Samizdat by The Royal We
This album was made in 2004-05 and never released, so dial your heads back 20 years. Me and Animas knew each other in high school, but we really reconnected in 1998 in college as two half-mad English nerds who consumed libraries and intoxicants for fun. Then one day we discovered that both of us were writing raps instead of fulfilling poetry assignments, and for the next two years that's pretty much all we really cared about. I'd hit up poetry open mics and rap 10 minute acapella verses from memory while people read Robert Frost poems, Animas would try to lure anyone into a cipher even if it was Opio from Souls Of Mischief, and we'd battle drunk frat boys wherever they gathered whenever we weren't being active public miscreants. By 2000 we had both rapped our way out of admission to law school, Animas went to Chicago and I went to the mental hospital and then the trauma ward (and I'll still take Aurora Psych. and Froedtert Hospital over Chicago haha). By 2002-03, I'm back on my feet, Animas is back in Milwaukee, and both of us are back to only half-mad and fully drunk on underground hiphop.
It's easy to forget, but underneath all the flag-waving, some of us were righteously pissed off when Bush stole the 2000 election and 9/11 didn't change that fact. If anything, our country's collective reaction, both domestically and overseas, only magnified our disenfranchisement and amplified our dissent. We were radicals in the way that only people in their early to mid-20s are capable of being. Me and Animas spent a LOT of time talking in the lead up to the 2004 election--imagine if Socrates and Plato were locked in a room with unlimited Pabst, psychedelics, and every rap record ever made--and I guess it was inevitable that these songs would come out.
I can't give enough credit to Animas for his work on this record and countless others back then. My man was working a 9 to 5, taught himself how to make beats and record, writing rhymes, and dealing with my maniacal presence in his house at all times. So, what you're hearing on this album is: a Roland TR-505, a Shure cardioid mic, weird old records, and two dudes navigating post-collegiate drift with hiphop as their north star and zero oversight. For the last 20 years, these songs only existed on an old iPod that I thought was lost. To be able to smuggle them into the present climate in America not only makes me happy, but it brings out the true definition of the title Samizdat.
Everything DNA: https://linktr.ee/midasdna
Tracklist
| 1. | Thousand Yard Stare | 2:30 |
| 2. | Bread And Circus | 3:01 |
| 3. | No Surrender | 3:48 |
| 4. | Blowback feat. Dana Coppa | 2:20 |
| 5. | Pharmaceutic ills | 4:44 |
| 6. | Civics | 4:25 |
| 7. | High Noon | 3:00 |
| 8. | It's All Bad | 3:22 |
| 9. | Sedition | 4:31 |
| 10. | Salvo | 3:26 |
| 11. | Samizdat | 4:54 |
| 12. | Raison d'Etre | 4:45 |
| 13. | Thousand Yard Stare (Instrumental) | 1:59 |
Credits
Beats: Animas
Lyrics: DNA and Animas
License
All rights reserved.Tags
Writing about what you write is tedious. At best it's like filling out your financial disclosure statement with an attorney for a third divorce; at worst it's trying to explain yourself to a beat-cop at some seedy theater during a showing of Debbie Does Rappers. Either way, the goal is to get back to a life that's weird enough to write about. So...I guess you're about ready then.
Get in.