Thank God For Drugs And Drums: El-P Revisits His Solo Debut

In May 2002, El-P delivered his first solo album, Fantastic Damage, to a world toppling over the edge. Pre-millennium tension had given way to new-millennium dread, and the brash New York rapper and producer was here to assure listeners that all their worst fears were legit. The onslaught begins on the opening track, as a distorted vocal sample from 1970s schmaltzster Peter Skellern transforms from an earnest pledge of love into a warning:

So onto the empty streets we go
And it might be my last chance with you
So I might as well get it over with
The things I have to say won't wait until another day

Born Jaime Meline, El-P had made a name for himself as part of Company Flow, a group of verbose misanthropes known for bombing tracks as though they were vandalized subway trains covered in end-to-end burners. The trio's 1996 album Funcrusher Plus made it the flagship act of Rawkus Records, one of the key sources of independent hip-hop in the mid-'90s when labels like Bad Boy and So So Def were embracing the most populist possibilities of the genre. Near the end of that decade, El-P and his manager Amaechi Uzoigwe founded their own label, Definitive Jux, and began planning to release Company Flow's second LP themselves. But before they could, the group broke up — and the dark energy of the scrapped album tentatively titled The Pain Cave was instead channeled into El-P's solo breakout.

submits that the foretold dystopia is already here, calling out "merchants of blood" and "the eerie malevolence of commerce" as parts of daily life. But it also looks inward, cataloging personal moments that shaped its creator's grim outlook. "" recalls his childhood in," a confessional about the physically abusive alcoholic his mother married after his parents' divorce, "" goes a level deeper, envisioning his trauma as an institutionalized product sold to an entire generation of families.