Inventiveness and invocation in the Brooklyn rapper’s thirteenth album.
Showbiz!, by MIKE, 10k
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Don’t be a clown, don’t be a clone either. —MIKE
Showbiz! dangles like a decoy on the threshold of the classic rap music that rejects commercialism while being cannibalized by it, and uses the threat and throne of fame and notoriety not for cliché self-aggrandizement but as effigy, sacrifice, and rite of passage into the revised “Young World” Brooklyn-based rapper MIKE has been inventing through his annual festival by that name and across twelve albums. Showbiz! is his lucky thirteenth, a hex-breaking that dares us to challenge him as he bends industry and lyricism to his will, his dystopian optimism as vision. MIKE elegantly resists the cult of breakthrough and tends to his ascent into the cast of revered emcees and producers (he is mostly self-produced under the moniker DJ Blackpower) through relentless focus on output, community, and craft, against the tide of disillusionment and nihilism that keeps shifting music toward the righteous incoherence of Pentecostal baptisms but without the enlightenment, or the simplicity of reformatted hymns encoded with the coordinates to an abandoned home.
The invocation of and as Showbiz! is rap’s imagined homecoming here, a resettlement that hisses at the gimmick of making it by any means necessary, or arriving on the scene as a preemptive, self-actualized star entity whose brand already flatters and appeases the mass-marketing machine. That finesse, often followed by meteoric rise, years of corporate extraction, and a gradual or abrupt fall from grace, has become so imperative to what were originally poems set to music at the cadence of magic and creating counterspells against bad infinity that wannabe stars wear it like a rented couture costume. Say it slower, and with meddling disdain, s-h-o-w-b-i-z, echoes of sho’ is, or sho’ you right, and the word also connotes an alert and deliberate resignation and retreat into traditions that undermine the potential for uncompromising substance in art. Attempts to define the real as anything obscure or marginalized, and therefore anything popular as suspicious, have also grown elitist and false in late-stage capitalism, however. Showbiz! harbors a dismissal of both postures and posturing in general, the mode is slack and unrelenting grappling with language as tapestry, invoking the spirit of restoration to when onstage and backstage are one and performance isn’t a con of spectacle but a lifestyle and inventive mode. All rehearsal, but full-out and live, and the audience or listener has to give as much enthusiasm as she hopes to receive from those performing—the cipher made live and the crowd that came to watch or consume encouraged to participate or be accused of behaving like ops and shady executives. No more showbiz; you could feel the pain in my speech, MIKE accuses.
MIKE. Photo: Ryosuke Tanzawa.
We vet it all in secret, intuiting the difference between “content” and artworks, and aware that some popular music is propaganda and distraction and some is just so good it gets stuck in agit-prop’s predatorily gentrified neighborhood and mistaken for that. MIKE is a necessary detractor, delivering the unstaged and offstage raps of late-stage disaster capitalism (mostly by way of his own label, 10k) as if it’s easy to write, rap, and produce sometimes multiple albums a year; it’s urgent, he’s keeping vigil over the soul of the form without being corny about it. Showbiz! as album possesses a jazz attitude. The voice acts like Charlie Parker’s saxophone on recordings of “Cherokee,” settling into the beats with relaxed confidence both casual and astounding. A flow this smooth takes so much effort and skill it seems effortless in execution. MIKE enunciates and slurs within the span of one word, turning the language ambivalent and existential, critical both in condition and mode, as if he’s interceding to revive with a sermon a phony he just killed. It’s merciful music that also asks for mercy. He channels a union of the spirits of MF DOOM, Guru, Moondog, and Fred Moten—the private smirk you can detect in each of their timbres augmented and recombinant, giving MIKE momentum that feels automated and is also snatched back between, sometimes in the middle of verses and bars, toward ecstatic dejection and total faith in self. What seemed unassuming is revealed as a manifesto with no credo but I’m up, no ideology but do better, do more, undo the chore of this with devotion, work harder, as the skit sampled on the “Clown of the Class” demands in distress.
MIKE. Photo: Nuvany David.
It’s difficult to locate a center on Showbiz! because MIKE’s flow wavers between total sobriety and the calm delirium of the madman on the corner poet Ted Joans warns us might be a prophet. MIKE does not pause or gasp or inhale or change pitch, a barreling, at times disturbing monologue in monotone only punctuated by the interruptions of other voices, din in the chamber arkestra of his mind made into small club, church, or corner-store antics, and reenacted so that his flow is the horizon your mind gazes into quietly, looking for asymmetry where there is none, which becomes both soothing and disorienting. I get this strange feeling, he loops over and over in “Strange Feeling” as it flows into “Zombie pt. 2,” which opens with an excerpt from a lecture: This classic zombie was very much a living human who, through drugs, religious ceremonies, and behavioral manipulation was convinced that they were dead and that their soul had been taken from them. If Showbiz! has a thesis, it is this criticism of the zombie class, which he understands his own susceptibility to joining unintentionally. Perhaps the rapper’s exacting soliloquies are his way of interrogating his own intentions and temptations, his self-guided exorcism, tired of achieving / it’s up to the Gods / no more preaching. Later, on “Showbiz! (Intro),” thousand miles, got a road fetish . . . / shit ain’t pretty but it’s mo’ better. He enters fugitive business, the minding of his own black business.
“Spun Out,” toward the end of the album, is the stunning and stunned crescendo, the form and serene emptiness the record toils toward—the eloquent incoherence of unraveling, giving up, giving out, before you’re made to against your will. Niggas don’t wanna spin they get spun out . . . too much heart for this shit I might run out . . . obedience to star-making will deplete and ruin you and turn you into the walking dead. And yet the talent for poetry woven through beats and samples will make you famous, revered, one of those martyr kings gone missing. There was a commotion and I got swept up in the crowd—a line sampled, muffled, off-the-cuff, cautionary. MIKE makes an ensemble of himself, and each member is trying to quit before they’re compromised, and each refuses to step away, addicted to the group and the glory, its doomed but dominant-for-now beauty. But what if show business is the natural outcome and only antidote to burnout for hyper-intense souls so natural they need artifice to protect them from being seen up close and stolen or stolen from, the album asks. The final song is synths and spectral halo, reverb-laden choir of the self turned holographic and remote, more approachable that way. It’s the path from the murky, deceitful mundane to ascension and clarity that this album maps and pivots on. Instructions for how not to integrate into the burning house of rap, by integration with the light body that blinds the spotlight, by being the one who plans to burn it down and leave through the back exit, where there’s a hidden stage that only accepts exiles reciting sudden mantras of the undone Young World.
Harmony Holiday is the author of several collections of poetry and numerous essays on music and culture. Her collection Maafa came out in April 2022.