http://www.theguardian.com/music/mu...eroes-canibus-madcap-artistry-a-hip-hop-great
Cult heroes: Canibus's madcap artistry makes him one of hip-hop's greats
Canibus has more of a reputation for what happens off-mic than on it – and that’s unfair, because he’s a genuis with a monastic devotion to rap
The biggest hip-hop star the world has ever known. In an alternate universe … Canibus.
Photograph: Johnny Nunez/WireImage
Angus Batey
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If you’re one of the bewilderingly small number of hip-hop fans around the globe who realise that Canibus is one of the greatest rappers of all time, you’ll be no stranger to concepts of alternate realities and parallel universes – that’s the sort of stuff he enthusiastically ladles into his dazzlingly eccentric verses, alongside references to advanced weaponry, ancient civilisations and whimsical musings on why he’s not more widely respected as an MC. And you’ll probably be at least willing to imagine that in another one of the infinite number of worlds very like our own that quantum physics suggests may exist, the artist born Germaine Williams is the biggest star hip-hop has ever known.
By the time he released his solo debut in 1998, Canibus was revered as a formidable freestyle battle rapper with both a voice and lyrics that were destined to have him stand out from the pack. That first album didn’t do badly – it sold half a million copies, and got him props and press around the globe – but the blue touchpaper never quite caught fire. Canibus has rapped about how aliens might be related to dolphins (Channel Zero), how space travellers who’ve crossed the galaxy will return to save us from man-made global warming (Secrets Amongst Cosmonauts); he chucks one-liners about Faraday Cages and SERE training into the kind of songs that aren’t afraid to rhyme “ganglia” with “East Anglia”. He can namecheck Bob Dylan and Rakim in the same stanza and not sound like he’s taking the names of the greats in vain. It’s the kind of manic inventiveness and madcap artistry that makes real hip-hop fiends’ hearts beat faster – all the things non-rap fans say they dig about Lil’ Wayne, but without so many non-sequiturs and caveats. It’s not the sort of stuff you get on a trap mixtape.
Today, those who vaguely remember Canibus probably recall his feud with LL Cool J – a misunderstanding that escalated into one of hip-hop’s most entertaining on-wax wars of words, roping in, over time, Wyclef Jean, Mike Tyson and Naomi Campbell (but will probably be unaware that the beef was ended, suddenly and surprisingly, just before Christmas, when Cool J brought Canibus on stage during a Brooklyn gig). They may also remember the oft-voiced refrain that Williams hasn’t seemed to acquire the knack of picking his beats very well, and that however good he was as a writer or vocalist, he never found his perfect production partner. Anyone prompted to look him up on Wikipedia will be confronted with a seemingly endless saga of social-media disgruntlement, bad business decisions, labels that mysteriously release records years too late and against their maker’s wishes – but no serious discussion of his manifold and obvious talents. There’s more space devoted to an embarrassing incident in an online pay-per-view rap battle in 2012 – in which Canibus’s reputation for freestyling was shredded when he produced a notebook and started reading material he’d prepared earlier – than to any one of his 14 albums.
Canibus – Bis Vs Rip
That is beyond unfortunate – it’s also desperately unfair. Few artists in any genre have displayed the depth of commitment and the work ethic Canibus puts in to his records, only for the response to appear to obey an inverse curve, with each extra ounce of effort losing him three or four more listeners. Part of his problem may be just how far ahead of everyone else he’s often been, coupled with his tendency to point this out to the people he’s leaving in his wake. “I’m through givin’ advice, I just give concern,” he once rapped, “and try to rebuild all the bridges I’ve burned.” It didn’t work: years later another track found him musing, with commendable and uncommon honesty, “I’m a fool and I got no friends.” Why would that be?
Canibus – The Masterpiece Collection
On every record there are things to cherish, things to stand and applaud, ideas to challenge the ways you think about art, language, culture. On the 2002 track Master Thesis he dives into what is not so much a stream as a cascading cataract of consciousness, emerging with a freeform narrative in which he gets a call from Buckminster Fuller, who “said he had a contract to rebuild Rome / said he didn’t want to do it alone / I told him I was busy writin’ poems but I’d think about goin’”. On the song Brainwash Reversal – another rapper’s track he was merely guesting on, but which, when issued in remix form with only his verse intact, is still longer than most rappers’ hits – he comes out with an inspired slice of freeform gibberish, peppered with references to rappers and pop stars and name-dropping one of his own and a classic Public Enemy album, all held together by its own momentum so that the clashing series of images make this weird kind of … well, it’s not quite sense, but it’s something analogous:
Fear of a Black Planet, you panic, you crash landed
You stranded – Canibus on the back of a woolly mammoth
Melatonin Magik mechanics, 10,000 commandments
Metaphors in the form of cuneiform and Sanskrit
Click your heels, kid, you ain’t from Kansas
You talk a lot of shyt and we want some answers
Oh, you are from Kansas! I’ll spank your antlers
Like Marilyn Manson in a band with Hanson
Going camping with Jack o’ lanterns, rap flow phantom
The handsome ghost of Wacko Jacko dancing …”
You wonder whether Williams imbibed style, swagger and indomitable self-confidence in the womb. Certainly, his family offered an unfortunately indelible lesson that talent is not always sufficient. His dad, Basil Williams, was a good enough cricketer not only to have played test matches for the West Indies, but to score a century on his debut against Australia, yet he came along at a time when the riches the Caribbean could boast in batting talent meant his window of opportunity was quickly closed. If we’re looking for an echo or a sense of predestination, it’s there – but it’s also a different situation: Canibus has been elbowed out of his starting berth in the hip-hop Greatest XI to make way for demonstrably and considerably lesser talents.
