#35: Divine Styler — Spiral Walls Containing Autumns of Light (1992)
Los Angeles, CA — Eve Jim Studios
“lol this album is fucked. its difficult or impossible to explain just hiow ficuking wierd this album is. anybody looking to break free from some stereotypes regarding what rap is or should be should take a listen. loollo i hav eno idea how to describe this album” — Gloob, circa 2023
Fellas, I’m not gonna beat around the bush with this one. This is not an album you’ll hear about in the early 90s hip-hop conversation. This is not something you’ll ever see in those “top 100 essential hiphop records of all time” lists, and was something I added to this list one hundred percent of my own volition, given how criminally underappreciated it is. This is not your run-of-the-mill sci-fi flavored conscious rap — hell, this barely even qualifies as rap at all. It has been described by AllMusic as “…a [glittering] dark jewel, equally nightmarish and astonishingly beautiful […] ‘Parliament/Funkadelic meets The Residents’, and even this doesn’t hint at the sheer range and ability on display […] the album Prince could only wish to make in the ’90s — all-encompassing, spiritual, disturbing, and never, ever boring”. It was by far the most unconventional hip-hop album ever made by the time of its release, and might still be to this very day, more than 30 years later; and yet it remains mostly unknown to the general public. And man, was I looking forward for the time for me to review this to finally come around.
It would be somewhat unnacurate to label Divine Styler as just a rapper — not that being “just a rapper” would be less dignified or artistic, mind you, but rather that his artistic scope here goes further than the usual blueprint of hip-hop creation. Hailing from hip-hop powerhouse Brooklyn, Mikal Safiyullah (born Mark Richardson) not only raps and produces but also plays a myriad of instruments like guitars, keyboards and miscellaneous percussions, as well as some singing here and there. It’s not just as a musician that his all-encompassing artistry shines, though: this album is a firm product of very personal creation and direction, a veritable journey through his mind, a deep dive into a disturbed, incongruous, conflicted and extremely intimate lyrical soundscape, peppered with afrofuturism, surrealist poetry and sunni mysticism. But let’s take it one step at a time.
Divine Styler was never your average rapper. That doesn’t mean, though, that he was always the very out-of-the-average rapper he is in Spiral Walls. Starting his career in 1989, on Ice-T’s famous Rhyme Syndicate posse, he would release his first album, Word Power. It’s a mostly conventional record, entirely produced by the illustrious Bilal Bashir, but in it, among his “…scattering 5%erism and gratuitous thesaurus abuse with traditional battle raps”, some foreshadowing of the egregiously off-the-wall stuff that would come with his next release were already present. Word Power was immediately held in high regard by critics and fans alike, but was nevertheless a commercial failure, for the most part due to Styler’s uncanny style of rhyming. Spiral Walls Containing Autumns of Light, released three years later, would be one of those cases of history repeating itself, first as tragedy and later as farce: by fully and purposefully embracing his tendencies toward unapologetically left-field, high-concept writing and producing, he would warmly embrace his loyal fans’ appreciation of his uniqueness and flip commercial imperatives off in one fell swoop.
Spiral Walls Containing Autumns of Light solidified space shit status. LSD fueled chanting naked drum circle in space shit. It was the first truly transgressive album from a hip hop artist — to call it a hip hop record would be a disgrace to the genre and a discredit to whatever he was trying to do with the album, but he was really the first rapper to go crazy. Not in the Young Jeezy watching the d-boys sense, maybe closer to Canibus painting his entire body silver or Andre 3000 thinking he should sing like Prince crazy. It was like dude went from idolizing Rakim to channeling Genesis P. Orridge. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing, as far as avant garde music goes, the record is one of the most adventurous major label releases of it’s era. But he also broke the hearts of a few rap fans anticipating more elite articulate mouth architecture (pause) and James Brown loops. [source]
Where to start, then? The complex, sometimes nigh-incomprehensibly cryptical bars to be found all throughout? The ubiquitous, deeply personal, spiritual themes? Or the absolutely wild production and instrumentation? Differently than most rap albums at that time, Spiral Walls consists mostly of live band recordings rather than sequenced beats, and the little machine beats there are in here usually go in a rather unorthodox direction, with strong industrial influences at times. This makes for a highly versatile musical setup, and most instrumentals in here aren’t really rap beats at all; instead, we have a wide array of funk, alt rock, folk, noise, psychedelica, new wave and no wave tracks upon which Styler just so happens to be rapping, or whispering, or singing, or chanting, or yelling, on.
There is musical variation to an excess that really doesn’t ever allow you to let your guard down: you might be feeling relaxed after the psychy, late-Beatles-esque groove of Grey Matter, and not at all prepared for the disjointed, ominous, atonal, angsty mess that is Heaven Don’t Want Me And Hell’s Afraid I’ll Take Over; even the chaos of Heaven… will not prepare you for the egregious, noisy, extremely heavy-hitting force of nature that Mystic Sheep Drink Electric Tea is, and Width In My Depth’s mellow, folky strumming and whispering feel almost disconcerting after that much of a wild ride.
