![]() There’s no attention being given, no questions being asked, no one having these conversations. To keep people super-stupid and ignorant. Music that chooses to promote the opposite has been all but excommunicated from the broad church of hip-hop, he says. ![]() And now, not only is there no literacy in the music but in the vocal content as well, everything is pushing this death agenda. The literacy showed in the content, in what was being said. We weren’t stupid, we were educated, and the education showed. They’re missing an arm and they’re still moving.”īack in the day, he says, MCs weren’t admired for what they represented – their personas – as much as how they represented the culture: “Even a cat who I love, Kool G Rap, I don’t love him because he’s one of the original street gangster MCs, or a drug dealer narrator, but because he had a language, his own language. They’re just pretty much walking zombies, minus the gore. “We’re host to something and that something, I would say, is the group mind, the group consciousness that’s taking people out. ![]() He sees a population of Manchurian candidates brainwashed to be in thrall to a culture that is slowly killing them. The way Divine sees it, the populace no longer need prisons to incarcerate and institutionalise them. ![]() “It’s based on my reality,” he says, meaning the reality of living in present-day Los Angeles and the personalities and the culture he experiences and interacts with on a daily basis.ĭef Mask posits a scenario similar to Philip K Dick’s Black Iron Prison, an unseen construct that “everyone dwelt in without realising it”. Although it’s not in any way intended as such, Def Mask could be seen as a state of the nation address because, like all the best science fiction, the album is inspired by and rooted in the here and now. He returned to the genre in part because he felt a need to articulate a response to what he saw around him. “Why is there no relationship between Bobby Schmurda and Chuck D? Or Chief Keef and KRS-One? That’s what we’re missing.” “It would be sacrilegious for Hendrix not to know who Muddy Waters is,” he says. Divine believes part of the problem is that the chain connecting elders and youngers, although just four generations deep, has been severed so that the old school no longer informs the new. A music that was once as much a commentary on itself as well as the world it emerged from seemed to have become entirely lacking in self-reflection and self-awareness. He felt uncomfortable in the negative space mainstream hip-hop had carved out for itself. It turns out there is a relatively simple explanation for the long absence. However, for someone so shrouded in mystery, the figure who sits – unmasked, it should be noted – in an upstairs room of The Seventh Letter, a street art gallery and store in Hollywood, is remarkably open and gregarious, and keen to elaborate on his history and his return to hip-hop. According to the blurb accompanying the album, the Def Mask of the title “keeps others at distance and creates a barrier between the wearer and the multiple realms of psychic pollutants” a concept that certainly seems in keeping with Divine Styler’s reputation as rap’s recluse. His fourth album, Def Mask, a tour de force of hardcore beats and futuristic electronic production wrapped around dystopian science fiction, is released next week, 14 years after his last. He’s clearly reverential to the art form, yet he chooses to blaze his own trail rather than waste energy seeking acceptance or contextualisation.” DJ Shadow, who collaborated with Divine Styler on the 1999 single Divine Intervention, and describes himself as a longtime fan considers him “an anomaly within rap.
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