When Malik Ameer sent me his hand-pressed CDR album ‘The Nightmare’ a decade and a half ago I had no inkling I’d still be talking about his music this many years on. But it’s a testament to his natural talent and growth as both a person and an artist over the years that I’ve still got nothing but positive things to say about the man and his music.
With “Subterranean Sutra: God before zeus.” Malik joins the ranks of Shabazz Palaces, Jeremiah Jae, Run the Jewels and a handful of others making Rap music so real it could’ve come from the “true-school”, but so modern as to seem “futuristic”. The beat pounds, blanketed in dissonant synths, as Ameer authoritatively barks out clues to finding the ultimate solution to the worldly problems he once enumerated so powerfully on his earlier output, surrounded by sampled tribal chants and hand-drumming. The result is something that feels timeless, like it could’ve blasted from boombox speakers in ’89 or might be beamed from a spaceship by aliens centuries from now. I would have listened to this, and pored over the slivers of science embedded in the lyrics, when I was 12. The fact that I dig it just as much now at 36 says a lot.
Close to 20 years deep in this Rap game, Malik Ameer is putting out that next level, raw, conscious Hip-Hop shit for 2014 and beyond.
