Going Left is a monthly column that highlights exceptional work from indie hip-hop acts. Read last month’s inaugural column here.
Hip-hop’s most adored works come from artists who turn their life experiences and perspectives into immersive environments. For rapper Fatboi Sharif and rapper-producer Lungs//LoneSword, their new project Cyber City Society is a frayed pasture of digital dystopia, where tumult looms around crumbling corners and “the PCP weather forecasted in a hazmat suit,” as Fatboi rapped on album closer “Adolescence.”
Fatboi’s abstract lyricism finds a symbiotic home with Lungs’ pitch-shifted, eerie loops over the course of six tracks. After the first song, the soundscape goes drumless, likely because the suspense of records like “Encrypted” and “Acird Rain” already had listeners’ heart pounding enough. Fatboi excels at reeling off jolting couplets that seem like nonsequitur observations at first, but collectively compile a portrait of a fictional world of tumult. Or is it mere fiction? Most good horrors and thrillers reflect real life elements that are exaggerated for effect. The two artists sought to use their hyperbole to offer commentary on paranoia, drug abuse, unemployment, and as Fatboi says, “society losing its feeling as a whole.”
Both artists tell Complex that the netherworld they created was a reaction to the chaos of life in 2020. Lungs says the first two beats he made, “Acid Rain” and “Monster Theme,” were expressions of the “hell of the initial quarantine.” He was living near Brooklyn’s Maimonides Medical Center, which was so overrun by COVID deaths that he “could see the body trucks” from his window. As Lungs reflects, “it went from that to fighting the cops” during worldwide uprisings after the police killings of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd.
Fatboi says it was initially difficult for him to get inspired during quarantine because he couldn’t be around people, and he was processing many of the same things that Lungs was. “The first year and a half [of quarantine] was, we all got to be scared of everything because of what’s going on in the world,” he says. “We can’t be around nobody. We can’t touch nobody.”
The two friends talked on the phone periodically, and finally reconnected in-person in April 2020. Lungs gave Fatboi those first two beats, then Fatboi walked alone through lower Manhattan with them as his score. That night set a tone for the project, and Fatboi would spend immense time absorbing Lungs’ beats before putting pen to page.
“I would play [the beats] for six, seven hours,” he says. “Sleep to them and just see different shapes, colors, sound effects and shit. Then I’d just go to his crib the next day: ‘Yo, I wrote some fire to this.’” Fatboi says he writes for nine hours a day on average, intent on “creating puzzles for the listeners.”
“A track like ‘Plastered,’ the lyrics go straightforward with the title, and you get it like, ‘All right, this title goes with this, he’s talking about this,’” Fatboi explains. “But ‘Adolescence’ or ‘Crescent Moon,’ it might be two or three different things that one bar might mean. The end of ‘Adolescence’ [is] ‘Dear God, mama tears, bring in the psychiatrist, look where I’m living at, I can’t stand it.’ You might take it as, if you see the video, ‘hospital insane asylum.’ I might mean it as, ‘Mom, take me out of this country, this spot that I live in and the city is a bunch of fucked up shit.’”
That cerebral approach helps Cyber City Society transcend a mere horrorcore designation. Fatboi’s lyricism isn’t about sophomoric shock value, and Lungs’ soundscape isn’t about darkness for the sake of darkness. Fatboi says they looked to albums like Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions To Hold Us Back, which masterfully reflected the zeitgeist and urgency of a time period. And they were also inspired by sci-fi films.
“The creation [process] was a lot of Chinese food, Popeye’s Chicken, and just watching a lot of movies,” Fatboi reflects. “He’d have some of the old black and white, sci-fi monster movies playing, and I’m like, ‘Yo, I want this shit to sound like this. This was dope, man.’”
Lung says the beatmaking process was straightforward throughout the album’s conception because of his chemistry with Fatboi. Lungs sought to extract just as much with his sample choices as Fatboi does from every bar.
“Sometimes you’ll see the potential of what this thing could be, in the sense of a tiny ass, weird ass loop sound,” he says. “Most people would just hear it and be like, ‘OK, this is a fucking annoying sound being looped over and over again. But for me, it’s an entire world in that loop. I’ll hear that and I’ll be like, ‘Bro, this is an entire soundscape. I’m seeing an entire fucking city.’”
Engineer (and artist-producer) Wavy Bagels added the reverb to Fatboi’s vocals and figuratively colored Cyber City’s soundscape. The previous Goin Left artist says his contributions were seamless, not just because of the time both men gave him to meticulously mix the project, but his years-long relationships with both.
“Cyber City Society has been the most experimental project I’ve mixed,” Wavy says. “Part of the engineering experience is knowing your personnel, knowing the people that you’re recording, and not just on a musical tip. Lungs, he likes a lot of historical context stuff. He’ll be making a beat and have Amazon Prime on it just running back a bunch of old movies—historical, ill stuff. And then knowing that, how that sonically sounds in my head, like an old ‘50s, ‘60s radio.
