The Flight Brothers utilize an arsenal of poetic techniques and linguistic flows unavailable to the majority of rappers today. Their song-long conceits are buttressed with sound internal rhymes, complex metaphors, off-the-wall puns, and linguistic streams of consciousness that leap off the conceptual deep end.
While Priviledge's language-bending tongue twisters often re-enact the higher mental processes of "your brain on purple haze," Billy Woods' slow-mo flow plays the pauses, delivering a heavy handed swath of sociocultural imagery matched only by the weight of his baritone delivery.
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In Emergency Powers, the first volume of the World Tour series, the Flight Brothers undertake a critical examination of world events and trends between 2005-2007, incorporating issues from the War in Iraq to the War on Drugs under polysemous perspectives and personas. As per their group's moniker, “Super Chron,” the consumption of high-grade marijuana aids in their channeling of these transcendental viewpoints. Their flights of speculative critique, mixed with a sardonically tinged sense of stoner humor, give the Brothers license to speak as if they were actually present in various locations, with “half of the tracks co-titled 'Live from Somewhere'” (Nathaniel Long, Hip Hop Linguistics).
SCFB's intercontinental flights across time and space are meant to evoke a need to connect the dots between such seemingly disparate events as the 2007 financial crisis to Yosemite Sam cartoons, disillusioned stoners to child soldiers in Uganda, and even Islamic fundamentalists to blue collar workers. This calls for rhizomatic leaps in thought and intuition thats asks a lot from the listener, but which promises to give more food for thought in return.
(This “food for thought” metaphor is toyed with in the album art to SCFB's third album, Cape Verde, which features prominent SLR photographs of various exotic mouthwatering seafoods at the “Wo Hop” restaurant in New York City's Chinatown.)
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Emergency Powers begins with “Drought,” a song which features a spaghetti western soundscape designed to engage sympathy for the small time hustler getting by. The Flight Brothers introduce themselves through tales of their lives as precarious middle-men moving pounds of marijuana in the midst of America's War on Drugs, where undercover “federalis” with cameras play "gotcha with the zoom.” Here the hyperbolic gestures of “bling bling” toted by coke rap acts like Clipse are altogether avoided, the reasoning that “if the weeds blue"--or high quality--"that you should “keep that to yourself / if you value your health." (Billy Woods, “Drought”).
As another contrast to typical hustler narratives in hip hop, the logic behind the alternative economy of pushing drugs in “Drought” makes direct connections with issues of proletarianization, class mobility and the refusal to subscribe to dead end wage labor jobs. Here the hustler's lifestyle offers a kind of elusive independence from capitalist institutions that can't be found at McDonalds or Sears, but sans the glorified excess associated with the multi-million dollar drug trade:
Dodge City, August 1999, hot than a mugAC broke sweatin the timeWaiting for these drugs, biting my nailsDaydreaming weights and scalesBig sales, fuck retail, yadda yaddaType scheming that'll keep me out of jail, eatin' proper. (Billy Woods, “Drought”)
Think about wage earners, and modern day slave laborI'd rather brush my teeth, with a rusty razorThen front and bullshit, with all you fakersI'm a kind bud breaker - stay quiet, with noise makers. (Priviledge, “Drought”)
On “High Grade,” another track that references marijuana in the title, the Flight Brothers are at their most apathetic, but non-coincidentally at their polemical. Priviledge in the chorus states that he'd rather “Blaze 'til I touch mars and clutch jars / Filled with high grade then race with these cars and trucks." Taken literally, his refusal to drive on highways functions as a protest to the oil-based economies of suburban sprawl in post-WWII America. Figuratively, he takes an apolitical stance towards what he critiques as the pointless rat race of 21st century progress, saving his labor power solely for lighting blunts.
