“I be on those chemicals…
She be on my testicles…
Poke her with my tentacle…
Then put her on my schedule…”
I’m a lazy fuck who hasn’t listened to anything but “Really Doe”, a brand new track from Detroit emcee Danny Brown featuring Ab-Soul, Kendrick Lamar, and Earl Sweatshirt, all day long. So this week’s Monday Magick is gonna be more like Monday Rap Shit and decidedly on the quick and messy side.
How can I justify featuring a brand new Rap tune as part of Monday Magick? Well, based on some of the rhymes dropped during the joint’s five-plus minutes it just so happens that Danny and his collaborators seem to have written this song just for me and my particularly magickal musical mindset!
First there’s the bit quoted above where Danny Brown, in the midst of a series of lines alluding to sex and drugs which references psychedelic chemicals and Lovecraftian tentacles. It should be pretty obvious to anybody who’s followed my writing for any length of time to determine I have a bit of a fetish for tentacles. And no, this isn’t just the typical Hentai-influenced tentancle-porn fetish. It’s that too. But it’s also inspired by the creatures that play such a big role in H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos. And even more so an actual “religious” experience I once had that involved decidedly Lovecraftian creatures full of eyes and tentacles that were a product of a melange of Kabbalist meditation and Typhonian Magick. To put it plainly Cthulhu is my “spirit animal” and I find tentacles to be sexy as fuck. And apparently a certain drug-addled rapper with a high pitched voice can relate to that and has taken to referring to his genitals as such.
“Still wicked as Aleister…
Crowley n****z know me well…
For heaven’s sake I’m the GOAT…
You haters can go to Hell…”
Second, Ab-Soul, the psychonaut of the Top Dawg Records/Black Hippy posse, opens his verse with a shoutout to none other than The Great Beast, To Mega Therion, The Wickedest Man Alive, Aleister Crowley! That it comes alongside an allusion to Baphomet, the goat-headed hermaphroditic idol of the Knights Templar and patron of this very website, which also happened to be one of Crowley’s aliases, just makes it that much better! I’ve paid my respects to The Prophet of The New Aeon countless times in this space, but a name-drop of the O.T.O. leader and founder of Thelema from a relatively mainstream Hip-Hop artist is something that doesn’t happen every day and just couldn’t go unnoticed or uncelebrated by me, or this column.
The rest of the record features a mixture of the standard Rap braggadocio, touching on the subjects of sex, drugs, money, technical acumen, success, and the lack of competition rival rappers pose to the featured performers, over a thunderous drum-break, a repetitive bass bump, various screeches, a sound like the chanting of Tuvan throat singers, and assorted chimes. Is there anything deeper to all the references to transgressive sexuality than Rap clichés? I’d normally say “nah, son”. But with tentacles and the world’s most famous purveyor of Sex Magick making an appearance I kinda have to wonder.
“Really Doe” is from Danny Brown’s forthcoming fourth LP ‘Atrocity Exhibition’, which is due out September 30th via celebrated Electronica label Warp Records.
Music is magick!
