The Butcher Boys

Everyone deserves a chance to create a mirror they can look into and feel proud, even within the marsh of indigestible commercial junk dispensed by the entertainment industry.

The conveyor- belt culture of producing be it music or film, let alone literature, leaves no artist exempt from the innate sacrifice of passionate ambition that is being canonised.

Repackaging human desires has always been a major economic commodity for the 21st century’s industrial civilization and this trend we should have expected to be pervasive at all levels of human interaction, communication and social constructs. And the resultant hostage mentality is what most artists are confronting through their expression, and Orion Quest and Aak.da.GOD have taken the calling to an esoteric paradigm.

Through Hip Hop, most young South Africans have found an affiliate mode of expressing protest, and this outlet is gaining prominence which should qualify a professional analysis as a barometer of social temperance.

The new Hip Hop says: “The young are disenfranchised, under-resourced and angry and it is MC's who have taken the responsibility of being social commentators, in a language of youth, aimed at highlighting the plight of the youth who are the future of a nation.”

In the new South Africa, this militant trans-galactic vibe laced with apocalyptic rhymes is beckoning the youth to build political movements through the hip-hop musical culture.

Ok, subcultural categorizations that might include the Militant urban commando and Conscious Rapper seem fitting when a Hip Hop Crew transitions what today’s hip hop is usually associated with - a lifestyle full of glamour, money, women, violence, drugs, and sex. What once originated as a medium of expression has now become a catalyst for capitalistic gratification; the hip hop movement has objectified women in general and turned wealth, over-flashy jewellery, and cars into must have commodities for social acceptance.

One separating element of their craft is the depth of the musicality and skill weaved into multi-layered beats, laced with potent lyrics from a sound intellectual activist tradition.

Superimposed narratives that do not aspire to exist independent of the lyrics while remaining capable of standing alone as instrumentals of note, are what sets aside the crew’s signature style as refreshing and unique. 
 

The Reckoning

The first single to be released independently from the soon to hit the streets debut album is a truly macabre track, a monotonous voice renders a monologue about darkness, something to the effect that “I see more now in the dark, than what I have felt in the light.”

And I will still search for that hauntingly sombre monologue for sure.

When the beat begins, a prologue to disaster unfolds with cinematic lucidity.

A skit voices waging inner battles suddenly prepares for lyrical moans, bass tones gurgled with ghostly samples in the rear of a battle zone start making you want to start stomping.

A melody that suddenly implodes is the vehicle upon which the cynical lyricism of Orion Quest travels, while simultaneously teleporting the listener to paranormal landscapes of nightmares of a foreseeable future.

Metaphorical implications of the streets as dangerous as real combat take precedence in their rhymes, which compels me to ask who are the real enemies of man in contemporary realities?

It thus appears that these anomalous characters that pen responses and rhymes aren’t mere puppet for pickpocketing the masses of the senses, but serve to elevate the knowledge content leveraged by seasoned delivery into the SA Hip Scene.

Bleeding Skies
Inglorious Basterds