Open Mike Eagle
Dark Comedy
Open Mike Eagle, how do you do it? I know there is a picture of you in a cape and tights somewhere down the semen-stained corridors of the internet. To be riding such a wave of such creativity, such vision, such inspiration must be fucking terrifying! When will the sponge stop dripping it's sweet nectar? Will the next chorus be too out, like way out, like way way out for people? Crafting one's demeanor as effortless, seemingly just seamlessly being so fucking innovative, all that wavy makes me sea sick, bro!
Except I know that's total bullshit! Open Mike is the Mike Rowe of the rap game. While other rappers are snorting coke after shows begging for drugs and pussy like slightly comical but mostly sad, super sad fiends…Mike is back home in bed propped up on a pillow wearing glasses and flipping through the Huffington Post app because he can't sleep. Open Mike Eagle is a father and a husband, first. Second he's an entertainer, including rapping and being funny. He's sought out the hotbed of whatever he was interested in, in whatever city he sleeps (Project Blowed, The Groundlings). He's not afraid to do the work, learn the craft, and really be about that shit. For all the genius and opportunity, for all the success critically, for all the coin that is hopefully pouring over your bank account like a Scrooge McDuck silo, it's the rough hand shake, the open mind, the old soul, the radiating spirit, the warmth of a husband, and strength of a father, and the honestly of a man that makes Open Mike Eagle so special to his fans.
Dark Comedy is Open Mike Eagle's fourth record in as many years. It is also his most fully realized, putting funny back into rap minus the high fructose corn syrup. It is the Tootsie Roll center of the Tootsie Pop. One…two…thuhrrrreeee!
Syffal Staff Opinions
Qualifiers. Not only the best track on here but working it's way into one of my favorite tracks of all time. There's just something special about this song. OME's flow and voice fit the beat and the stars just align to make the ill shit. The chorus, the lyrics, just everything about this song gives me chills on my dills bro.
literally doing anything. This is one of those records you can vibe to at any time and any place. A summer barbecue or a cold wintry day. This shit just goes hard in the paint and soft in the sheets. You can Fuck to it.
road tripping with a bunch of homies to the forest where we spend the whole day throwing rocks into the river, day drinking, and laying on picnic tables staring at the clouds.
This album is bound to elevate Open Mike Eagle's status in the underground rap game. If Open Mike Eagle was just a blip on the radar then this album is a push pin that solidifies his place on the map. SYFFAL Fucks wit it and you should too.
Hannibal Buress dropped a verse on this record and it is as funny as you would expect. He is killing the game right now in every way. Except he calls a Honda Civic a girls car and that's what I drive... but he rescinds that later saying if that's all you can afford then don't listen to him so we're still cool Hannibal, just barely though.
Very Much Money. Open Mike Eagle's rap singing is just fucking amazing. Very Much Money feels like dude's sitting on a yoga ball bouncing and just bropothesizing to himself in a field filled with other yoga balls. Subject matter is flattering, as it's telling me I'm a super fucking hero, even without a shitload of money, and the little whisp of Mike's singrap is just fucking adorable.
I've given this more than a dozen spins over the last month and I have to be honest when saying it's the perfect album for having nothing to do but sit. I popped this on while the kids swang on the swing swings in the backyard and shit was just fucking perf. It's like the art rap version of vitamin d bro. Frealdo.
Other people finally seeing Open Mike Eagle for what I thought he was six years ago. Dude is just fucking original as hell. One day I hope dude is my dad.
I love seeing this guy succeed and I also love how I'm not afraid to skip a track because the next track that I love I'll keep starting over. This fucking album is like a value menu at a farmer's market in that it doesn't matter what I fucking like or don't like, cause it's all freshies bro. Open Mike Eagle is the green hit of the rap game bro.
Very Much Money (Ice King Dream) is my favorite. The confrontational commentary on the commercial value of creativity in, “come say that shit to my face,” cloaked in such commandfully chill cadence is like my mantra when reading my mom’s husband’s Libertarian-leaning Facebook posts.
First press play on Golden Age Raps (my 1a favorite track) and then go be in between hair cuts, delete bad spoken word records from your iTunes library, vape in the last pew, Google Alan Moore comics, shun cat videos (like that’s possible), watch Zeitgeist for the 137th time, eat a Whatchamacallit and then rhyme instead of sing.
a no-holds-barred WWE-style wrestling match between W. Kamau Bell, Malcolm Jamaal Warner, Cornel West, Kamau Daood, and KoKo B. Ware. It would start off with perfuctory “Is it racist?” questions and end up a freestyle on favorite sandwiches. Also, listening to “Idaho” the first time while driving into the night through actual Idaho in the middle of the most depressing tour I’ve ever been on, and thinking Open Mike Eagle you are a genius and an asshole for this song.
