Review: C.H.I.P.$. – Couch Potato
C.H.I.P.$. – Couch Potato (2011) [Self-Released] // Grade: B+
C.H.I.P.$. is for real. These are some dope raps bein kicked by a dude who likes to have a good time. Plain and simple. He has a good ear for beats, and while he’s not constantly going in, he’s making solid tunes the whole time and he goes in enough that the record bangs consistently, and it’s worth listening to the whole of Couch Potato more than once. Rap has become pretty quizzical. Whereas it used to just be a few different really broad strokes when it comes to rendering an identity, we’re all about dynamic gradations these days. Rap identities are much more robust. You can’t just say oh C.H.I.P.$. is this, or C.H.I.P.$. is that. It would take a little more “this and this too”-ing. He goes from talking about shooting guns, to Porsche models, to children’s sitcom titles, to weed, and further, and further. It’s rap, I mean when rap is just about being a master of words, and having nothing to say but saying it. Inevitably the raps wind up being about everything. And of course some songs have a more thematic approach — like “Throwin a Party”— but in general C.H.I.P.$. takes the best part about being a dope rapper — kicking dope raps — and leaves it at that.
It would seem that there has always been a kind of John Wayne-like fascination with The Rapper. I say “The Rapper” and not rappers because I’m speaking to the kind of archetypal stand-in that our society has created; the sum of symbols, signs, and signifiers that rappers represent; the character(s) that rappers are expected to play in the tales of our age. Historically, the rapper as artist has never been a very interesting point of conversation. Most folks gloss over the musical efforts of this particular brand of artist, and instead opt to examine the novelty of the rapper. They ponder over how a rapper is like a little fetish or trinket that can stand in safely for the reviled and unsafe places from which they come, and of which they speak — The Rapper is the polar bear at the zoo, only with the agency of language, the delusion of grandiloquence, and the illusion of freedom in a cage as big as the media’s attention will allow. That was how rappers functioned. For the most part at least, and certainly almost explicitly within pop culture. But at some point within the last 3 or 4 years a shift began to take place, and as that shift has carried further its fruits have been varied, and likewise surprising. The Rapper is dissipating and as a society we have instead begun to focus on the artistic merit of these rapping individuals rather than focus on how their identities as Rappers serve to re-iterate cultural stigmas and stereotypes. That’s why you so rarely hear folks talk about a rapper’s musical feats, yet a rapper’s “message” or “image” is a frequent topic of conversation when it comes to their music. So, that is the lengthy but necessary explanation to preface the fact the C.H.I.P.$. is someone I see as part of an emerging wave that is demonstrating other ways of being a rapper. Ways that, while relying on many familiar tropes, present us with an approach that is slightly, but significantly different.
The thing about rapping and identity is, it’s always a tricky balance. You’re always going back and forth between being human and humble, and being a rapper and glorious. I think that balance is what lends it a great deal of its emotional capacity, because it’s the manifestation of a person struggling between two extremes that define us as humans. “I’m just like you” vs. “Ain’t nobody ill as me”. We seek to commune with others, but we also seek to define ourselves through our excellence. One way that this can come out is very obviously through blatant expository rapping, and another is to let it manifest through the graces of style, and the seductive capacity of art. The latter is an emerging approach, and one that C.H.I.P.$. represents well. He also does a good job of balancing it against the former. While C.H.I.P.$. certainly creates sophisticated art, it is complimented by the gradient of his sensibility alternating between casual chill jokin’ dude and dude on the grind with the heater and the shooters. So this is to say that C.H.I.P.$. answers the predictable beckoning of The Rapper with an artful response that is one part eat a dick, and one part Kurt Schwitters: carefully constructed works rendered in terms that are marked by daily life.
Depending on what you bring to this release it’s unlikely that C.H.I.P.$. is gonna blow your mind. But, that is becoming less and less of a trait of the music of our times. These days it seems to be way more about consistently releasing quality material. People don’t wanna wait years to see you climb a mountain. They wanna see you runnin’ cross country 24/7. That’s where we’re at. And while C.H.I.P.$. definitely has some ACGs and some mountain climbing gear in the trunk, he’s on the grind daily in some air maxes, just rollin like Kraftwerk at a hypnotic pace. So, I’m gonna be anticipating his next release because this is definitely the kind of music that I’m trying to have at arms’ reach. Stay on it holmes.
- Zachg