“And then with Sharif, he likes reverb,” he adds. “He likes his voice to be sounding like it’s in an empty space, and he loves the horror stuff. So I think about my grandma, rest her soul, she used to collect mad horror VHS cassettes when I was a kid. So it was a combination of a ‘50s radio, combined with a ‘90s TV, with a VHS player in it type shit.”
Those finishing touches helped cinch Cyber City Society, which Fatboi and Lungs plan to revisit with follow-up projects. They say their next work will feature Lungs rapping as well. But in the meantime, they’re also working on solo work. They’re staying busy, putting out Cyber City vinyl, and building more worlds.
“I think it’s a good time to make music,” Lungs says. “I also think it’s a bad time, too. It’s rough, but it’s a great time. There’s never been more ways. The saturation fucks you, but it’s so much harder to get boxed out than it was previously. You don’t need an analog recording studio. And now, you can just do whatever the fuck you want. There are so many untouched things that nobody has done, related to hip-hop, that motherfuckers can just do. [It’s about] trying to do shit that’s different in every level, with the merch, with the physicals, and just have thought, care, and intention put into everything.”
Read below for three other acts putting care and intention into their thrilling works:
Brainorchestra, ‘Big Brain’
Take the art, and the artist, for who they are. The opening salvo for Brainorchestra’s Big Brain album suggests as much, with comedian Bill Burr bemoaning, “I resent the fact that someone’s gonna judge me some day… It doesn’t even make any sense. You made me, so this is your fuckup.”
It’s solid, hilarious advice that the Elizabeth, New Jersey native says he took to heart. “Basically what I got from it is that being judged is rather ironic,” Brainorchestra says. “Because we as people gain our understanding through other people, what they do, how they do it. It’s easy to judge someone who doesn’t align with your opinion or way of life. So I figured putting it as an intro would be kind of funny, because the song basically highlights how I feel about myself, regardless of others.”
The prolific rapper-producer is no “fuckup,” though, and neither is Big Brain, his latest, aptly titled offering. The 15-song project is his first album of 2022, following a busy 2021 which included three albums full of the multi-talented artist commandeering his own beats. He says the project was made over the course of the pandemic, offering a glimpse into his creative process. And it seems as though he was working on a range of projects at once.
“I made tons of songs but these were my favorite in my opinion,” he says. For good reason. From “The Judgement” intro, the project arrests the listener with warmth. “Dangerous” is a sunny sampling of orchestral strings and a jazzy piano that gives off (lyricist) lounge vibes. “Mr. Soul Diesel” is a similarly smooth track dominated by a bassy breakbeat. “Watch Ya Shadow” is a drumless, pensive beat that sounds like it crept through the shadows into your ears as Brainorchestra and inaugural Going Left artist Jahmonte Odgon unfurl rapidfire bars.
Brainorchestra says the sonic variety on the project is the result of a “very intentional” decision. “I didn’t want my album to be predictable,” he says. “The different styles in beats and features allowed me to [be a tastemaker].” Ogbon and Butch Dawson on “Dangerous” are the lone features, and they make apropos guest spots in the Big Brain universe, but it’s Brainorchestra’s show. He curated the perfect canvas for himself to show off on.
As an MC, Brainorchestra compels with a slick, cool flow, speckled with assonance and casual putdowns like “you takin’ European label money,” on “Golden Brick,” gems like, “Watch ya shadow, the one in ya mind the hardest battle,” on “Watch Ya Shadow,” and economical clever metaphors like, “You dudes too comfortable and plain like white tees,” on “The Judgement.”
The quotables shine amidst a canvas of Brainorchestra reflecting on his life, career, and, as he says, “the evolution of being a beatmaker, to producer and rapper.”
His native Elizabeth also looms large on the project—he recorded Big Brain at his home studio in the Garden State, making Jersey a major thematic piece of his latest work. “Elizabeth is a cultural melting pot of a city,” he points out. “It has a vast scale of people that represent different places globally, as well as raw moments in life. A lot of stuff is beautiful but also unfortunate, and it created real learning experiences for me, my family, and many of my peers and general citizens of Elizabeth.” Those experiences are rife throughout Big Brain.
Fly Anakin, ‘Frank’
At the end of the “Bread” skit on Fly Anakin’s Frank, the Mutant Academy rapper-producer tells a friend, “People like me ain’t really worried about the commercial success, I’m ’bout the bread.”
Most onlookers misconstrue that the path to the bread is commercial success, but Going Left is all about the artists making a good indie living. For most of them, it’s not about the windfall from one hit, but a lifetime of reliable income from cultivating a fanbase that respects your work. As Fly Anakin notes in another discussion on the album, he and Mutant Gang have been building a following for almost a decade, and his debut studio album further pushes him along that journey to the bread.
Fly Anakin is a skillful producer and MC, and both of those talents are on full tilt throughout a 17-track project that’s already atop many people’s early best of 2022 lists. In a sea of MCs, Fly is a distinct character, just as likely to garner a rewind with a flurry of assonance as he is with vivid bars like, “Pardon my bitch, she had enough of my shit / she pullin’ sticks out the Telfar with the fronto stuck in it” on “No Dough” or “I got my alias from a bar fight,” as he quips on “Sean Price.”