Dark Comedy, literally IS my shit. Like I have to go check my draws after listening to it, and I’ve listened to it a lot. The worst part is w-w-w-iping my own ass and g-g-g-etting shit on my hands.
This query, in particular, was equally daunting as Piper Chapman's first week in federal prison; seriously, there is an abundant aural avalanche in action. Qualifiers effectively (and extraordinarily) encompasses Dark Comedy's maze-inside-of-a-linear-narrative and is the signifier and embodiment of said twist-and-turns. Open Mike Eagle literally applies Muhammad Ali's advice about floating and stinging (through actual flowing and singing!). Is "flowing" like Benghazi? Something seemingly scores of us have surmised is no longer relevant in the name of 'Because'? Because Open Mike Eagle FLOWS ingeniously, tangibly, enviably; his cadence's carom is in the Classic Canon and Qualifiers is Open Mike Eagle's finessing of quantum physics.
Trekking to or from a funeral and/or wake, drinking fancy coffee treats, walking around your neighborhood, cruising Netflix, illustrating to your compatriots how and why you're redefining "whimsical", half-heartedly watching a Tom DeLay documentary, feeling flummoxed-by-fatherhood, writing, painting, book-shopping, rolling up the coastline, wrestling non-CGI Bengal tigers, bending helicopter blades, getting schooled by Warren G., or contemplating the demise of Paperboy.
Newspapers, fields, invisible buildings burning, spaceships, mountain after mountain of crumpled up paper revealing half-finished/dead idea iterations, the technology of politics, myself watching myself read "Status Updates", 56K modems with faces, and multi-phase lasers and shit.
Open Mike Eagle is the West Coast's answer to Roc Marciano; no, I am absolutely not stylistically equating the two. But Open Mike Eagle has resuscitated and rebuilt a vein of linguistics and style that collapsed light years ago. Whereas Roc Marciano's startling, stark, sparse slice of rap real estate resonates precisely because of its frigid surface temperature, Open Mike Eagle extends to his congregation a warmth searing enough to melt any size iceberg. Awash in a sea of Slug and Earl Sweatshirt clones, he solidly, separately stands on an island that does not succumb to such fakery as Climate Disruption. Open Mike Eagle won't be sunk because he can't be sunk; he is the genre and the genre is him.
Dark Comedy finds Open Mike Eagle taking great-painless-pains to catapult the sharper sides of his rap self. He's certainly talon-tazed before this: "Unapologetic" with labelmate and creative cohort Nocando for example. And this is not to describe Dark Comedy as an "issues" record: a record that finds Open Mike Eagle zeroing in on specific, dicey subjects. Dark Comedy offers us a chance to listen to him nibble around the edges of his own atheism, pro-Black sentiments, and overall sense of where and what real political warfare is or should be (in the philosophical/ideological realm). Behind the brain of every comedian and sad clown, as history dictates, generally lay a murky, macabre landscape from which they were inspired to escape (or at least visit as little as possible).
Open Mike Eagle's repartee remains intact and is a legitimate highlight over the hiccups and hijinks of Dark Comedy's thirteen scenes. Particularly on the particle-popping "Thirsty Ego Raps" produced by the thrilling illingsworth. Originally unfazed and halfway-to-vexed at the beat, it began to pummel-and-pulsate its way into my spine and my brain clicked: Headnod served like eggnog. Open Mike Eagle easily effectuates his electric, elastic, ebullient elements in a dazzling display of deft non-sequiturs and Bon Mot Bombs; his savoir fare with language and its sentiments on tilt.
Dark Comedy is without question the best rap album released this deep into 2014's pocket. Based on songwriting alone, it is a towering trophy; pair its multitude of messages with production that could very well have been the result of an evening of Prince Paul on Peyote recording and sequencing exploding car batteries having an orgy and its appeal is clarified all the more. I don't know how funny Dark Comedy will be to you, but I do know this: Open Mike Eagle is neither a bird of prey or a Culture Vulture. He is, however, Hip Hop's apex for the foreseeable future.
It's either Golden Age Raps or History of Modern Dance. The former being a shining example of everything that makes Open Mike Eagle the most intriguing rapper on the scene right now - hilarious, deep, quirky, stylish as shit, charismatic as Fuck and likable as all get out. Not to mention horribly original. The latter is that depth and history and the beat had a real Bomb Squad feel to it. Love it.
Anything other than fronting. Because only fronting ass assholes could front on this classic.
Something often talked about in sport with the all time greats. It is usually a championship series or game. You see them rise above the rest and become the defining athlete of their generation. This album feels like the rap version of that. Something outstanding, better and more transcendent than all of the others, even the greats and contemporaries of the time. This is the new high water mark.
I am so happy for Open Mike Eagle. He seems to be getting the props he deserves and he is doing it on his own terms, but honestly I am way more happy for the fans because we get to experience his vision and it is fucking sublime. Kudos Mike.