The Optical Files #125: R.A. the Rugged Man - Die, Rugged Man, Die (2004)

Back in 2004 I was excited to cop the 1st full-length album (at least, 1st to be officially released) from Suffolk County's underground legend, horror & exploitation film connoisseur & critic, & boxing fanatic R.A. the Rugged Man. At the time, his give-no-fucks attitude felt like a breath of fresh air amid the bling-saturated early 2000s. My attitude on it is a little moderated now--I certainly can't stand by everything, & we'll get to that--but Die, Rugged Man, Die is still an endlessly compelling listen & still the best album that R.A. has made. 

One thing nobody can ever deny about R.A. is what a phenomenal rapper he is. With his thick Long Island accent, deep voice that doesn't boom so much as rumble up from the sewer like the grunting of CHUDs, & a mushmouthed bellow that recalls his claim "I was born in special ed classes," he's always been one of the most distinctive emcees out there. He lists his "musical influences" in the liner notes & the 1st 2 names are Kool G Rap & Big Daddy Kane, but he really didn't have to because those are the names that will come to anybody's mind when listening. Like Kool G, he uses a deliberately sloppy delivery with a hardcore lisp that conveys barely-contained contempt for the listener or the object of his scorn. Like Kane, he stays mostly plainspoken (on this album, at least), but every once in a while spins off into a syllabic rhyme run of stunning intensity, that keeps going past bar lines & neat divisible-by-4 phrases, pushing against the very structure of rap itself, like this beauty from "Chains":

Hospitable, hittable, cooler than Digable, criminal

Miracle, lyrical, take every syllable literal

It'll riddle, profitable, visible, irritable

Little brittle pitiful fists will do little but tickle, you typical

While he's certainly showing off here, every word has meaning, & he's clearly not just stringing rhyme words together for the fuck of it. He's not one to rhyme for the sake of riddling, & for every flight of fancy like the one quoted above, he's got plenty of unadorned bars that seek to do nothing but convey meaning: "I never seen the penitentiary/I been shook since I seen the Haiti Kid in Penitentiary 3," he declares in the aptly-titled "Midnight Thud."

What felt so fresh to me back in 2004 was the punk rock attitude R.A. displays here. His on-mic persona revels in being broke, fat, dirty & obscene, which is miles away from your average rapper's concern with projecting wealth & attractiveness. Most rappers I knew of at the time talked a lot about being poor, but only to contrast it with the material success they'd achieved. R.A. was different: "I don't wanna get rich, trust me, I'd rather be poor." He states his position most clearly in the closing lines of album opener "Lessons" (which ironically became a minor hit on college radio): 

I ain't down to sign autographs & shake your hands
I don't want trendy-ass followers for fans
I don't wanna sell records, I don't wanna be big
[...]I don't want fans who don't know who G Rap is.

From years of listening to underground rap, I was used to anti-mainstream messages. Hell, even the most mainstream rappers aspire to be seen as anti-mainstream. What felt new about Die, Rugged Man, Die was that it was not only anti-mainstream, it was explicitly anti-commercial, but totally not pretentious about it. R.A. doesn't make songs explicitly about class struggle, but the themes sneak in around the edges of tracks like "On the Block," which is a lot more than the surface-level nostalgia song about the golden age of hiphop that it appears to be. Amid the litany of shout-outs, he positions himself as a throwback to when it was truly a culture for those on the margins. "Rap is corporate now, it's all about endorsements/& the rich kids love it, so fuck them poor kids now," he spits, before wistfully recalling, "I remember when the mainstream hated rap music."

Of course, this anti-commercialism is more than just philosophical. R.A. has been very open about his mental illness; low self-esteem & fear of success go hand-in-hand with depression. The song "A Star Is Born," recounting the multi-label bidding war he was at the center of in the early '90s which resulted in his signing to Jive Records & getting dropped before he could release his debut, Night of the Bloody Apes, sounds like classic self-sabotage. Luckily, he's in a better place now, which I'll get to in a minute.

In keeping with his proud-to-be-broke stance, R.A. assures us that he's "never bought a beat for more than 3 Gs" &, well, we can tell. The production is certainly not this album's high point, even though an early incarnation of the White Mandingos (featuring Daryl Jennifer from Bad Brains & journalist Sacha Jenkins) worked on the rock guitar-driven "How Low." Ayatollah's Horace Andy "Skylarking" sample propelling the Wu-Tang feature "Chains" is pretty awesome, as are J-Zone's wacky xylophones on "Brawl." It's a little odd to say since R.A has a history of working with legendary producers like Havoc & Alchemist, but although the beats are fine, this isn't an album you put on just to vibe with the instrumentals.

A lot of R.A.'s lowlife delinquent persona works on a kind of outdated conception of shock value, a South Park-esque "equal opportunity offender" attitude that results in him doing a whole lot of punching down here, especially when it comes to women. He also seems to be slightly obsessed with being white, though not at a Haystak level. I just don't find that stuff as acceptable as I did when I was 19, but even if we say for the sake of argument that it's a me problem, there is nothing that justifies R.A. flagrantly using the n-word on the hidden track "Shoulda Never" that appears after about a minute of silence following the outro. It's the classic "I have lots of Black friends so everybody knows I'm not racist" canard. I'm glad he seems to have learned his lesson but honestly, old-school R.A. the Rugged Man seemed pretty ignorant on the subject of race.

In recent years, it seems like R.A. is doing very well for himself. He appears to be in a good place financially & mental health-wise. He's taking better care of himself. Good for him. He is aware of his status as elder statesman, & has done his part to elevate young artists like A-F-R-O. He seems less given to self-sabotage & more willing to embrace the success that his music has brought. With this, though, have come other changes. His rap style has changed: he now enunciates a lot cleaner, his lyrics have become a lot more showy, & he does a lot more speed rapping than he used to. I can't help but notice that this has been a parallel evolution to the artist that R.A. & everybody else gets sick of him being compared to: Eminem. Both are hyper-aware of their legacy, constantly out to prove how nice they are at the expense of everything else, & rap with huge chips on their shoulder. Lots of technique & not as much id. Consequently, both artists' output has suffered. While Legends Never Die & All My Heroes Are Dead are technically "better" (i.e. more polished, more proficient) than Die, Rugged Man, Die & Night of the Bloody Apes, but I can't help it if old fat sloppy crustified R.A. resonates with me more. I guess it's sad that his music seemed more compelling when he was in a self-destructive place in his life, but what's even sadder is that's not uncommon among rappers in general.

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