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Image via Mr. Lif on Facebook / Rob Myers
One of the better pieces of the underground hip-hop scene’s puzzle is El-P‘s work with Definitive Jux. There are probably more than a few P&P readers out there who share our love and appreciation for the Def Jux label, and one of those is Boston’s own Mr. Lif. While he’d been known as a phenom on the hip-hop scene for years, it was his 2001 debut album, the conceptual masterpiece I, Phantom, that really pushed him past many of his cohorts. The project might be the cause for many of us rejecting the “American dream” for fear of being consumed by consumerism and the endless pursuit of the almighty dollar, and I Phantom‘s “Success” was a great example of that. On a track that shows a working husband and father slowly growing apart from his family due to the demands of his day job, ultimately ruining his life. It’s a dark and depressing look at the side of the American dream that we normally don’t get to see… but ends up playing out more often than you’d realize.
Oddly enough, it wasn’t always that ominous. Lif fans should remember the 2002 live album that preceded I, Phantom, Live From The Middle East, take from a live show at the historic Cambridge, MA venue. It was one of the first times that heads heard The Perceptionists (aka Mr. Lif and Akrobatik with DJ Fakts One) on record, and featured a track called “The Fringes.” As the story goes, “The Fringes” (which is produced by longtime Lif collaborator Insight) was written the night before Live From The Middle East was recorded, and Lif loved it so much that he decided to perform the cut live for the first time—fuck-ups and all—for his hometown crowd. You might have guessed it already, but “The Fringes” ended up turning into “Success,” with a lot of the Lif-described “playful charm” from “The Fringes” taking a darker turn that reflected the scope of I Phantom.
For years, “The Fringes” hadn’t been available anywhere, with fans from across the Internets openly wondering when they’d get a studio version of the track. After hitting 30,000 Facebook likes, Mr. Lif threw the song on Bandcamp (with a name-your-own-price feature on it) with a note on Facebook; keep in mind that this isn’t mastered (which you can hear in the instrumental), but is more than what fans have had for the last 12 years. Check that out, then peep the Live From The Middle East version of “The Fringes,” as well I, Phantom‘s “Success,” which features Aesop Rock on the hook.
