Another Planet? A Visit with Phiik and Lungs’s Another Planet 4

Are First Impressions an Opening Salvo or a Death Sentence?

I started exploring the rapper Lungs (and his production moniker Lonestar) after his most recent appearance on “Steel Pan Labyrinth” off the new Shrapknel album Nobody Planning to Leave. I was caught off guard by the sudden beat shift and by his speedy, almost cloistered delivery. He had a lot to say and he was absolutely going to fit it into his verse.

Reading some press on the album, Lungs appeared to be up-and-coming and was not on my radar at all. I was curious about him after hearing the verse, so I started to seek out some of his other projects. One of these, in particular, was Another Planet 4, a collaborative series and project with fellow New York rapper Phiik. I listened to a few of the songs from it while driving around one afternoon. I put it on a playlist to come on after the aforementioned Shrapknel record(It’s worth noting that Shrapknel, though not the focus of this review, are a major throughline for how I got to Another Planet 4 and why I interacted with it beyond what I am about to describe in my first listen) album finished playing. When the album switched over, I was confused and even a little put off. The beats were short, but sparse loops with minimal (or altogether absent) percussion. The rhymes and delivery were particularly dense and free flowing, focusing less on a cadence and pocket and more on the sentiment being expressed. Lines seemed to be unrelated and didn’t focus on a specific moment, but rather painted a broader, more abstract idea. It was a lot, especially when considering the cohesiveness of the most recent Shrapknel record I had just finished listening to for what felt like the 15th or 500th time. All of this is a longer way of saying that I wasn’t feeling the project.

And then I found out that these two were an opening act for Shrapknel’s tour that I had recently purchased a ticket to see. I wondered if I maybe missed something with Phiik and Lungs, and at the very least I could have a better notion of how they might perform live. I decided I would give the record a few more chances before the concert. I spun it several times, but I still wasn’t sure how to deal with the sound they were creating and the ways it existed. At the show, they definitely were impressive in their ability to perform their verses, but I just couldn’t feel the energy the way I felt the performances of the other acts.

One of the tenets of this “Staying Power” series of essays/articles/whatever is that I don’t want to do traditional reviews with a pros and cons list, so it may seem awkward or even contradictory that I go out of my way to tell you all the ways this project wasn’t clicking with me over the course of my interactions with it before and even during the show. Maybe it was a byproduct of the sustained listening I’ve done for the other records I’ve covered these past few months, but my initial ambivalence/outright lack of enjoyment with this record was why I continued to dig into it long after my initial listen and after the concert. I wondered what I might find by exploring my bias about their sound. I wanted to detach myself from my initial and subsequent reactions to the project and try to consider the things this group was doing and why they were doing it. Of most importance to me was this question: is this my bias about what a rap album should sound like?

Forebears and Touchstones

During the Shrapknel show, Premrock shouted out the openers and said a little bit about each of them. When speaking on Phiik and Lungs, he commended them for being unwilling to compromise with their style and ethos. That is certainly true; their sound is especially lyrics- driven, taking the delivery styles of artists without inflection to an extreme (they make 21 Savage sound like Ol’ Dirty Bastard). Meanwhile, the beats that Lungs produces (which as minimal as most of them are, are particularly interesting) are more a blank canvas for them to wander in varying degrees of speed and staccato. When I consider what’s missing, I just felt like I wanted to hear a little more traditional rhythm in the style and beats.

That’s not to say there’s no tradition or influences at work here. In an interview with Lungs and Fatboi Sharif on RhymeBeat, Lungs talks about The Fugees’ monolithic album The Score being his first hip hop album. I find this so interesting because The Score in particular is one of those genre-defining albums but is also based in the sounds of its era and Lauryn Hill’s ascension as a totemic figure in rap and RnB. It’s probably about as traditional a rap record as any other big time 90s rap darling. Lung’s second record, however, was Cannibal Ox’s The Cold Vein.

Though I don’t see any sort of influence from The Fugees, I do see a lot of the ethos of early Def Jux, particularly El-P and the aforementioned Cannibal Ox. Lungs and Phiik mirror some of El-P’s earliest off-kilter flows, though they do take it a bit further and over much less involved beats than the richly-produced earliest works of Def Jux. On “Don’t Lose “Em” the two are rapid fire word-associating to create a setting of paranoia where Lungs mentions both Lana Del Ray and questions if “it’s dudes rapping or Steve Bannon.” They also spend time shouting out New York and the Grip collective they are affiliated with, notable member Akai Solo actually has a solo track “Been a Few Days” on the the album. The beat to “Don’t Lose Em” itself is a suspenseful sound hit with the only percussive sound being a stretched, distorted clacking of sorts, almost akin to the sound of a copier shooting out paper but pitched and slowed down. Phiik and Lungs each spacing the bars loosely, only noting the passage of time with the ways they occasionally gulp for air.

The recrod also plays with the otherworldly, space adjacent spaces of Def Jux sounds, particularly the Iron Galaxy/Space motif that features heavily into The Cold Vein. On “Captain Picard” Lungs lyrics focus on androids being hunted by a shadowy government in one breath and then telling Amazon, rather crassly, that he isn’t working on Mars. Phiik on the other hand makes reference to 90s era technology like “more crashes on Windows 95” and name dropping Crash Bandicoot. In “Saudi Arabian AF 1’s” Lungs closes his first by suggesting he’ll unfreeze himself in the future to kill Bill Gates. All of these happen in a disjointed, rolling sequences without choruses, without much percussion, though some of the songs do play with more traditional rap percussion a bit more such as the aforementioned “Saudi Arabian AF 1’s” and album closer “Worse Off than Drug Addicts.”

