Roc Marciano - Marcielago [2019]

Roc Marciano’s influence on today’s underground hip-hop scene truly cannot be overstated. Whereas in the 2000’s the underground was dominated by these eccentric personalities, boisterous lyrics, overly-political subject matters, and a damn near fetishization of 90’s New York producers, Roc Marciano found success in stripping back the formula and looking even farther backwards for his inspiration. Marcberg, Reloaded, and Marci Beaucoup are all important for so many reasons, but key among them is the influence that it would have on the underground scene moving into the mid to late 2010’s. Rappers like Action Bronson, Willie The Kid, Mach-Hommy, and the entire Griselda crew (especially Westside Gunn) owe a lot of their steez to Marciano, who championed these loose and wordy non-sequitur flows, complete with humorously over-the-top violent and pimpish  bars. Their beat selections too, although not 100% due to Roc what with people like The Alchemist out there, reflect Marciano’s with a huge emphasis on 60’s-70’s R&B, soul, and blaxploitation film soundtracks like Shaft, Black Caesar, and Super Fly. The beats are not the chamberish cypher music of the mid 90’s, or the left-field jazzy-raps of the 2000’s; for the most part, they are pure, raw, uncut samples, vocal and instrumental, looped in long intervals as to evoke the specific piece being sampled rather than creating something new to rap over. Drums take a backseat to the sample on Marciano’s tracks, which is a trend that would continue well into the 2010’s and into today.

This 2010-2013 run of projects is essential to understanding where this new Underground wave comes from. Reloaded in particular is one of his best projects

In 2018, Roc Marciano released three whole albums worth of material; Rosebudd’s Revenge 2 (a sequel to an album released the year before), Behold a Dark Horse (which was much more traditional in it’s 90’s hip-hop roots, what with Black Thought and Busta Rhymes making appearances), and his collaborative album with DJ Muggs, KOAS. This was very unusual for him, given over the previous 4 years had only seen one project from the man. I took it as a statement to the underground that he still ran this pimp shit, and people would do well not to forget it. Well, the message was well received; well received enough that he took almost the whole of 2019 off, being on the occasional feature (where he would usually be on many features; that’s just his way). Unbeknownst to most, however, was that he had been working on a new album the entire time, and decided to release Marcielago, his 8th studio album in his long career, totally out of the blue here at the end of 2019. The man has not missed a single beat in over a decade in the game, and Marcielago continues this winning streak.

Roc Marciano as a rapper is a testament to the power of word association in hip-hop; he hops from one rhyming word to another with such ease and grace, penning rhyme schemes that can span dozens of bars and can include the majority of the words in any given sentence. The substance of the words isn’t *exactly* the point (although it can still impress), but the lyrical dexterity and the effortlessness of his rapping is what draws you in trying detangle this word-soup being spun at you. If you’re looking backwards in time, you’ll be hard pressed to find a true influence to his style: Busta Rhymes maybe, Guru from Gang Starr, Masta Killa from Wu-Tang, MF DOOM is more of a contemporary but his sound is similar. But if you want to know what he really sounds like, listen to some of the cats out today. The way people like CRIMEAPPLE, Estee Nack, Westside Gunn, and Hus Kingpin pen their bars show a clear influence from Roc Marciano, and if you’re impressed with the way those dudes rap then Marcielago is an essential listen for you. However, don’t go into this expecting any sort of grand statements on life being made, because Marciano sticks pretty close to his subject matters: pimpin hoes, being the smoothest to ever do it, dealing drugs, and killing ops (and leaving their body somewhere to be found). The closest he comes to cohesive statements are on tracks like Joe Jackson, where he details his position in the game (as the best obviously) and how he goes about his craft, and the religious tracks I.G.W.T. and God Loves You. Religion is actually fairly important to Marciano, with there being many references to Jesus and being saved even outside of those two tracks; I wouldn’t call him a religious rapper by any stretch however.

Hempstead is outside of New York City proper, so the pool of influence is vastly different from a rapper who group up in one of the five boroughs.

Roc is totally content with being a lone wolf, with his conservative use of features matching up nicely with his proclivity to produce most of his own material. But by now, he’s amassed such a pool of talented peers and proteges, that collaboration is just a given at this point, and Marcielago is a showcase of the best that all involved have to offer. Roc still holds tight on the production reins, but he enlists The Alchemist and Animoss to provide a couple beats. The Alchemist gives us the perfectly sinister Saw, with its distorted and theatrical electric guitars, largely drumless (like a lot of the album). Molly Ringwald is the first of two Animoss beats, being a straightforward soul-sampled cut with a nice groove and nostalgic piano-work; his more true-to-form cut is on SAYLAVI, which may be one of my least favorite in the tracklist, but for reasons separate from the instrumental, which has a tinge of island influence with it’s steel drums watered down in the mix, spacious and open but not feeling skeletal. Vocal features come from familiar places as well: Brownsville’s Ka checks in on Ephesians for an appropriately cryptic and profound verse, and his presence here is another in a long string of stunning verses given to Roc Marciano (who I think is literally the only rapper he has ever collaborated with in this decade) for his albums, having appeared on damn near all of them in the past decade. Willie The Kid, the perpetual underdog in the underground race, raps fantastically on Bomb Shelter… but I can’t hear him. In one of the few missteps on this album, Willie is buried so low into this boisterous and ear-grabbing beat that it’s crazy hard to hear his words, which is a shame because what he’s saying is smooth as hell. Westside Gunn is on Boosie Fade, which is pretty much the perfect atmosphere for a Griselda member to lay down their steez, and blows it out of the water with the ambiance and his gutter lyrics. I’ll be straight and say I don’t know who Cook$ is, but while I’m lukewarm on his singing performance on God Loves You, his verse on Puff Daddy is top 3 of the album, with some of the nastiest lines on this motherfucker. “My mama fucked El Chapo the birthed me / what’s crumbs to a brick boy, you playin with birdseed” is some of the hypest and gangsteriest shit on Marcielago, and has me wanting to find out who this dude is.

