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Rhys Langston felt misunderstood and underappreciated.
While most zeitgeist rappers might be aiming for their own meal at McDonalds or a spot on a cartoon soundtrack, the Los Angeles-based multi-hyphenate has been here writing dissertations and fictional narratives to accompany his literary beat poetry. On any of his past releases, you might find Langston interrogating the forms and functions of hip-hop in the liner notes, or adding to the canon of his own fantastical and rebellious mythology of himself, using these devices to highlight the high-concept wit of songs with probing names like “Aggressively Ethnically Ambiguous.” All of this can suggest music that is unnecessarily dense or academic, a perception that over time began to wear Langston down.
In response, he released last year Stalin Bollywood, a propulsive and confrontational lark. In the eight-song blitzkrieg, Langston applied a post-punk veneer to punctuate sardonic rallying cries such as “the pope is an unrepentant rapist” and “I’m cleaning up after dirty white boys.” “It was very reactionary of me,” the rapper explained to me on Zoom last week. “I felt there was this idea that I was too alternative a songwriter for my own good, who could never say anything straight. Such as “What is he saying? There are so many words. And I was just like, fuck it, I’m going to say some crap straight up.
Stalin Bollywood was billed as depicting “civil discourse, indeed discourse as a whole, in complete disintegration”. But modern society has been in the midst of this decline for years, and neither Twitter nor cable news have ever produced such exciting riots. As Master of Ceremonies, Langston is less lord than Ham on rye – righteous and reckless, but not without reason, and always basing his attacks on lived experience. Like Das Racist before it, Langston has an irreverent tone that, even at its dumbest, can’t help but be clever.
The reality is that the criticism leveled at Langston’s artistic tendencies has always been unfounded. From his debut project Full front headliner, mismatched mixtape, he managed to strike a perfect balance, delivering his lively satire without compromising the immediacy of his flow. His songs sound expensive without having to name luxury brands or spend money on household names; instead, Langston tightly coils $20 words into electrifying anthems against class discrimination, hypocritical politics, and other issues that lie at the center of his black Jewish identity.
The child of two working actors, Langston grew up in the Laimert Park neighborhood of Los Angeles. He cites as musical influences a touchstone from his SoCal childhood, from Snoop Dogg to Pharcyde to Freestyle Fellowship. The latter, discovered via a mix CD by a high school friend, “activated this approach to rap with everything going on.” He felt inspired to start writing in college, but quickly became disillusioned trying to follow in the footsteps of others as a budding artist.
“I started producing because I didn’t want to copy YouTube beats,” says Langston. “A lot of what people were producing around me felt bloated and very genre-specific.” Inspired equally by rock and electronic music as rap, Langston challenged himself to better capture his musical references in his instrumentals, which led to the vast array of styles that have graced his discography ever since.
Whether riding Stalin Bollywoodprog-rock shuffles or zoning out over the trap beats of the previous year’s linguistically drunk Department of Language Arts, Langston has consistently demonstrated a mastery of a range of techniques and a willingness to push boundaries. His penchant for highbrow concoctions positions him as a golden follower of the irony-rap mystics forged by Project Blowed and Hellfyre Club, such as Open Mike Eagle, RAP Ferreira and Busdriver. In the next chapter of his absurdist auto fiction – Grapefruit Radioout today — he continues to deepen his stature in that lane while offering the biggest shake-up yet of his always unpredictable career.
A full-service creative system, Langston typically produces and mixes their own music, designs their album artwork, and writes accompanying press materials. But Grapefruit Radio marks a notable departure from that vertical integration, finding the rapper relinquishing almost all beat-making responsibilities and bringing in features from all over his corner of the indie-rap diaspora. For an artist who exercises as much executive control as Langston, it was a valuable lesson in doing less, relying more on instinct than on premeditated vision.
He describes Grapefruit Radio like a happy accident, a surprise album for himself. “I’ve been working on this really demanding thing, a very emotional and melodic project that’s really intense in terms of expanding my musical repertoire,” says Langston. After taking a break to put out a call for beats on Twitter, he soon found himself with some looser instrumentals to play with, leading to some of his most effortless rap acrobatics to date.