In addition, Billy Woods verses' in "High Grade" offer a scathing critique of the War in Iraq, hollowed/hallowed religious movements, and a negation of the ideological pretenses underlying American nationalism in terms of pro-black politics:
Signed up and now you're pretty much stuckFuck The TroopsAnd sorry if that applies to someone near youBut the day you start following ordersIs the day you become a tool, full court jesterIm not a professor, and this is more of an anecdote than a lectureBut walk with Caeser, you're gonna get burnedIt's like n*ggas will never learnWhite boys been hearing land of the free so longThey can't help but go alongBut black people we know its just a songWe know how they speak right and do wrongYou'd be better off selling crackClosest imma get to Iraq is the hash in this bong.(Billy Woods, “High Grade”)
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In "Guy Fawkes," co-titled "Live from Baidoa, Somalia,” Billy Woods posits the figure of “the foreigner – a non-descript character at first glance / who got everything from callahans to exotic plants” as a kind of corrupted Agamben “whatever singularity” inherent to the functioning of late-capitalism in it's individuated formations. This is in that Woods is able to trace the role of the unassuming “invisible outside investor” present throughout the globalized world that “historically feeds off of, and often helps sustain, war torn areas in selfish quests to profit from death” through various historical instances (Nathaniel Long, Hip Hop Linguistics). These include references to:
- drug lords (“Billy Clint on 153rd and Bahrain”)
- black marketers (“the Chinese counterfeiters”)
- crime syndicates (“Wu Chang, aka the black bird”)
- arms dealers (“once the check clears get you past Mogadishu / warheads for those missiles”)
- African oligarchs (“'Mr. Africa' with perfect penmanship”)
- European fascists (“who passed the poison to Hitler as Berlin was burning”)
- pimps (“Hagar the Horrible got Blondie in the oldest profession”)
- and human traffickers:
Colombian pilots thinking that they hauling bales of Jamaican------
But the hull's full of undocumented Haitians
That's international relations, that's immigration and naturalization
He got aliens patiently waiting at 8-mile to body snatch your white Christ
And in the Congo he sold arms to loyalists and rebels alike
So there's little sympathy for the devil,
But it's never his head on the pike
A rolling stone gathers no moss
And not one of those arraigned could identify the boss. (Billy Woods, “Guy Fawkes”)
For the Flight Brothers, this embellishment of reality is essential to the experience of consumer-based subjectivity in the age of capitalist spectacle, in which there are an overwhelming amount “of fake scenarios for me to get 'round” with enough room to “get down on whichever one sounds the best” (Priviledge, “A Million Little Pieces”).
The brothers transmute this theme of vicarious subjectivity into well executed puns that reference books, television shows, and movies that develop into structured poetic conceits. For instance, Priviledge utilizes the names of television shows to embed a larger tale about growing up in a media-saturated culture:
Just chill for “60 Minutes” cause hindsight is “20/20”
Those were "Good Times" we were having, hmm,
What happened? (I dunno?)
What's happening? "What's Happening Now?"
I guess it's all in the "Family Ties"
At one point "All My Children" were "Young and Restless"
Momma said: “Well it's a fact for sure, you know -
You're about to have your “Worst Week Ever," turning “24”
"Welcome to the Real World," she said methinks
You could either be "Survivor" or diver like Michael Spinks. (Priviledge, “A Million Little Pieces”)
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In “First Blood”, the stoner duo take to serious subject matter that most rappers (let alone most writers) wouldn't touch by putting themselves in the shoes of radical Islamic fundamentalists. Billy Woods delves into the cold-hearted psyche of a rogue sleeper cell plotting various terrorist attacks on first world nations, while Priviledge articulates the experience of a Palestinian turned extremist living on edge in Israeli-occupied territory.
The audio samples (and the song title) taken from Rambo: First Blood accentuate a deep historical sense of karma, in which America “[wants] to deny that we're dealing with an expert in guerrilla warfare,” with the counter point being that “NOTHING IS OVER!” and that “You just don't turn it off” (Rambo: First Blood). The conceptual parallel drawn between these two audio samples is that much like with Rambo, the Vietnam War veteran, it is the United States itself that has sometimes funded and given reason for anti-American extremists to become skilled killing machines in the first place.
An infamous example of this uncanny recursive process at work can be found in the blowback of the C.I.A. sponored Operation Cyclone that took place during 1979-1989, in which “the early foundations of Al-Qaida were built in part on relationships and weaponry that came from the billions of dollars in U.S. support for the Afghan mujaheddin during the war to expel Soviet forces from that country” (Tompaine.com).
