Truck North: Feast of Violence

 

Truck North’s fourth—yes, fourth—release of 2022, Feast of Violence is a labyrinthine work of art.  His previous LP, Where the Wolf Lives, was among other things a long-form meditation on laboring in obscurity despite being a master of his medium, like El Greco, Rembrandt, and Van Gogh.  On “The Asimov Cascade” he warns us that Where the Wolf Lives is “a work of art sculpted from the clay like I’m Rodin, the gates of hell for The Thinker who ain’t worked out his plan.”  On Feast of Violence, Truck North, a master technician, must be headed to paradise because he has most definitely worked out his plan.  

 

“Wrong Way Traffic” starts with a sample advising that this is “the type of music that needs a little concentrated listening, and I would request you to have a little patience. I know you are very impatient to hear your favorite stars, who will be in the second part, but we are trying to set the music to this special event.”  This sample perfectly encapsulates not just Feast of Violence, but just about every Truck North record.  The message here is that the stars with predictable hits are going to have to wait until we’re done doing the important work.  This sample is followed over two tracks by almost eighty virtually uninterrupted bars—straight flow requiring exactly the kind of concentrated listening we were warned we would need in order to understand the record.  No catchy singalong choruses, no autotune, not even a refrain, the only marker being the beat dropping every twelfth bar, and not even that on track 2, “Ape v Ape.”  And this is typical of Truck.  Where the Wolf Lives is an experiment in song structure, eschewing the predictable verse-chorus-verse-chorus format of radio hip hop in the name of achieving a higher goal—creating real art instead of disposable pop tracks.  But here on Feast of Violence it seems almost more deliberate, more purposeful, and more carefully plotted.

 

As if to reinforce this point, on track 3, “The Spook,” we get another sample: “It’s like, you know, they have no idea how our formula is, right?  Which is, like, non-formula,” and another voice interjects, “It’d be advanced, if I’m not mistaken?  It’s tricky?”  Yes, it is in fact tricky the way Truck North rocks these rhymes.  The sample is then ironically followed right on time by a perfect four-bar intro, sixteen-bar verse, and four-bar chorus, as if to lull you into a false sense of security, which he then pulls out from under you with a ten-bar second verse and then a one-bar version of the chorus.  The message is not just that we should expect the unexpected, but that Truck will purposely turn left as soon as you think you are going right.  Feast of Violence is art to be interpreted not just in lyrics, but in bars, beats, samples, and everything else that you hear.

 

And I think that’s the point here.  This record is so tricky, so advanced, that we are now into the fourth paragraph of a review of a record by a top-level lyricist, and we haven’t even gotten to the lyrics yet.  On track 4, “God Shammgod” Truck says, “It’s a whole job to make something look so easy knowing it’s damn hard, now watch how I snatch the shit back like a Shammgod, I present some moves that you can’t guard,” which is a perfect description of what he just did on the previous track—he faked you out with half a perfectly structured song, then snatched it back, and broke your ankles with a change of direction.  And in fact you cannot guard such a move.

 

“The Maker” begins with an untouchable verse that begins, “A Tale of Two Cities, death squads by committee, where they say that it’s better to be envied than pitied, a written masterpiece like it’s James Joyce’s Ulysses about a ‘Machine Gun’ that was shared by A Band of Gypsies.  ‘No Sympathy for the Devil,’ this here the lower level, where the forces for good and the army of evil wrestle.”  They say the best way to kill a joke is to dissect it, and the same may be true for a rap verse, but these lines are too tempting to leave alone.  The references to Charles Dickens’s novel of the French Revolution and its Committee for Public Safety, which was in fact a death squad, James Joyce’s inscrutable stream-of-consciousness novel Ulysses, Band of Gypsies (the band that Jimi Hendrix would probably have broken up The Experience for, if he had lived long enough) and their most admired track “Machine Gun,” and the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil,” show us Truck North’s almost express intention to create art for the ages that doesn’t just stand the test of time but continues to impress, not just in terms of surface-level cleverness, but of true depth.  The track then does just that, and becomes a lamentation on being forced into a life of crime, with a chorus that starts, “My inner monologue is just trying to deter the crime, and he’s saying ‘The first to draw, he the last to die.  You can’t tell no stories from that other side.  It’s either him or me and that’s the bottom line, and I don’t plan on meeting my maker tonight.  Nah.  Don’t plan on meeting my maker tonight.”  Damn.

