Before I get started, can everybody just take a moment & gaze at that cover art? Does anything say "no fucks given post-9/11 fuck-Bush protest music" louder & more eloquently than that image? Ahhh, what a beautiful piece of graphic design.
The day I'm writing this, there is a featured editorial in the Sunday New York Times about how both the left & the right, for different reasons, feel that their free speech is under attack. Of course, there is a difference between the right using legislative means, scare tactics & the power of the state to ban books & suppress speech in education, & the left complaining about bigoted millionaire entertainers--but as recently as a decade ago, appeal to the 1st Amendment was definitively a left-wing strategy. Paris writes 2 different messages in Sonic Jihad's liner notes about the "intolerant climate of suppression of free speech & artistic expression" & "fear, ignorance and censorship that results from the fake U.S. patriotism generated by the terror attacks on September 11th, 2001." It makes me nostalgic for the days before the right figured out how to co-opt & twist the language of the radical left.
As usual, Paris produces the whole album himself, & this time it has a somewhat low-budget feel, rough around the edges with over-compressed mastering & an unrefined sound. One of the major problems with this album is how similar all the beats sound: most of them exist in a pretty narrow tempo range, with similar funky basslines & moody keys. There are a handful of exceptions: "Ain't No Love" evokes So-Cal G-funk, complete with a nod to Parliament. "You Know My Name" generates a horrorcore feel with ominous keys, distorted & pitched down vocals & scary-movie strings. These few varied beats help to break up the monotony, but it doesn't help that Paris uses the same flow on pretty much every song--the same flow he used on pretty much every song on Sleeping With the Enemy a decade earlier. This is not an emcee interested in innovating cadences.
He is interested in clearly communicating his subject matter, & the album is mostly concerned with being the musical equivalent of its cover art: a gutsy, no-punches-pulled attack on the Bush Jr. administration & everything it stands for. On "Sheep to the Slaughter," Paris zeroes in on the war effort & how it preys upon the poor & people of color, offering an impressive litany of white American celebrities, both political & otherwise, who endorse the war but will never be called upon to fight in it. This segues into "Spilt Milk" featuring the always-amazing dancehall deejay Capleton, discussing what Paris describes in the liner notes as "a harmful double-standard at most record labels of endorsing artists who only espouse misogyny, mindless violence, and drug culture."
Aside from the sonic monotony, the other problem with this album is imbalance. After the propulsive single "Freedom" featuring dead prez, the album drops into a 4-song fallow period. It emerges in stunning form, however, with the album's 2 best songs, "Evil" & "AWOL." The former song is framed as Paris explaining what he would do if he were an evil overlord bent on oppressing & exploiting a race of people, & he proceeds to detail America's entire history with Black people step by step. "AWOL" is a storytelling song where Paris raps from the perspective of a naive young man seduced into joining the Army by a recruiter named Diablo, only to find just how unprepared he was for the horror of desertside operations. Though he makes it home, his mangled body reminds him of the lessons he's learned in the song's chilling final bars: "Now I'm fucking with this wheelchair, ain't nothing the same/& I'm knowing confrontation's more than video games/War is pain."
The album's backloading continues with the lead single, "What Would You Do?" where Paris bluntly accuses the U.S. government of orchestrating 9/11: "Ain't no terror threat unless approval rating's slumpin'/So I'mma say it for the record, we the ones that planned it." He offers a compelling argument, not quite as evidence-based as Immortal Technique's on Revolutionary Vol. 2, which came out the same year, but close enough for me to consider the 2 albums to be spiritual siblings. (Tech's verbal equivalent of this album's cover art: "You better watch what the fuck flies outta your mouth/Or I'mma hijack a plane & fly it into your house.") Paris bemoans the Patriot Act & other anti-terrorism measures facilitating unreasonable search & seizure, before closing the song by, once again, defending his free speech rights: "With the 4th Amendment gone, eyes are on the 1st."
Back in 2003 I ordered this CD in the mail from Paris's guerrillafunk.com website, & I still think that was the moment I ended up on whatever FBI watchlist I'm probably still on. It was worth it, though, because though this album is uneven, about half the songs on it are some of the cream from the headiest period of protest music I've ever lived through.
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