The video for “First Blood” consists of a montage sliced together from news reports and live footage of terrorists in action, with the tit-for-tat imagery in the lyrics matching exactly that which is portrayed in the video:
It's the two piece of Tunis
Had to get back hand stamped son,
Curfews in effect in Baltic camp
We Guildenstern and Rosencrantz:
All the world's a stage and my props are
Highly flammable, combustible, materials
Tear gas is a snack
A shank is thanks on the West Bank
His fleeting ambition just sank
With the rest of 'em
Next of kin, had they shack bulldozed
A black flower grows in the sand
Don't pick it - that rose is just a ruse
P.L.O is my witness
Cross another name off the hit list
Kids shit, “My First Martyr” kit
Might hurt a little
But that surgeon in Calandia's
A motherfucking artist--
Sharp as a tack, hard to the point,
Ahead of the jeep
Now Jerusalem streets filled with screams (Priviledge, “First Blood”)
Gimme 4 walls and a ceiling----
2 laptops, 11 believers with no feelings, Insha'Allah;
I'll have Rome reeling
Satellite phones for my dealings
Spotless prayer rugs
Ammonium nitrate in the bathtub
Don't slam 'em doors, four maytags on
Forty nights straight, a true labor of love
Applied Science, Chemistry double major
More pure than hate, colder than anger
Made a timer out a CD changer,
Allah's A-team in blacked out vans
Come together like Hannibal plans
Cannibal Ox is on planes
That won't fly like V8 rockets
Synchronize watches on Madrid's trains
'Fore I rock away payphones, mad change
Suspicious, long distance
Karachi, Pakistan operative assistance
“Demolition Man”: he's walking dead
Staring at the Queensboro strand
Thinking cap on his head... (Billy Woods, “First Blood”)
The latter half of Woods' verse is reminiscent of the symbolic green light at the end of The Great Gatsby, in which “the American dream” is “written in stifling tenements by flicking florescent lights” (Billy Woods, “Slaughterhouse). In the case of the commercial gangsta rapper, “the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us” (Fitzgerald 143) is found in the selfishness of “B.M.W's sitting on the biggest kicks” that represent “every black man's wish personified” (Billy Woods, “Slaughterhouse). For Woods, these empty signifiers represent a distorted dream for the majority of the disenfranchised blacks in the United States, a group which he further as lost “in the dark, searching for that light switch” (Billy Woods, “Slaughterhouse”).
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On Indonesia, Woods tropes on the figure of “the New Negro” who “got his swagger right watching Huey [Newton] hit that pipe” (Billy Woods, “Xanax”), and how the “Pepsi generation” of “Toys-R-Us kids / didn't grow up [but] did bids (Billy Woods, “Gatwick”). Woods expresses similar sentiments in “Drought” about how kids “eyes numb” but how “that same PlayStation thumb can cock a gun,” with the logic being that “if we ain't getting out the slum / then why should you?” (Billy Woods, “Drought”). The most that Woods himself offers to a younger generation in terms of guidance and 'getting over' is found on “To Catch a Thief,” when he states:
My advice: stay in school, hit the books good
And marry that girl already
Option two: bake the pies, stay on the grass,
Tell Mom a few white lies, hit the ground running. (Billy Woods, “To Catch a Thief”)
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The third album in the World Tour series, Cape Verde, offers an introspective view of American life and current events through the conceptual lens of “a day in front of the TV” circa 2010. In an interview with the Village Voice concerning the theme of Cape Verde, Billy Woods states that “if you want to know about America, what better way than TV--that's how most of the world absorbs the idea of America. When I was growing up in Zimbabwe we still had G.I. Joe, Cosby Show, all that...So American TV, to an extent, is universal” (Billy Woods, Village Voice).
This universalizing sentiment associated with American TV is channeled through the intro tracks of “Reggie Miller”, “Golden Grams” and “Strangers With Candy,” which function as contemporary bildungsroman for the 21st century adolescent growing up in a world saturated with pop culture and high-fructose corn syrup.