There are artists with Grammy awards, platinum sales and mansions in affluent suburbs bought with money made from rap who aren’t fit to lace Williams’ boots – and who know it. A rap fundamentalist, an obsessive in perpetual search of lyrical perfection, Canibus has more bright ideas before breakfast than other MCs manage to eke careers out of. If riches accrued to those with the most innovative concepts, cleverest lines and most monastic dedication to the art of rap, Williams would annually be grossing the GDP of a decent-sized country. Instead, he’s putting out albums every couple of years that are bought by 15,000 diehard fans and existing outside a mainstream that seems all too eager not to have to deal with fans demanding enough to know they deserve better from their hip-hop icons.
Canibus – Second Round KO
Amazingly – humblingly, inspirationally – he’s still not given up. A new album, Fait Accompli, was released last July, and the rapprochement with LL has suddenly seen his name being bandied about the hip-hop community with a renewed sense of interest. Perhaps a bright new dawn may be about to break. Album No 15 – philosophically yet optimistically titled Time Flies, Life Dies ... Phoenix Rise – was promised for March. Or maybe April. Now it’s due on 12 May. There’ll probably be another calamity before it arrives, and doubtless after it does there’ll be plenty of cynics who can’t be bothered to listen who chirp up with their online snark, deriding his complexities and criticising him for using long words, their critiques the rap-fan equivalent of “TLDR”, merely marking them out as lazy and ignorant. But those of us who haven’t given up hope will be willing to wait just as long as it takes, ready to take another journey into the parallel universe where Canibus sits enthroned as pop’s undisputed lyrical heavyweight champion.
Cult heroes: Canibus's madcap artistry makes him one of hip-hop's greats
Canibus has more of a reputation for what happens off-mic than on it – and that’s unfair, because he’s a genuis with a monastic devotion to rap
The biggest hip-hop star the world has ever known. In an alternate universe … Canibus.
Photograph: Johnny Nunez/WireImage
Angus Batey
Shares
1,304
1304
Comments
9
If you’re one of the bewilderingly small number of hip-hop fans around the globe who realise that Canibus is one of the greatest rappers of all time, you’ll be no stranger to concepts of alternate realities and parallel universes – that’s the sort of stuff he enthusiastically ladles into his dazzlingly eccentric verses, alongside references to advanced weaponry, ancient civilisations and whimsical musings on why he’s not more widely respected as an MC. And you’ll probably be at least willing to imagine that in another one of the infinite number of worlds very like our own that quantum physics suggests may exist, the artist born Germaine Williams is the biggest star hip-hop has ever known.
By the time he released his solo debut in 1998, Canibus was revered as a formidable freestyle battle rapper with both a voice and lyrics that were destined to have him stand out from the pack. That first album didn’t do badly – it sold half a million copies, and got him props and press around the globe – but the blue touchpaper never quite caught fire. Canibus has rapped about how aliens might be related to dolphins (Channel Zero), how space travellers who’ve crossed the galaxy will return to save us from man-made global warming (Secrets Amongst Cosmonauts); he chucks one-liners about Faraday Cages and SERE training into the kind of songs that aren’t afraid to rhyme “ganglia” with “East Anglia”. He can namecheck Bob Dylan and Rakim in the same stanza and not sound like he’s taking the names of the greats in vain. It’s the kind of manic inventiveness and madcap artistry that makes real hip-hop fiends’ hearts beat faster – all the things non-rap fans say they dig about Lil’ Wayne, but without so many non-sequiturs and caveats. It’s not the sort of stuff you get on a trap mixtape.