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that Lungs’s production style and some of his subject matter plays with a strain of music made popular in the era of Roc Marciano, Ka, and even some of the Griselda records roster. As I mentioned before, the production toys with minimal to lacking percussion and that is certainly something that has loomed large in the careers of Roc Marciano and Ka. Additionally, the references to plugs (referring to a person providing large scale amounts/connections to drugs), though a bit more obscure than Griselda artists like Benny the Butcher and Stove God Cooks more terrestrial references, we still hear about the Plug’s shorty being in a talking phase with Lungs, AOL Instant Messenger connections, and other idiosyncratic connections/references that make the plug less like an imposing figure or like the all important, god-like connection that Griselda artists talk up and more another bizarre character in a strange world.

Phiik, on the other hand, is a bit more influenced lyrically by curiosity and the esoteric rappers of the past. Though both are incredibly dense, verbose rappers, Phiik’s internal structure of his rhymes is often a bit more complicated and a little more rooted in the traditional place and time of lineage in rap. His closing verse on “Worse Off than Drug Addicts” starts with a bit of wisdom and self-awareness that shifts to talk tough. “No perspective like self/I’m still spilling wealth/she shelf life irrelevant/I’m only stepping in rooms without elephants/you doubt development/I’m delving into hell to crack Belvidere and swing the bottle like Bellinger.” In fact, most of Phiik’s lines showcase strong internal rhyme. While this is no criticism of Lungs, who is holding his own and is responsible for all of the sounds heard on the album, Phiik’s delivery, though also rooted in the speed of his thoughts, is definitely more minded in technical feats of delivery, and a little more prone to some, still exceptionally minor, inflection. Though Lungs also mentions New York, Phiik seems to be more mindful of his place in New York rap and less in the otherworldly spaces Lungs inhabits.

Bolder, Stranger Territory

I had to start with thinking about the ways these two seem inspired by the past to get past some of my initial angst with the record. By exploring connections via the subject, ethos, or style of contemporaries and sound ancestors, I was able to find a thread to place them, but it does a disservice to this album to reduce it to a collage of tradition and amalgamation of styles. Though these two are creating from past ideas and sounds, they are clearly a unique product of growing up in the information age and an inclusive worldview.

As I mentioned, the work toys with space, technologies of the recent past, and an uncertain future, but all of it is a product of a ruined world. The muted beats are often evocative of a sense of claustrophobia and paranoia, and this is only compounded by a frenetic and metrically blurry delivery. Both rappers rarely feel like they adhere to a metrically standard bar or measure of music within their delivery. The beats being so minimal allow them a great deal more leeway here, but it is still jarring. Beyond the blurry flow, the focus of verses flits within a stream of conscious style, wildly veering from idea to idea. Within the subjects of the songs, we are treated to the decay of focus with the rare moments of uplifting sounds addressing some form of transcendence or rejection/escape. Telling off the all-powerful and present demands of Amazon, ruminating on the fragility of space travel in “Death Weapons” and even the moments of 21st century tough talk, both rappers are commenting on the debauchery around them and doing so in an ode to the scattered and fractured 21st century attention span.

What’s even more interesting is that Lungs particularly responds to issues of our time, “if I ever have kids I’ma love them for exactly who they is like Dwayne Wade” is one of the stray lines in “Don Quixote.” This line is quickly delivered and then it shifts to ideas of haze and “a lot of these cats are trying to sober up like White Claw Gabe.” Though the issue of unconditional love for children is quickly glossed over, it is a particularly salient moment in the song and a uniquely modern stance in a hip hop song, especially when we consider the relative controversy about “traditional” and more “progressive” social views impacting not only hip-hop but the country as well. Later, he mentions “fake-ass rap dudes posting homophobic tweets than act surprised when they got canceled” on “She Could.” These are isolated moments, but they work in concert with the notion of a dissatisfaction with the current world or, at least, the world that Lungs observes and responds to in these songs.

What Does it All Mean?

I started and stopped this writing piece on at least three different occasions. My first take was all rooted in some version of the tradition that Phiik and Lungs were subverting, but it read too much like a think piece on New York rap in the past and the way this is evolving on Another Planet 4. I found it challenging to think about the album in isolated pieces, to pull examples when so much of it is so complex in delivery, scattered/blurry in focus, and brief in time (the album is about 43 minutes but is mostly just two frenetic verses and some vocal samples per song, each moment almost over before it begins). This complicated my second iteration where I tried to thread the past and the present a little more.

What I want to leave you with is this: I had to sit with this record for a long time and really work through a series of thoughts and my preconceived notions about what I love when I consume rap. While I am no stranger to unorthodox music, I find that my rap sensibilities struggle when a record strays from the lineage and tradition of music. It would have been easy to let this one go by the wayside, and in truth, I likely would have had I not been so curious about how their live show would translate when I saw them with Shrapknel.

When I sat and considered my biases a little more regarding the stream of conscious stylings and muted beats, I was able to push them off and see the stuff within the album that made it a unique, compelling listen. Would I love to hear these guys put out a more traditional sounding record with some of the off-the-wall sounds and styles present on this record? Absolutely, but I think some of the magic Phiik and Lungs possess would be lost in the process. As Premrock said, they don’t compromise, and they certainly should not have to either. What we’re left with is, as the title of the record suggests, another planet entirely, but it is worth considering how it is also very much a piece of our own. It’s worth our time investigating and exploring what all of this in its twists and turns might mean for and to the listener.