Track by track with El-P
Fantastic Damage
“This started off as a remix for a Rawkus [Records] compilation. And they couldn’t handle it. They were like, ‘It’s too much’. So, I was like, ‘You know what? It ain’t too much for me, guys. This is where I’m headed’.
“The beat was all over the place. It is literally not sequenced. It’s just me playing the whole thing out with different chops on the EPS-16 Plus [sampler]. I thought it was nasty! I was like, ‘This shit is fucking raw!’ It’s a screaming intro. It’s kicking the door open.”
Squeegee Man Shooting
“This was based on this old newspaper article in New York. The title was the headline. It always stuck with me: somebody shot one of those guys that tries to clean your car windows and asks for money. It felt like New York; my childhood. It brought back memories.
“This was the first record that I was making under my own name. I needed it to be a documentation of who I was. I needed to