Today, those who vaguely remember Canibus probably recall his feud with LL Cool J – a misunderstanding that escalated into one of hip-hop’s most entertaining on-wax wars of words, roping in, over time, Wyclef Jean, Mike Tyson and Naomi Campbell (but will probably be unaware that the beef was ended, suddenly and surprisingly, just before Christmas, when Cool J brought Canibus on stage during a Brooklyn gig). They may also remember the oft-voiced refrain that Williams hasn’t seemed to acquire the knack of picking his beats very well, and that however good he was as a writer or vocalist, he never found his perfect production partner. Anyone prompted to look him up on Wikipedia will be confronted with a seemingly endless saga of social-media disgruntlement, bad business decisions, labels that mysteriously release records years too late and against their maker’s wishes – but no serious discussion of his manifold and obvious talents. There’s more space devoted to an embarrassing incident in an online pay-per-view rap battle in 2012 – in which Canibus’s reputation for freestyling was shredded when he produced a notebook and started reading material he’d prepared earlier – than to any one of his 14 albums.
Canibus – Bis Vs Rip
That is beyond unfortunate – it’s also desperately unfair. Few artists in any genre have displayed the depth of commitment and the work ethic Canibus puts in to his records, only for the response to appear to obey an inverse curve, with each extra ounce of effort losing him three or four more listeners. Part of his problem may be just how far ahead of everyone else he’s often been, coupled with his tendency to point this out to the people he’s leaving in his wake. “I’m through givin’ advice, I just give concern,” he once rapped, “and try to rebuild all the bridges I’ve burned.” It didn’t work: years later another track found him musing, with commendable and uncommon honesty, “I’m a fool and I got no friends.” Why would that be?
Canibus – The Masterpiece Collection
On every record there are things to cherish, things to stand and applaud, ideas to challenge the ways you think about art, language, culture. On the 2002 track Master Thesis he dives into what is not so much a stream as a cascading cataract of consciousness, emerging with a freeform narrative in which he gets a call from Buckminster Fuller, who “said he had a contract to rebuild Rome / said he didn’t want to do it alone / I told him I was busy writin’ poems but I’d think about goin’”. On the song Brainwash Reversal – another rapper’s track he was merely guesting on, but which, when issued in remix form with only his verse intact, is still longer than most rappers’ hits – he comes out with an inspired slice of freeform gibberish, peppered with references to rappers and pop stars and name-dropping one of his own and a classic Public Enemy album, all held together by its own momentum so that the clashing series of images make this weird kind of … well, it’s not quite sense, but it’s something analogous:
Fear of a Black Planet, you panic, you crash landed
You stranded – Canibus on the back of a woolly mammoth
Melatonin Magik mechanics, 10,000 commandments
Metaphors in the form of cuneiform and Sanskrit
Click your heels, kid, you ain’t from Kansas
You talk a lot of shyt and we want some answers
Oh, you are from Kansas! I’ll spank your antlers
Like Marilyn Manson in a band with Hanson
Going camping with Jack o’ lanterns, rap flow phantom
The handsome ghost of Wacko Jacko dancing …”
You wonder whether Williams imbibed style, swagger and indomitable self-confidence in the womb. Certainly, his family offered an unfortunately indelible lesson that talent is not always sufficient. His dad, Basil Williams, was a good enough cricketer not only to have played test matches for the West Indies, but to score a century on his debut against Australia, yet he came along at a time when the riches the Caribbean could boast in batting talent meant his window of opportunity was quickly closed. If we’re looking for an echo or a sense of predestination, it’s there – but it’s also a different situation: Canibus has been elbowed out of his starting berth in the hip-hop Greatest XI to make way for demonstrably and considerably lesser talents.
There are artists with Grammy awards, platinum sales and mansions in affluent suburbs bought with money made from rap who aren’t fit to lace Williams’ boots – and who know it. A rap fundamentalist, an obsessive in perpetual search of lyrical perfection, Canibus has more bright ideas before breakfast than other MCs manage to eke careers out of. If riches accrued to those with the most innovative concepts, cleverest lines and most monastic dedication to the art of rap, Williams would annually be grossing the GDP of a decent-sized country. Instead, he’s putting out albums every couple of years that are bought by 15,000 diehard fans and existing outside a mainstream that seems all too eager not to have to deal with fans demanding enough to know they deserve better from their hip-hop icons.
Canibus – Second Round KO
Amazingly – humblingly, inspirationally – he’s still not given up. A new album, Fait Accompli, was released last July, and the rapprochement with LL has suddenly seen his name being bandied about the hip-hop community with a renewed sense of interest. Perhaps a bright new dawn may be about to break. Album No 15 – philosophically yet optimistically titled Time Flies, Life Dies ... Phoenix Rise – was promised for March. Or maybe April. Now it’s due on 12 May. There’ll probably be another calamity before it arrives, and doubtless after it does there’ll be plenty of cynics who can’t be bothered to listen who chirp up with their online snark, deriding his complexities and criticising him for using long words, their critiques the rap-fan equivalent of “TLDR”, merely marking them out as lazy and ignorant. But those of us who haven’t given up hope will be willing to wait just as long as it takes, ready to take another journey into the parallel universe where Canibus sits enthroned as pop’s undisputed lyrical heavyweight champion.
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