The title to “Reggie Miller” is a reference to both low-grade marijuana and the 1970's Indiana Pacers shooting guard, functioning in the song as a nostalgic throwback to an time where watching “The Wonder Years” was the norm. Willie Green's signature organ pipes create a sonic space in which the Flight Brothers “juxtapose youthful reflection with the jadedness of old age,” where “it's a fine line between schwag and midgrade / Jail cells and heydays / Classics and stuff that's just old” (Billy Woods, “Reggie Miller”).
What results from the juxtaposition between old and new, as well as memory and souvenir, is the characterization of what Bernard Stiegler might refer to as the opposition between anamnesis and hypomnesis, whereby "we discover that a part of ourselves (like our memory) is outside of us," left in traces of objects that haunt us as living spectres, whether canonized or obsolete.
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The Looney Toons samples at the beginning of “Golden Grams” détournés a seemingly innocent kind of neo-liberal ideology found in American animated cartoon characters, where Rocky and Bulwinkle dream of “[becoming] so rich that [they'll] have to hire people just to count [their] money.” Taken in the subversive context of the song, these samples of Saturday morning cartoons are deterritorialized from their childhood body of virtuosity, transformed and “re-membered” as a seditious form of capitalist propaganda.
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The songs “Jumpstreet,” “Good Country People,” and “B More” come in where “Drought” in Emergency Powers takes off, concerning tales of precarious drug deals sans the hyperbolic glory of gangsta rap era troping. In fact, these songs produce just the opposite effect, by offering an introspective look into the drug dealer's paranoid psychology.
For example, the music video for “B More” contains super-close up shots of Billy Woods hiding in a safe house, where juxtaposed scenes of empty Heineken bottles, platters of cocaine, and mixtapes littered on the floor project the claustrophobic affect of the drug dealer's self-imposed prison.
Billy Woods further tropes on the drug dealer's internalized delusions in “B-More” by utilizing allusions to Edgar Allen Poe, specifically with regard to his most famous poem, “The Raven”:
In addition, "B-More" doubles as slang for the city of Baltimore, Maryland, where the HBO television drama “The Wire” is set. Throughout its 5 season run, “The Wire” reveals “class issues and the social order of contemporary life” in Baltimore through a kaleidoscopic view of the city's larger organizational frameworks, where individuals are forced to “contend with whatever institution they are committed to,” whether it be the illegal drug trade or the city government and bureaucracy (The Wire Wiki). Thus, the song “B More” features prominent samples of audio clips from “The Wire” as a warning against the dangers of hustling drugs in a vicious systemic cycle designed to get you killed, and where the chances for success are slim to none:Once upon a midnight drearyWhile I pondered, weak and wearyThrough bingy curtainsThe movement of serpents lurkingPinch-faced merchantsThey have the last thing you need andAll it costs is everything you have,Only the slave is truly freePut pen to pad, but the truth never comesEmpty out the bag but instead of a boost your numbAnd the raven/raving ain't done,Perched above my chamber door, having his funWings black as a dead son/sun. (Billy Woods, “B More”)
Live the life, lead the life, ain't no big thing -
He used to talk that shit all that time and believed it,
You know what I mean?
See, the thing is, you only got to fuck up once.
Be a little slow, be a little late, just once.
And how you ain't never gonna be slow? Never be late?
(Avon Barksdale, “The Wire”)
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Now really I was giving it to Nancy Grace in the face,
Staring up at her picture frame, and inside,
Was Arianna Huffington with Ann Coulter
Posing like the chicks from that lesbian kiss poster.
(Priviledge, “No Spin Zone”)
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The most solemn subject matter found in Cape Verde picks up where “To Catch A Thief” in Emergency Powers left off. “Wheel of Fortune” and “Travallier” depict an apocalyptic caricature of neo-liberal ideology in the wake of the financial crisis of 2007-2010, where the topography American life has shifted in accordance with the shock waves felt from government bailouts, the failure of banking institutions, and the collapse of the American housing bubble, "where a lot of families got screwed out their nest egg” (Priviledge).
