Here's a healthy helping of post-everything experimental drug-infused rap courtesy of XXX CLVR – he's from Halifax, Canada, and is part of collective, Weirdo Click. The track is called 'Make Me'.
Based on a foundation of looped fragments of a remix of a Shlohmo song – all sub-bass and unintelligible, monstrously FX'd vocals – it's an odyssey of sound, like sailing through a pitch-black cavern to who-knows-where; the soundtrack to slowly being ferried down the River Styx, filled with aching regretful spirits, to Acheron, the swampy lake of fathomless depth, and across its waters like sludge, a deep purple colour, infested with bad thoughts and vileness.
Here, XXX CLVR becomes the mythical ferryman himself, Charon, as he whispers a stream of consciousness into your ear. "Make me… the most hated…" he whispers as a refrain, weed smoke encircling his head as it pours from his lips.
Full of seemingly mundane references – Ed Hardy seat covers ("one of my exes… we used to take road trips everywhere," he reveals, a girl flying in from Cleveland, remembering ex's tattoos – the track is personal for the artist himself; a disconnected list of observations and thoughts much like Beat poetry but in super-slow motion.
"I tried to appreciate some of the more ugly aspects of my life. Make Me is sort of like, a dark social climbers' theme song" XXX CLVR tells me. "Also around where I'm at right now everyone all friendly and shit wanna be the most liked by everyone like its high school and shit so I was just like fuck it y'all might as well make me most hated bc im tryna be as far away from y'all as possible just doing my own thing working on myself as a person."
He concludes: "I'm a terrible person right now. Working on it."
The rise against ingratiating oneself to appear to fit in more, pleasing others to become accepted, comes across in the song – the imagery in XXX CLVR's outpouring sometimes verges on disturbing – "put the drugs in my neck," he states bluntly – but is mainly confessional, sharing dark and flashing yet everyday vignettes of his life thus far: "Every other week delete numbers" — "Nike tech fleece at ur funeral / Shit was beautiful / Brutal but it's just the usual." Smoke inhalations and lighters skritch-skritching accompany the slurred words.
Like I said, it floats around on the borders of the Underworld, but dissuades itself from inching closer to the jaws of hell themselves, displaying artistic restraint, and matching the minimalist instrumental produced by Aux Jennings, the sparse use of words, the verses dotting through the darkness like burning torches in a nocturnal world.
- 'Make Me' is taken from an upcoming EP, Vxntxblxck, released 27th February via South African music/creative entity, YOH.
