[LOGS]

INTRODUCTION

first and foremost, I would like to address the fact that i'm not a media outlet. I don't care about near anything that's happening on the internet, or really anything outside of the circle of what pertains to me in general. I'd be lying if I said that this would be an unbiased media outlet, where I always give objective commentary on anything that has any kind of traction. If your looking for that there are plenty of blogs out there (underground underdogs, who I've worked with before and work frequently with their lead designer Avery aka TUNNEL RAT), this is simply a platform that is a projection of my stream of consciousness. Maybe a review here and there, maybe even an interview, but for the most part this will be an inconsistent and in-congruent grapeshot of whatever manifests itself in this echo chamber.

-4153, 2/20/2019

LIL UGLY MANE AND THE MOLDY UNDERGROUND

The monday before last marked the 7th anniversary of Mista Thug Isolation, which for many (including me) was the first introduction to this larger than life character attached to an artist with no name or face. I remember when it dropped the internet was a completely different environment than what we have now. The traffic wasn't even existent in the highway of information on most music platforms, the salmon swam up different streams as most people couldn't see the writing on the walls of what the potential audience you could garner from music videos on youtube. I was 15 back then, OFWGKTA and Marble Hornets were the only channel on youtube I checked daily, Das Racist (probably making a whole entry for them), Danny Brown, and Despot we're all making music together, Ham on Everything was making RiFF RAFF videos every other week, and all the other shit an aging millennial can reminisce about. My life and what happened with and around it was simpler than what it is now, it was the dawn of a completely different landscape in music that spoke to an audience that was never really spoken for.

Who came out during the first half of this decade defined a group of people cross sectioned by age, race, and every line that could be drawn to compartmentalise a kid. Me and my friends never fell into one particular trope, and the rappers we listened to didn't either, they weren't something radio stations couldn't articulate the way they couldn't try and appeal to us. But back then I had a deep sense that I had to have a catalogue of music I listened to that no one else had, I guess to individualize myself from my peers, so I spent a lot of time during these years on my own searching the internet for albums that had 250 views on them, were over a decade old, and anything I felt nobody was paying attention to.

I had been a casual fan of Ugly for the first few years after that release, playing the fan made video for Throw Dem Gunz everyone and their mother has watched from time to time, but never digging much deeper than the surface of an iceberg only peeking its body. It wasn't until my college years that I truly could begin to grasp the forbidden dimension that album had been grown out of, and once I discovered it, I drove straight in much like Gordon Freeman with his crowbar. August of 2018 was the first time Lil Ugly Mane would play in San Diego, and there was no actual way I wouldn’t physically have been separated from that room on that night. A lil Ugly Mane show is something I can’t describe with mere comparison, as it lives in a vacuum separate from genre. The intensity and chaos of a hardcore show, parred with mic passes to the crowd and stage dives. It's how I ended up being on stage arm and arm with Ugly himself, screaming the lyrics to slack in my mack into the faces of a crowd that afterward asked me if I was part of his entourage. Believe me when I say it was one of the best nights of my life.

The point of my anecdote is to add in the last fuses of what i'm actually trying to talk about, i'm indulging in my own freedom from no pressure to cater for an audience that isn't going to ever read this. This is the same freedom that the creator without an ID had when they created Lil Ugly Mane, except there is a person in the middle of that exit sign, named Travis Miller. The only form of artist I could possibly entrap someone like Travis into is an escape artist, because he will always find a way to simply fold into the walls and out the other side. He is Houdini performing his final trick, and his final trick is any persona he feels gains too much traction or attention to himself as a real person. Since dropping Mista Thug virtually all of his projects dropped are more obscured and self deprecated then the previous, as if he wants to devolve the very concept of what that album represented. In MTI Ugly was the hood’s supervillain, he had the world wrapped around his finger as he boasted in his opulence and seemingly complete lack of inner reflection. This deconstruction really seemed to become full term with Travis’ 2017 release Volume 1: Flick Your Tongue Against Your Teeth and Describe the Present under the alias Bedwetter. The very name he bears in this album has a completely polarized implication than his initial releases as Lil Ugly mane, he is a broken down feeble cytoplasm of a human where nights a swept within swells of recurrent traumatic memories. Every track either tells a tale of disfunction, disorder, and mental decay. Everything else found on his bandcamp is a burial ground of miscellaneous projects he's done over his 20 year career, a testament to his lack of desire for any true formal one.

Lil Ugly Mane IS the underground, he's not just a name laminated and placed into a physical copy identical to others in all form placed onto a shelf with no markings to define itself. Others try to claim this title, but in the act of doing so are merely rolled farther down the stack of books from where that word really means. When you strip away all the names, all the songs, all the artwork, all the back catalogues, all the collaborations, all you find is a man who doesn’t want to be unearthed, and proceeds to burrow further into dungeons unseen by mankind for millenia and caves of untold fortune he may or may not show to those who live above.

“But what if he was bored and there was no between the lines, it was a way to pass the time, he liked the way it rhymed”

-4153, 2/27/2019

REVERSIBLE BIRTH

I lived a thousand deaths, and I just keep living

And I just keep grinning, and I just keep grinning

I lived a thousand deaths, and I just keep living

And my head keeps spinning, and my door keeps thinning

I lived a thousand deaths, and I just keep living

And I just keep living, and I just keep living

-Rb, 2/28/2019