Paul Thompson will run through your crew like the flu
An episode is a smaller part of a longer television show, but it can also be an isolated incident.Open Mike Eagle has been playing the TV comedy angle for a year now; before Dark Comedy dropped last June, he was throwing concerts that were billed as ‘variety shows’ and were decorated with framed pictures of Laura Palmer from Twin Peaks. He thinks we all killed her.
His new EP, A Special Episode Of, winks and nods at both its title’s meanings. According to Eagle, the six-track set is a current events-driven affair, short enough to digest after the news and before New Girl; it also comes during the period, bizarre and wonderful (and who knows how brief?) when Open Mike Eagle is the best rapper on Earth. This week he debuted “Raps For When It’s Just You And The Abyss” from the EP.
You can say that a band’s name defines them, but that’s lazy criticism and almost never true. “Abyss” lifts its hook from a song by Broken Social Scene. Mike is less concerned with diagnosing things as ‘broken’ than he is in understanding their machinations. “And life is a mystery school/ I’m on the airplane learning social delivery cues.”
His lady gets her haircut at the local salon; she doesn’t have to hide from ISIS and Boka Haram. Dang. “Infinity pool” rhymes with “rickety stool”. Mike engages with pop culture as something more than clickbait, where the trending topics are tactile things he process, stores, and recalls later. “My inner monologue is Com’s speech from the Golden Globes” won’t age because how long ago was Selma and who watches the Golden Globes? The specificity of his music feels time and time again like a direct reflection of how he relates to the outside world, so right-brained he can’t grow an even beard.
But “Abyss” is about pacing back and forth. It starts in a room “thirty miles south of Malibu” and is punctuated by frustrated fists against computer desks. Where 2012’s Rappers Will Die Of Natural Causes was driven by high-concept ideas carried out to their conclusion, Mike’s current work excels when he jumps from time measurements on Venus to LA Weekly features, from Cheshire cats to cooking crack. It’s scattered only in the way that water circling a drain is scattered—the imperfect process of trying to finish something great