 

Feast of Violence is in some ways a continuation of Where the Wolf Lives, and one of those ways is the appearance on every track (or pretty near) of the “Rocco my boy, you know?” sample.  The omnipresence of this sample and the appearance of the name Rocco in the album credits of Farmacia (Quick Tape III) made me wonder, but his mention by name in a quick anecdote at the beginning of “Tito Santana” and its first few lines seem to confirm that he was Truck North’s friend, now deceased.  Maybe someday we will hear his story through a track, but for now the meditations on death in “Tito Santana” and “Hellbound 2 Heaven,” a bifurcated track with a hell half and a heaven half, will have to suffice. 

The constantly shifting track behind “Bitter Harvest” makes it by far the most disorienting on Feast of Violence.  Within 2:31 its mood and tempo change seemingly at random like a progressive rock song, making it difficult to know what to focus on, but its successor, “Graveyard Run,” is a perfect counterpoint.  Its slow, unchanging beat and opening phrase “Bitter farewell to the seventh layer of hell,” is Truck letting you know you can say goodbye to that dizzying confusion and rest—but only for 2:38.

 

“What a Day” has an ingenious series of references to Oasis’ What’s the Story, Morning Glory?, one of the best lines of the record, “Murder was the case and they served it out by the caseload, mortician couldn’t hide the pain that his face showed,” and the slick but forbidding flow you expect from Truck by now.  “C.O.P.” starts off with a sample of Paulie Pennino from Rocky, saying “Extremely psycho, Rocco,” and relies on a chill, guitar-heavy track that belies the seriousness of the subject matter, or rather makes that serious subject matter seem light-hearted, and an in fact psychotic chorus, “Crooks on patrol, eight heads in a duffle bag, fittin’ to hit the road.”  “Dunkirk” shows Truck’s unstoppable flow going off again for twenty-four straight bars, a brief pause, and then twenty-four more in a long-form hood life description—“They called it clockwork when I go berserk, turn your home turf into Dunkirk, Hunting Park known for the gun work, bullets stay inside like an introvert.”  “Juice & A.C.” brings the tempo down seemingly as a prelude to “Big Bank Theory,” which brings it down even further and starts with a series of Shakespearean and classical references it’ll take a minute for your brain to untangle.

 

The record wraps up with “Plastic,” not exactly an homage to Death Row, but a track that takes Death Row and west coast gangsta rap as a thematic tool, a deep well of subject matter from which to draw references, allowing it to make its own point in its own way.  The simple refrain was taken from one of my favorite Dr. Dre tracks, “The Watcher,” “Zipped up in plastic, when it happens, that’s it,” and it includes things as subtle as an oblique reference to an interstitial from Ice Cube’s Amerikka’s Most Wanted, “JD’s Gaffilin’,” and more straight-forward references to Snoop’s “Murder Was the Case,” and Death Row Records itself.  

 

Though Truck North clearly comes from a bad place—on “Other Side of the Tracks” from Where the Wolf Lives, he tells us “my upbringing is something out of Donald Goines”—this is not gangsta rap, and Truck North is not imitating anyone from Death Row or anywhere else.  It’s closer in genre to Wu-Tang, but Wu-Tang crossed with Rush and Allen Ginsburg.  Feast of Violence is more like a chapbook than a record, it is art by a man who, despite the circumstances of his birth, and the traumas he’s gone through, has kept his mind razor sharp.  There are no saccharine, superficial tracks here.  This is a carefully planned record that we are meant to puzzle over, and, as with all good art, if we are willing to put in the work, we will be rewarded.