The sequencing in general is a thing to behold: it’s never predictable at all, and you’re constantly a little on edge from start to finish, but with just enough narrative and aesthetic cohesion to not feel just disjointed and random. Spiral never allows you to get entirely comfortable, but is also not so jarring all throughout; the tension ebbs and flows, the weirdness and grooviness take turns dictating the general tone but never but never really subside, and even during the most comfortable moments there is always this little flea behind your ear, softly biting your skin and never allowing you to grow used to it.
And what about the raps? His bars sound almost like riddles sometimes, but not in a random, weird-for-the-sake-of-weird way. There is order to his chaos, there are solid, consistent themes all throughout — it’s just that they are sometimes hidden behind nonlinear, unconventional trains of thought, and are meant to convey different but simultaneous ideas at the same time. At the time of this album’s release, Mikal was a recent convert to Islam, and, as such, made it a strong theme in his work. In between references to afrofuturism and visions of a bleak, divided world, he preaches the peace of Allah as the path to look up to. It’s not, however, preachy as one would expect given the way the theme is approached by various other artists at the time; Styler fashions a poetic, intimate, oneiric flow of consciousness, kind of halfway between a prayer and a sleepwalker’s mumbling, with no clear boundary between his description of reality and his inner musings.
His writing is uncompromisingly original and unique. He doesn’t really write like a rapper as much as he does on Word Power, but rather like a poet from the beat generation, like someone who would feel at home alongside both Gil Scott-Heron and William Burroughs, brimming with fertile metaphors and images. Technique isn’t really the focus here, and he barely bothers to rhyme his bars at all, let alone build elaborate schemes, but his mastery shines in the incredible, wild, spewing images, unabashed delirium and meandering visions of humanity’s future, both in this material plane and in the spiritual one.
I don’t want to be excessively comparative, but looking back on last week’s review, this is kinda like if you stripped Organized Konfusion of everything but the high-concept weirdness and penchant for performative drama, turned it up to eleven and added a good pinch of exquisitely-executed avant-garde live instrumentation to top it off. Is Spiral Walls an easy listen? No. Is it adequate for casual jamming? Most definitely not; it’s one of my favorite albums ever, but I’d be surprised to discover I’ve jammed it more than two dozen or so times to this day. It’s most obviously not a conventional music album; it’s also a statement, a highbrow art piece of sorts, not really in the same category as most hip-hop albums — hell, I’d say it’s not even in the same category as Styler’s other albums, which, while still unconventional and high-concept, are firmly situated within a palatable, if still uncompromisingly original, aesthetic. Spiral Walls Containing Autumns of Light truly is a one-of-a-kind work, a somber gem that will forever discreetly but insistently shine in the underworld of outsider music.
Favorite tracks
Livery: probably the only track in here that can be fully qualified as a proper hip-hop song, this one hits hard, fast and precise. Surrealistic explorations go hand in hand with skilled writing, creating this extremely high-energy sonic and lyrical scenery that’s so good to get lost in. “Brother’s dream so divine, have all city king/ For enhancement and please enchantment/ Swing the whole jungle of boogie for the ends/ Dance, dance to the loveless song of expression/ No pop-radical functions deliver me/ Come into the jungle of boogie to the livery/ No pop-eradical functions deliver me/ Come to the jungle of boogie to the livery”.
Grey Matter: this one features those eerie flutes and this prominent grooving that sounds like late-60s Beatles with a little extra pinch of psychedelia thrown in, and also some of Styler’s tightest flows in this entire joint, even though his delivery is kind of in the middle of the way between spoken word and proper rapping. “My opinion diction is the heaviest metal/ Plus this justice behooves you to settle/ Under Allah I have yet to show the autumn is cry to born/ Grey the never last matter of infinity […] It’s all about my grey matter, grey matter, grey matter, grey matter/ It’s a matter of fact that I’m fiction/ That ain’t nothin’ but my opinion diction”.
Mystic Sheep Drink Electric Tea: if Death Grips and Silver Apples had a lovechild, this one might be the emotional apex of Spiral Walls. Absolute heavy-hitter, as jarring as it is intense, features an instrumental track that is both uncomfortable and uncanny as it is strangely beautiful; it also only feels even more disconcerting when you consider that it immediately goes into Width In My Depth, a soulful, noodly, loungy folk track with tasteful guitar strumming and mellow lyrics about spiritual awakening and inner peace. “Autumns of light, continuing light/ Into the light, a good lie […] You’re my autumn/ Forever (light)/ Into the mystery world/ Dance, boys and girls/ Mystic sheep drink electric tea/ Mystic sheep drink electric tea”
The Next: maybe my favorite from a purely musical standpoint, it has this extremely cool soul instrumentation and spoken word delivery. It’s maybe where Styler’s ideas are better articulated, and he goes on this rant about how there must be hope for humanity after all — but still in his characteristically cryptic style, of course. “Yo, let’s tell the world/ About how the next may be near/ And the next may be far/ But check this out, kid/ After here is it more war?/ I don’t know but I’m outta here/ My space is my machine/ Two lights in which I dream/ Machine tangible blue/ Reflection who?/ Allah everywhere/ Inner through”