The off-kilter beat produced by Nasa for “Wheel of Fortune” frames the financial crisis through audio samples taken from hysterical game show contestants on “Deal or No Deal,” with the implication being that average wage earning Americans have gone crazy and are ready to take whatever they can get in this time of financial uncertainty. Priviledge articulates a lyrical jigsaw puzzle that juxtaposes Bernie Madoff's billion dollar ponzi scheme to government bailouts, as well as America's precarious ties to the World Bank, just one of many quasi-governmental organizations known for manipulating the financial institutions of entire countries:
Now watch the ticker tape as it falls so fast
Credit to false swap stashed in a burlap sack out back
With a card attached that read
"Thanks for being a friend –
Love, U.S dot gov”
Now send it to the world bank on the hush hush
No muster fuss with us, large with fiddles
You not working get a job, sparkling wiggles*
You know its pretty criminal to leverage a principal
Thirty times over in a ponzi scheme
I've seen it in once in a Fonzie dream sequence
On an old sitcom with a grown up Opie. (Priviledge, “Wheel of Fortune”)
In “Wheel of Fortune” and “Travallier,” Billy Woods takes on various personas that characterize the systematic underpinnings of white collar crime, the dark side to speculative financialization, and America's addiction to predatory late-capitalist logic, even in a time when it seems most prudent to abandon these ideals.
In “Travallier” Billy Woods describes the figure of the globe trotting speculative financier as a “clockwork diplomatic” and the proud owner of a “Howard School of B Georgetown associates degree.” His business is in “strip mining the margins for dollar signs,” and to him the sound of “stock ticker” tape is like “XXX porn,” with his involvement in the “free market” being akin to a “crack” addiction (Billy Woods, “Travallier”). The allusion is fitting, considering that global markets have been spiraling into an addiction for speculative capital since the Bretton Woods system of monetary policy management for industrialized states was dismantled in the 1970's, which simultaneously led to the termination of the U.S. gold standard.
In “Wheel of Fortune,” Billy Woods becomes a mouthpiece for money-making schemes and infomercials that lure the unsuspectingly desperate and fiscally ignorant into further and further debt:
Face foreclosure, it's the eye of the beholderThe musical contrast drawn between "Wheel of Fortune" and "Travallier" is that of the manic-depressive state of late-capitalism, where brief spurts of economic growth only signal the spasmic death throes of a consumer-based system in jeopardy of total collapse.
You see a boarded up duplex I see a copper mine
That's the power of positive thinking
That's the genius from my work from home
Online free money system
The road to perdition is paid with debt consolidation forms:
Arm, leg, and your first born
Midnight marauders, robo-calls from my answering machine
Piña coladas at the Marriott in Wichita Falls for a seminar
Living the dream, crunching the credit
Learn how to make so much money you cant spend it
As seen in USA Today...
Piled up like flap jacks, flipped his house like loose crack
N*gga, Rich Boi just bought a Cadillac
Two bedroom, two baths and hacky sack, black
I'll definitely holler when the SMB* bounce back.
*SMB = Small to Medium Businesses
(Billy Woods, “Wheel of Fortune”)
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Cape Verde ends with a self-referential audio sample alluding to the state of hip hop and the political potential of music in general, in which Pat Robertson, better known as right wing media mogul and owner of the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN), preaches:
"You know, I can't stand some of these churches today and all these rock bands. Even Al Sharpton, the great black leader said, “We are fed up with the filthiness of these songs, and all the vile language they use.” Someone said, “Do you believe there'll be music in hell?” Well, if it is it'll be rock n' roll and rap, and I make no apologies for saying that.
"We've done away with the old hymns of the faith, the old rugged cross, I'd rather have Jesus; what have I to fear, what have I to dread? Nothing, I'm leaning on the ever lasting arms – you cant even get a decent message out in most of today's 'music,' and I'm not afraid to say it.” (Marion Gordon "Pat" Robertson, The 700 Club.)Thankfully for us, rap groups such as the Super Chron Flight Brothers are putting out quality music with a decent message--one which they aren't afraid to say (or sample) either.
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Works Cited
Anonymous. "Super Chron Flight Brothers." Cooleh Magazine. 24 Aug. 2010. Web. 26 Nov. 2010. <http://www.coolehmag.com/frontEnd/booth.php>.
