Record: Snap your Neck Back
Label: Pamplemousse
Year: 2005
Sounds Like: Hip Hop, Rap,Experimental Hip Hop
Country: France
French act ''Gasoline'' started making Hip Hop and sampling and creating dark atmospheres extracted from black films, and b movies, in 1998. The main active member is the DJ and producer Yoann who is also part of the collective of french producers ''L'agence''.
''Snap your Neck Back'' is their second album that appeared in 2005 after their underground acclaimed first experiment ''A journey to the abstract Hip Hop'' which was way more committed to the exploration of Instrumental Hip Hop formulas rather than common rap and rhymes.
In this second work the old school is more present and is more condensed. It also features the American composers ''The Dojo sound'' and DJ Troubl' and the multi instrumentalist Aerodrink.
Snap your Neck back is loosely based on the Water Hill's 1979 cult movie ''The Warriors'' A dense rendition to short loops, dreamy pianos, obscure scratching and so on. Lyrics in French, English and Spanish. Diverse and varied singers and voices offering an intense and certainly a vibrant street, but unusual imagery
Does it Work
Regina Says:I will start this by saying that Kendrick Lamar is an extremely repetitive lyricist and I show myself amazed whenever I hear how lauded this aspect of his music is, while I enjoy his stuff and experimentation, I can't stand his lyrics. When they say that he reinvented Hip Hop and its perception, I shake my head and feel that he only reinforced all the Hip Hop stereotype thing.
And that is something that I experience with American Hip Hop quite often: the street code, the patrol picking niggas, the stash behind the bushes and all that business leave me actually tired at many points. Obviously HH is a cultural thing that often comes from all the marginal racism and choking social conditions that black people have experimented, but Hip Hop, like Punk needs new views, new experiments, new horizons. It is there when I run for other things. It is there where Euro-hip hop gets into the game.
Gasoline SYNB is not the average Hip Hop album that you will find out there. it clearly is not gangsta album per se. I mean, you can easily deduce that the record and people behind it are very distant from America altogether. Mostly because while it is a dense and political record, the canons and most common aspects of American Hip Hop are not truly present. Yess, you guessed, just like happened with Punk rock when the Brits started to do their own Punkish stuff. And, to be honest, it is something that I value and appreciate.
Is this a reason why Gasoline SYNB is an album worth a listen? Why is it the most underrated Hip Hop album ever and why it should be widely recognized as a great concept album?
Fairly...Yes. It is an old school album in a jazzy way in which everything is set perfectly: the rhymes, the beats, the background sounds, the contributions and specially the way everything feels like a cinematographic experience. From the beginning it is so catchy, so thrilling, so much like a vehicle of verses, different voices, transitions references to the cult movie ''The Warriors'', it gets dancey, it gets very dark, the female voices are deliciously timed. The lyrics are extraordinary. The samples from the movie with loops emerging behind.
But ove it all: the variety. There is so much variety here, it tries to provide a different perspective in each song. SYNB is a total experience. One that will give you the chance to consider again your (purposely formed) hate toward the genre, perhaps?
Rate: Fantastic
Menanth says: Hip Hop is a very hazardous material to handle, even though it is a genre that most of people seem to enjoy and be knee to embrace these days, there is also a very bleak atmosphere of extreme saturation that (like happens in most of cases) will end up breaking the back of the whole movement/genre/style. Nevertheless, this record is something different, the Hip Hop stuff is more like a tool and not the whole machinery itself. I can say that this record is the album that I always wanted from Hip Hop, the record that I would try to pick as a youngster when I'd dig into Hip Hop stuff, I can say that it feel just too good, it goes trhough your blood stream and hickjack your whole attention almost immediately, and I agree with Regina on the fact that it truly sticks out as a very underrated album, it just has this vibe of perfect Hip Hop, cruedely yet ambiciously created.