recently devouring the classic Wu Tang catalog (Enter, Swords, Cuban Linx, etc), and was thirsty for more. But what existed was lackluster, entirely unlistenable off brand Wu syndicates and weird as fuck wannabes. One fortuitous afternoon somewhere between 1998 and 2000, I happened upon Violent by Design by this cd store employee’s recommendation. They actually had the album in a mall in Akron, OH before music had gotten so easy for a 14 year-old to download that purchasing it was out of the question and before they were even really known outside of Philly. My grandparents bought it for me and I bumped it in their car on the way home. Pops was not pleased with the lyrics but I nevertheless completely fell for the undeniably perfected formula of raps and beats interspersed with eerie, cinematic and sometimes insightful voiceovers from what I would later discover were classic films or vocal samples taken from a slew of sources as random as the Undertaker's theme music.

So there’s that, I have to give Vinnie Paz a portion of the credit for that revelatory moment in my life though I was a much bigger fan of Jus Allah’s rapping because he had some of the best lines on Violent By Design. I now get that 98% of that album is priapic and ignorant nonsense, but it appealed to me at a time in my life when I perceived rapping as an action whose goal was to beat the universe into submission and to make damn well sure everyone on the planet knows you’re the best of all time. So in turn, I am also grateful for him showing me that way which was not mine.

Digression and credit aside, I found myself uproariously laughing at the ridiculousness of the lyrics in some of these AOTP videos. I probably shouldn’t be, but who really cares? I can laugh at myself and can take a joke, shit, I can take The Joke, which is the absurdity of my own existence, so I feel it necessary, or rather cannot help it, when I laugh at others who seem to take themselves so goddamn seriously; rapping about absolutely nothing but inflicting pain on the listener or the importance of their own existence. I did it for years and am probably not immune to slip up once in a while in the future. I’m okay with that because I do not ever take it seriously. The below comes from a track entitled “Bloody Tears”:

I shoot my biscuit in the air until the sky is gone
A 16 of mine murder your entire song
9M submachine is long like your entire arm
I'm a loud mouth fucka not a quiet storm
I don't believe in an afterlife so once you die you gone
Never nothin soft, everythin' a violent song
Kanye West, gay rapper, thats when lines are drawn
Qwest hit me with a beat like he Italian mob
It ain't even beef no more, its Hillshire Farm

Pretty cool, huh? Let’s examine what’s at play here: Vinnie Paz, inflated fat fuck Patton Oswalt with a set of teeth a homeless cat might sport after an episode of Bumfights, is so viciously and uncharacteristically inhuman that after he murders you for no reason he will not allow your family to mourn your passing; all the while, prefacing the entire event with his New Fucking Fact that he no longer believes in the afterlife, thus it’s all over for you, forever. But maybe we can forgive and second guess his seriousness with the beyond belief comedy that is the last line posted above. (Side note: I first heard the “Italian mob” line as “Qwest hit me with a beat like he a tired mom”) The icing on the cake of the entire song is the Castlevania sample. Genius, guys.

This video has nearly half a million views. HALF A MILLION. Someone is going to remember this in 50 years, which may be more than I can say for anything I’ve done or will do, but is that honestly how you want it all to be remembered? Vaguely clever musings on how brutal you could conceivably be to other people? And I’m not shitting on the entire culture of rap because there are plenty of people out there each doing their singular, inventive and novel thing. I will go out on the fickle limb of conjecture and state that he’s faking the fucking funk too. What are the odds that the Pazmanian Devil, the short fat kid from the Philly suburbs, packs a cannon in a taxi cab? (He says that in some other terrible song I was listening to that now I can’t track down)

Moreover, I’ve seen Vinnie Paz in interviews. He seems like a genuinely nice guy and occasionally makes dope and scholastic references in his raps. I bet that he has a whole bunch of shit he could rap about that would be interesting and insightful. Admittedly, he has a good enough grasp of wordplay and structure to be able to probably be pretty good at it. Perhaps this is a glimpse of the real Vinnie Paz in “Before the Great Collapse”:



You can’t deny that that beat is absolutely nasty and that Vinnie might be speaking from the heart. Perhaps he should do that more often and take a cue from Stoupe’s intro sample, sourced from the 1995 film, “The Addiction”:

“To face what we are in the end, we stand before the light and our true nature is revealed. Self-revelation is annihilation of self.”