Damien HolstersFor alternative hip hop, the golden age was the 2000s. Following a somewhat binary decade where rap was either gangsta and hardcore or afro-centric and jazzy, the turn of the century is when hip hop, ripe for the next step in its evolution, expanded into a beautiful fragmentation of styles and subgenres, one that would submerge this dichotomy. The digital masses’ increased demand for a redefinition of “cool”, and their appetite for something different, was matched by output from artists who grew up listening to rap as one genre among others, and whose artistry reflected an eclectic taste.
Independent labels like Rhymesayers, Def Jux, Anticon or Doomtree re-wrote the
underground playbook, both stylistically and commercially, as terms like emo rap or nerdcore were first used. On the mainstream side of things, it was a great time for genre-blending and crossover appeal, best exemplified by acts like Black Eyed Peas, K-os or K’Naan, and by songs like The Roots and Cody Chestnutt’s “The Seed 2.0”, OutKast’s “Hey Ya”, or Kanye’s “Love Lockdown”. A major beneficiary of this fragmentation was rap rock, which, after the early days of Blondie, Tone-Loc, Run-DMC, PE or the Beastie Boys, entered a second phase of nu metal-inspired relevance: Woodstock ’99 famously featured breakout stars like Linkin Park, Limp Bizkit or ICP, who dominated the first part of the decade, while the second belonged to Fort Minor, Flobots or Hollywood Undead (Rage Against The Machine being the link between the two phases.)
In the midst of this rap rock resurgence, a Bay Area group put together a project
which, at least to one Washington Post critic, was nothing less than the best rap album of 2005. Released on Interscope the same year as “The Rising Tied” by Fort Minor, Flipsyde’s first effort, “We The People”, was far from unsuccessful: it sold 62,000 units, its two singles (“Happy Birthday” and “Someday”) reached the charts, and the latter, which currently has 72M views on YouTube, was even chosen by NBC to promote the 2006 Winter Olympics. The trio, made up of emcees Steve Knight and Piper, and guitarist Dave Lopez, went on to tour with the likes of Snoop Dogg, Akon and the Black Eyed Peas. Yet, 20 years later, it seems the rear-view mirror shows them as little more than two-hit wonders (by contrast, “The Rising Tied”, which went platinum, recently got a vinyl reissue). Interscope dropped the group after their second album flopped, and none of their following projects grasped mainstream attention. Exemplative of the online indifference Flipsyde now suffers from, their Wikipedia page has read for years that “they’re currently working on a new project together”.
Don’t trust the rear-view mirror. Look for yourself and zoom in: you might appreciate that, not only was “We The People” truly one of the great rap albums of the year, but also that Flipsyde managed to create their own unique style, somewhere between West Coast rap rock, Latin hip hop and Quannum-style Left Coast hip hop. “Someday”, the song that actually caught the attention of Interscope’s Jimmy Levine and opens the album, lays out the Flipsyde formula in all its originality: Steve Knight takes care of the chorus, Piper of the ad-libs. Their voices – Knight’s, high, raspy, almost RnB-ish ; Piper’s, low, thicker, more stereotypically hip hop – complement each other as well as sun and sea, and prefigure Hollywood Undead’s combo of Danny singing and Johnny 3 Tears rapping. Both get a verse, and so does Dave Lopez: only his is without words. “A guitar solo is just like another verse, (…) another way of talking”, he says, and it’s hard to disagree, especially when his mastery of acoustic and electric guitars shines throughout the project and is essential to the group’s identity. The lyrics – figurative in the chorus, concrete in the verses – speak of overcoming adversity and hoping to break free from shackles both social and spiritual. This formula can also be identified on “Spun”, “Flipsyde”, “Train” or “Skippin’ Stones”. Because of how unique it is, how personal and true to each member’s own strengths, instead of making the album sound formulaic, it gives it that distinctive vibe: a Flipsyde song is unmistakable.