The last feature, Knowledge the Pirate, is located on the back end of the track Tom Chambers, which plays as a grand, two part hip-hop epic, complete with a transitional piece the bridge them together. It’s a fucking movie, plain and simple, with Knowledge as a supporting actor laying down a killer drug-slinging verse. The first beat is this Tarantino-esque intro with these weeping guitar chords introducing you to this character of unhinged violence; a pimp in his prime cooking crack and dressing fly as hell. The bridging beat is this stunted guitar and snare loop, and tells of the man’s buildup to the explosive climax of bullets and cars screeching. The final beat… Jesus Christ it s soulful piece of work. These rolling guitar licks over a quick but tight-looped vocal sample is so urgent and in-your-face, it builds this sense of chaos in a movie scene, where characters are rushing to the end of their stories about to be snuffed out, or end up on top. Obviously Roc Marciano wins because he is the ultimate pimp, “on a different frequency”, and even in the face danger he wants you to know that “your queen rub the meat to summon the genie”, because flexing on you is in his fucking BLOOD.

Marciano’s LP with DJ Muggs last year, KAOS was one of the stranger releases in this new run of Muggs albums. No features, otherworldly and evil beats; I didn’t feel at first that Marciano fit as well as he should, but I’ve come around on it in the past year.

For everything that Roc Marciano is as a rapper, his skills as a producer are astoundingly sharp to the point that any problem I (or anyone listening) might have with the man’s voice or delivery is washed away in the soundtrack to a classic hip-hop record. In some ways, I feel like Marcielago is Marciano’s most impressive offering of beats to date, for the variety, expert sampling and beat-loops, vintage quality, and beat structure are just top-fucking-class. Besides the masterclass that is Tom Chambers, Richard Gear is an excellent example of his skill, with the different parts of the beat smoothing into one another with drum and guitar breakdowns, and when the beat comes to sudden halts throughout the emptiness speaks just as loud with soul as the instruments do. He still reaches back into his older styles on Choosin Fees and God Loves You, with both being almost untampered sample looped in beautiful fashion; Choosin Fees is reaches back into those 70’s soul-train jams, looping this powerful voice, distant strings, and happy piano keys. God Loves You is a healthy mixture of bluesy guitar licks and Sunday service pianos, evoking the feeling of sitting at church while the neighborhood kids play in the band. I’ve mentioned religion plays a part in the way Marcielago plays out, and I.G.W.T., which starts out with this almost acapella intro backed by this incredibly soulful female wailing away in the background, eventually transitions into a rolling piano sample driven instrumental accented by this “oh god” sample chopped and looped very tightly; it reminds me of one of those old Motown recordings of church groups, improvised and raw. But Roc also looks to darker sounds on the album as well: Puff Daddy is a harsh and devilish synth-fest, with singular piano notes played hard to evoke this sense of impending doom, like someone you don’t want to fuck with is right around the corner coming for you (it reminds me of Omar’s Coming off of Westside Gunn’s FLYGOD, which Roc Marciano is coincidentally featured on). Boosie Fade, with it’s eerie and shrill synth chords everpresent in the mix, as well as these psychedelic synths fading in later in the track, seems tailor made for the Westside Gunn feature, reminding me a lot of a beat that would come from Griselda’s Daringer; it’s like something that would play at a futuristic hood march. Ephesians, as the most discordant and unusual beat in the listing, features these incredibly punchy drums, clipped synths, and these industrial synths that grind away in the background; another track that seems a perfect fit for it’s feature, Ka. But it wouldn’t be a Roc Marciano album without that trademark cockiness in his production, and Marcielago, gives you two doses with Bomb Shelter and Joe Jackson. Bomb Shelter, which while admitting that I’m not a fan of the way the vocals are mixed with the instrumental, is brave for looping this incessantly bold trumpet sample and strong bassline for almost the entirety of the track; it’s almost saying “yeah, I can do this, fuck y’all” with every repetition. Joe Jackson closes out the album with a blues guitar sample, sparing baseline, and sparse snares, which when put together is like the closing credits to a film where the hero has beat everyone, pulled every girl, and lit a cigar while sitting on the hood of his Rolls Royce; a triumphant end to a compelling blaxploitation flick.

It’s rare that an artist can remain so on point for so long, but Roc Marciano continues to show that his skills in all aspects of his artistry do not stagnate, an in some cases (like his production) he continues to grow into a legend in his field. There are a couple references to this album to legacy and legitimacy: on the opening skit, the late Prodigy says that the rap game is a closed circle meant for a select few individuals. The final skit, Legacy, ruminates on what one will leave after they kick the bucket. Marciano, with his legendary talent on the microphone, deep running and strong bonds with his peers, and his impeccable and untouchable production catalogue, isn’t even leaving anything up for question or up for discussion: he *is* one of the select few, and the legacy he is leaving behind is more than just his music, it’s *him*. Roc Marciano will live forever because his music is truly timeless, and his pimp game is too strong to be buried 6 feet deep. Marcielago is Marciano placing the crown on his own head after a decade of influence on the rap game, and you know what? Maybe he deserves it.

Roc Marciano’s Website/YouTube