Anonymous. "Cannibal Ox | Definitive Jux Records."Definitive Jux Records. Web. 26 Nov. 2010. <http://www.definitivejux.net/jukies/cannibal-ox>.
Anonymous. "It's Been a Long Time Coming..." Backwoodz Studioz. 2002. Web. 26 Nov. 2010. <http://www.backwoodzstudioz.com/>.
Woods, Billy, Priviledge, Marq Spekt, and Hi-Coup. Emergency Powers: The World Tour. Super Chron Flight Brothers. BOND, 2007. CD.
Woods, Billy, and Priviledge. Indonesia. Super Chron Flight Brothers. Marmaduke, 2009. CD.
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Long, Nathaniel. "Super Chron Flight Brothers "Emergency Powers: The World Tour" Review." Hip hop Linguistic. 11 July 2007. Web. 26 Nov. 2010. <http://www.hiphoplinguistics.com/reviews/albums/2007/07/super-chron-flight-brothers-emergency-rations-the-world-tour>.
Kantor, Matthew. "Reviews: Super Chron Flight Brothers: Emergency Powers -The World Tour." Allhiphop. 4 June 2007. Web. 26 Nov. 2010. <http://allhiphop.com/stories/reviewsmusic/archive/2007/06/04/18136948.aspx>.
Ducker, Jesse. "Fifth Element Online :: Super Chron Flight Brothers-Cape Verde (2010) « Fifth Element Blog." Fifth Element Online :: Home Page. 28 July 2010. Web. 26 Nov. 2010. <http://fifthelementonline.com/blog/super-chron-flight-brothers-cape-verde-2010/>.
Weingarten, Christopher. "Download "Reggie Miller," Super Chron Flight Brothers' Wonder Years-Sampling Stroll Down Rap Nostalgia Lane - New York Music - Sound of the City." The Village Voice Blogs. 3 June 2010. Web. 26 Nov. 2010. <http://blogs.villagevoice.com/music/2010/06/download_reggie.php>.
Anonymous. "Super Chron Flight Brothers | Indonesia." Highsnobiety. 21 Apr. 2009. Web. 26 Nov. 2010. <http://highsnobiety.com/columns/timbrodhagen/2009/04/21/super-chron-flight-brothers-indonesia/>.
Pettman, Dominic. Love and Other Technologies: Retrofitting Eros for the Information Age. New York: Fordham UP, 2006. Print.
Bahn, Jimmy. "YouTube - First Blood Terrorist." YouTube - Broadcast Yourself. 6 Mar. 2008. Web. 26 Nov. 2010. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIRIT3pWGo0>.
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Tim Boyd, “Oprah Freaks Out Over A Category” January 26, 2006 via Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution.
Ukhomeoffice, “Cannabis plants in box” September 13, 2010 via Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution.
Jon Feinstein, “grillz” February 1, 2009 via Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution.
Hdptcar, “Demobilize child soldiers in the Central African Republic” June 20, 2007 via Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution.
Daniel Horacio Agostini, “Kicking Television” January 19, 2006. via Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution.
Theleetgeeks, “Bill O’reilly Goes Crazy on The Set of Inside Edition” May 13, 2008 via Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution.
Nationaal Archief, “Cleaner sweeping the floor after Wall Street crash, 1929” January 20, 2011 via Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution.
Photo Credits
Lotte Grønkjær, “The World Tour” May 21, 2008 via Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution.
Lotte Grønkjær, “The World Tour” May 21, 2008 via Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution.
Tim Boyd, “Oprah Freaks Out Over A Category” January 26, 2006 via Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution.
Ukhomeoffice, “Cannabis plants in box” September 13, 2010 via Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution.
Jon Feinstein, “grillz” February 1, 2009 via Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution.
Hdptcar, “Demobilize child soldiers in the Central African Republic” June 20, 2007 via Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution.
Daniel Horacio Agostini, “Kicking Television” January 19, 2006. via Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution.
Theleetgeeks, “Bill O’reilly Goes Crazy on The Set of Inside Edition” May 13, 2008 via Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution.
Nationaal Archief, “Cleaner sweeping the floor after Wall Street crash, 1929” January 20, 2011 via Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution.