Note that this pattern isn’t the only thing that makes the album sound cohesive. Out of the three subgenres mentioned above, it’s no surprise two share a geographical origin: if we had to pick the main words that describe this album, California would be one of them. Arranged by Michael Urbano, drummer for a variety of Californian rock bands throughout the 90s, highlighted by rapid-fire flows and switches in delivery reminiscing of Bone-Thugs or Busdriver, heavy on G-Funk whistle synths, loud, flamboyant, relentless, unmitigatedly catchy; it plays like the ideal score for a late-day, open-roof, scenic drive in the Bay. Synesthetes might very well experience this album as any color on the sunset palette – a San Francisco sunset to be specific. (Unfortunately, the cover of the album, with its Old English font and Heineken green hue, more closely resembles the draft for a beer logo.) The group’s Latin-American tinge only adds to this California-ness: Piper, born to a Brazilian father, drops four bars in Portuguese on party song “Get Ready”, which serves as a great reminder that the Golden State is home to one of the largest lusophone communities in the US. As for Dave Lopez, who is originally from Chile, he admits doing “a lot of Latin licks” and claims that “whenever [he jams] on something, that Latin feel just comes out”. His verse on “Someday” might be his smoothest on this project, and fittingly, there probably hadn’t been a better original guitar composition on a rap song since Lauryn Hill paired with another Latin-American rocker on “To Zion”…
Latin America influenced Flipsyde in other ways. Knight actually speaks Portuguese on another track, “Revolutionary Beat”, this time to pay homage, among other insurgents, to a legendary figure from his father’s country:
“From Zumbi dos Palmares na mata fechada
To Commando Vermelho bustin’ at the cops with them choppers
Che Guevara and Castro bangin’ in Cuba
To the Zapatistas and Latin Kings that bust with that Ruger”
These proper nouns bring us to a second word that could define this album: Revolution. Released amid the turmoil of the Bush years, “We The People” is ironically titled: as Piper and Knight’s lyrics roam through themes of racism, poverty and war, they certainly do not paint the image of a more perfect union. As is often the case in rap music, the group holds an ambiguous view of violence: they deplore it (“Got a name and street fame, Jesus Christ couldn’t save him / And he gon’ ride until that day he gone”), but they glorify it at the same time, depicting it as the only way to fight back against political oppression (“If we can’t live in peace then fuck it let’s die / (…) Catch a traitor and stick a needle in his eye”). Yet, it should be said that Flipsyde, especially through Piper, retain a degree of level-headedness that isn’t all that common in political hip hop. The song “U.S. History”, in which he personifies the U.S. in the first person, stands out for its didactic qualities: it’s not a sweeping, hysterical bashing, it’s actually a fair and reasonable crash course, with bits of witty satire (“I got a nephew named Israel that’s right in the middle / Pay his allowance as long as he can dance to my fiddle”). Refreshingly, Piper manages to be (very) critical of his country without portraying it as the de facto bad guy. Consider the two following quartets, respectively taken from the aforementioned song and “No More”:
“Saudi Arabia’s cool, got a son Bin Laden
I was trainin’ his soldiers to go against the Russians and stop ’em
Then he tried to say I need to take my soldiers and cut
Gave him the finger, that’s when he flipped and blew my shit up”
“Moqtada al Sadr, Bin Laden, Al Qaeda
They all multiplyin’ and hidin’ and George can’t find ’em
And even if he did and killed them, then another would come
We makin’ enemies faster than we could pick up a gun”
Rather than solely attributing America’s bellicism to power-thirst or malice, Piper depicts a flawed society struggling to do what’s right in a hostile world. That might be a low bar for nuance but let’s not forget that by contrast, two years earlier, Immortal Technique’s rash anti-Americanism resulted in “Cause of Death”, a disgraceful anthem for the 9/11 truther movement.
Is Flipsyde watered down political rap then? Absolutely not. Uncle Sam is excoriated throughout the album, Bush getting the brunt of it. In the purest tradition of conscious hip hop, they invest artists with the mission of enlightening the people, as when Piper’s personified America on “U.S. History” accuses “the sons of Africa [who] invented this shit called rap” of “telling [its] secrets”. And as noted above, they do push forward notions of revolution and radical change. Yet, there is a kind of permeating cynicism on “We The People”, one that stems from deeper waters than circumstantial geopolitical factors, and keeps Flipsyde from black-and-white absolutes: their belief seems to be that there is something wrong with humanity at large, not just the U.S. “The world is at war / No discussion, just draw your sword”, says Piper, and it’s unclear whether that last bit is an observation or an injunction.
As such, if we were to look for a third word to describe this piece, we might opt for cynicism, maybe pessimism. Or, to keep it even simpler, we might just say Death. There’s a layer of darkness to Flipsyde’s songs. (Should we say underneath them?) Go back to the chorus on “Someday”:
“Someday we’re gonna rise up on that wind, you know
Someday we’re gonna dance with those lions”
It’s possible to read these lines through political lenses, but they might evoke a different kind of liberation: one from the burden of a hard-knock life. This, as well as similar choruses on “Spun” or “Train”, become ambiguous in that regard, although sometimes that ambiguity makes room for a kind of explicit, boastful nihilism, as on the chorus of the group’s eponymous track:
“And it don’t matter if it’s right or it’s wrong, as long as it is
And it’s all good and we’re gonna get grown
And every day we face a battle inside
But it don’t matter if we win or lose, we all gonna die”
As such, bereavement is at the core of one of the group’s most popular songs, and the second single on the album: “Happy Birthday”, an epistolary song written to an aborted child, from the perspective of his dad. While this track was hijacked by some pro-life contributors on Genius, who see it as an all-out defense of their cause, debates about personhood and when it starts are actually beside the point: this is a song about the pain, grief, doubt and guilt of a parent who aborted, and the staunchest pro-choice advocate could relate to it: supporting a woman’s right to choose (“I never tell a woman what to do with her body” raps Piper) doesn’t mean being blind to how soul-crushing the decision and its aftermath can be. It’s a timeless song, and one of the most poignant one can find about this issue, in any genre.
Were Flipsyde too pop-skewing for hardcore hip hop fans, not enough of a band for the rap rock crowd? Do they actually qualify as rap rock? That genre consists mostly of rock music with rap verses: Flipsyde is a rap group with guitar verses. Band or group ; rap rock, art rap or alterlatino… Some fans and critics might care about these technical boundaries: greatness doesn’t. A rap group, by any other name, rocks just as well. In the end, the only genre they might’ve truly belonged to is underground hip hop. And they weren’t underground simply because they ultimately didn’t maintain a mainstream audience, but because they were true to the underground ideal of authenticity and craftsmanship. As such, they remain a testament to the great music that exists, on the flip side of rap.