Romantic relationships play a notable role on Frank. Few of the songs are straight up about relationships, but in the midst of his free-wheeling lyricism are brief glimpses like, “Do you like the Grammys did J Cole, cry ‘tll you sleepy bitch/ Don’t let me see you switching I’mma leave and shit.” They serve to not only show off his charisma, but also delineate the qualms that he parses throughout the project.
They fuse together well on the short but impactful “Poisonous Primates,” with a chorus reflecting, “I need to kill off my ego and zone and mediate” and “I need to treat my shorty like a queen I know I play.” On the Nickelus F-assisted “Ghost,” he further rhymes, “Nobody in this world is thug enough to hold a secret / My sole ponder today, how real can I keep it?” He’s speaking for millions of people who wake up everyday pondering the same thing.
Fly Anakin matches the evocative soul beats with introspection, but his reflections are presented with an air of braggadocio in his delivery that allows him to reign supreme in his universe.
As an MC, he’s a whirlwind, unleashing a rapidfire flow and packing every pocket with anecdotes, reflections, and commentary over soulful production. The project demonstrates a mastery of MCing that took years to develop. He’s reflective of his life and times on the tracks, as well as on several skits that serve as another character-adding anchor to the project, with conversations ranging from shit talk and real talk, to someone hilariously revealing how Kenneth Cole jeans “tore their credit up.”
“I’m a ’90s baby, so I got a different respect for skits,” Fly says of the conversations. “They’re like peanut butter for the jelly. It just makes the shit make sense. I wanted to capture how it feels to be in my world.” He says that before the skits with his friends Grt Sctt!! and Big Kahuna OG, he had some clips with his sister where “we was talking about a lot of shit that didn’t need to be documented.” Smart choice.
You almost don’t want the skits to end on Frank—until another incredible beat starts and Fly catches you from bar one.
WiFiGawd, ‘Chain of Command’
If you ask a lot of people, including DC rapper WiFiGawd, Memphis started this trap shit. Acts like Three 6 Mafia forged new ground by merging rapid hi-hats, booming 808s, and slappin’ snares into a soundscape that could be as frenetic or smooth as the sample dictated. Three Six doesn’t seem to come up as frequently in trap godfather conversations, but WiFi is knowin’.
“I remember growing up and my best friend would blast Three Six all the time and those memories became stamped. Then around 2010 when Raider Klan started popping off, and that’s really when my Memphis phonk deep dive started,” WiFi says, adding that he was “fascinated” by their beat choices. “From the beats to the lyrics, it was way before its time and became timeless,” he says of the Memphis sound.
“Timeless” means the rapper-producer was able to use Memphis phonk as the crux of his Chain of Command album, a cutting-edge 11-track project that pays homage to Memphis, but also makes sure remnants of other sonic influences shine through.
The sonically adventurous MC is a reflection of the internet age, as his catalog demonstrates a variety of approaches and moods. His 2021 Sergio Summer and UPTSOULJAH Full Court Press albums, as well as his Hot As Hell series with producer Tony Seltzer, showcase him bending myriad soundscapes to the will of his free-form flows.
That versatility is apparent throughout Chain of Command. The intro almost feels like a venture into the dulcet, aspirational world of a Curren$y or Larry June, as he reflects on his life and rhymes “swear to God I’m havin’” over lush, reflective keys. But few of those ever-cool MCs are going to rhyme, “COVID-19 helped me out with some crimes / grab the fucking mask and the glock/now I’m sliding” like he did on “4 My Skaters,” which is dominated by a chant-like cadence that’s sure to go up at live shows.
If certain rappers are tasked to understand the assignment, WiFiGawd masters the whole curriculum here. He drops a meta “had to fuck this beat the fuck up” in the middle of “God of War,” then continues to reel off a variety of cadences over a pulsing beat that sounds like it was made on Jupiter. He’s a calm narrator on “365,” riding a glorious beat that sounds tailor-made for a showy drop-top cruise down a sunny block that never ends. And “Flying Lotus” marries a classic Memphis phonk cadence with new-age flows over a minimalist beat.
WiFiGawd says he crafted the album, which he co-produced with Tony Seltzer, over the course of “two to three” months. The project is a result of him going to the studio and letting the vibes of the beats guide him through each track.
“My process for recording is all about how I’m feeling in that moment. How the beat makes me feel,” he reflects. “I might freestyle or write. [It] just depends on what pops in my mind first. But whatever happens, I go with that, because that’s authentic for me.”
It’d be easy for an artist to lose themselves in their influences and create an inauthentic experience, but WiFiGawd’s lyricism, elastic flow, and arresting calm manages to spin all of this into his own sound, on yet another standout project.
“My supporters know that my music is a whole world to dive into,” he says. “Chain of Command is just a reflection of that. It’s one part of a never-ending world of music.”