The first one was Grapefruit RadioThe animated closer, “I Will Stop At Nothing (I Am Magnetized And I Move!)”, followed collaborations with similar eccentrics like Fatboi Sharif and Koreatown Oddity, which would become the first two singles from the record. It wasn’t long before he realized that these seemingly random traces belonged together in a sequence. “I realized Oh, this could really be something,” shared Langston. “That might deserve some attention from me.”
Working on the album turned out to be a respite, a low-stakes exercise in “simplifying my musical approach.” Part of that was a result of hearing myself in other people’s production. “There’s a separation that you inherently get when you’re working on someone else’s compositions,” says Langston. “You don’t hear every little detail and that allows for a lightness that I think this project has. A little less overthinking.’
This relative ease is evident in the album’s mix, which this time largely filters Langston’s penchant for banter and mischief through the dusty soul of modern loop-rap classics, as on FlySiifu or Quel Chris’s latest Death glory. On “Blacksmith Django With All The Fingers,” Langston leans on his Muckraker Jones moniker for a slanted exposure over a gilded guitar motif that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Roc Marciano tape. He spills his quill ink on various shades of boom bap, from the psychedelic ether of “Progessive House, Conservative Ligature” to the dissonant brass bounce of “DJ Khaled Muff Diving.”
My personal favorite is “Pharmacology In Front Effects,” in which Langston echoes the more pitiful meditations of Navy Blue and Akai Solo. Still, you’d be hard-pressed to find a verse from these artists as phonetically delightful as “It’s part of a stream’s penny/ Like a pre-antitrust avant-garde/ Cloudy sound like fermented fish/ In Scandinavian playlists smoked butts.” ”
At times, Langston’s satirical voice can feel impenetrable, but he’s the first to insist that the album is best taken without over-analyzing. For those who lean in, there are endless quotes and internal logic to cobble together into something coherent and exciting. But at its best, Grapefruit Radio held at arm’s length, where the lack of a full picture makes the resulting blur all the more stunning.
As he did with Department of Language Arts, Langston has devised additional reading material for those listeners who want to go deeper. The Grapefruit Radio Operators Manual contains 85 pages of, among other chapters, lyric sheets (cleverly called “Diagnostic Exercises”), “Frequently Asked Questions” (e.g. “If my variety of Grapefruit Radio it has active speakers, can I run it with a passive?”) and a list of circumstances that would void the warranty, such as “asking for too much clarification” and “maintaining ongoing hostility to the mystery”.
The Handbook builds on Langston’s existing lore – featuring appearances by familiar characters such as the venerable Lord Chocolate Davis – while helping to diversify his offerings for fans. “At the end of the day, I think the more cynical way of looking at it is just as pleased, you know? Keeping people interested so they end up streaming it on Spotify,” Langston muses. “Logistically, that’s important. I mean, personally, I’m as addicted to the media as anyone. But I think these pieces of writing are my way of providing content that’s a bit more serious and presenting a different vision of what I think multimedia could be.”
In the future, Langston envisions himself stepping into the mold of an artist like Saul Williams or Flying Lotus, “where if I decide not to make music as the focus for a project and just want to make a book or something that’s visual, that’s still really it comes from me. And you are interested in the idea, whatever form it takes.
With his multiplicity of skills and unbound ambition, it’s not hard to imagine Langston finding his way to the movies or as an author of full-fledged novels in the near future. Meanwhile, he’s currently working on two more albums: the aforementioned ultra-personal release that was originally going to follow Stalin Bollywood, and a duet tape with labelmates Pioneer 11, where Langston dipped his toes into singing and drew on his childhood love of Portishead and Massive Attack. There’s no doubt in his mind that he’ll continue to confuse people with his constant left turns, but he’s resigned to having his say.
“If there’s any remnant of me that still thinks about how I’m perceived, I think there’s enough shades of me already,” he reasoned. There is no longer an internal reaction to clarify things. “I’m very comfortable where I am, so you still don’t understand? This is cool.” If you haven’t liked Rhys Langston by now, that’s your problem.
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