Spectreview: Pink Siifu – NEGRO DELUXE

Released: April 9, 2021

Experimental
(Hip-hop/Rap)
(Noise)
(Punk)

-WITCH HAZE-

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Last year I declared Pink Siifu’s NEGRO one of my favorite albums of 2020. Almost halfway into 2021, I believe that declaration still holds up. It’s not a record I go to regularly, but it is one I go to when I need to access something very specific. Rather than relate to it – something that’s quite impossible for me to do – I can admire the sheer audacity of its burn and the lengths the Birmingham rapper goes to replicate an eternally-wounded cry of anger. The force that Siifu attacks the microphone in tracks like “SMD” and “run pig run” can bring up something elemental in all but the most stoic of souls. It was unlike anything I’d heard before, and it’s unlike anything I’ve heard since.

Siifu’s decision to rerelease his year-old “breakthrough” with another full album of fresh material appended onto it is not only evidence of his conviction in its unique power (and of Siifu’s prolificacy) but in his desire to reenter the grim story that logged another chapter mere months after NEGRO’s April release. The original record still plays like a timed crawl through barbed wire, but the new second disc makes the effort to balance murky jazz and noise in kind. It’s still provocative and unnerving, but compared to its brethren it feels almost like a palate cleanser, albeit one that may bring up the same knotted feelings of disgust.

There’s also the possibility that Siifu sees this new LP as a chance to take a deep breath and reiterate the points he once made near-exclusively through gritted teeth and flecked spittle. Judging from the way the new material is organized on streaming services, it’s meant to continue where the original left off. And so where NEGRO starts with the earth-shattering caterwaul of “BLACKisGod,a ghetto-sci-fi tribute(_G)” and blazes through thirty minutes of white-hot apoplexy, its soft ending now leads naturally into the free-jazz buildup of the new LP’s opener. The transition is not completely seamless, purely because of how much “BLACKISINFINITE” feels like a purposeful intro, but it has the odd effect of feeling like a complete vision of the album’s original introduction.

From there the music retains its dynamism while also cooling into a rhythm that surges and meanders at different times. Where “NEGRO FRIDAY” and “BLACKZ” lift off, “BREATHE.birth” dives back down. “FKOFFME” and “2dirt” pick up where the Bad Brains punk of “FK” and the blown-out trap of “dirt” left off, each elucidating both. Siifu, meanwhile, gets to stretch his legs as a rapper on “cointail” and “fkthapolice[slumvillage tribute]”; where previously he paralleled the urgency of the music with mantric repetitions, his technical skill comes through. Across the new material (which more than doubles the length of the package as a whole) Siifu and his compatriots expound on what made the original so compelling while dialing down the in-the-moment vitriol that facilitated its power.

Despite Siifu’s all-consuming intensity, NEGRO was a product of collaboration between several known talents, from musicians (like trumpeter Christopher Williams and drummer Blaque Dynamite) to guest producers (Jeremiah Jae and Roper Williams, among others) to poets and visionaries (the incomparable Moor Mother and Slauson Malone). The new LP continues that collaborative spirit; outside of the co-mixing/mastering work by L.A.’s Zeroh, there are even more producers to add to the roster, including Cali’s lastnamedavid (“cointail”) Richmond’s Ohbliv (“NEGRO FRIDAY”; “fkthapolice”) and Montreal’s Nicholas Craven (“Numbers on yo head”). The features, when they appear, also shine; Billy Woods gives the last say on “Numbers on yo head” or 

The general effect is one of redistribution: where NEGRO emphasized achieving catharsis – with the hollowness of a throat worn hoarse from screaming – NEGRO DELUXE now includes the aftermath, when the dust has settled but the missive has not. For all the potency of Siifu’s scorched-earth method, its efficacy boiled down to your preexisting beliefs concerning what he wanted to convey.  What this new disc does is double down on the didacticism not only lyrically but sonically, by moving the focus away from noisy provocation and towards (relatively) gentler fare. The most apparent difference comes from the transformation between the original “Nation Tyme.,” which fit paranoid stuttering and screwed jazz into its brevity, and the repurposing two-punch knockout near the record’s breathtaking end. But there are also the new “rehearsal” tracks, which double as cerebral ambient pieces thanks to their candid inclusions of found sound, and the energetic redux of “BLACK Be The God” that closes the album proper.

That redistribution also repositions Pink Siifu’s masterwork-to-date primarily as a work of Black love where its original iteration came across as one primarily of Black anger. Not that it wasn’t a work of Black love at its outset (and both, of course, are valid forms of expression) but their impacts unmistakably differ greatly. I originally came to NEGRO as a student to injustices I once callously passed over and left branded by the intensity of its heat. Coming back to it nearly a year later, I’m astounded by how the new material turns a blunt instrument into a holistic one, expanding its reach with a richer emotional vocabulary without compromising the message it wishes to spread. Even more than now, it is essential listening and one of the very best records of the young decade.

Highly recommended for a lesson.