new music: open mike eagle and paul white’s ‘hella personal film festival’ is a goddamn masterpiece #soundcheck

At this point, I greet every Open Mike Eagle Record as a holiday. Clear the schedule (or at least find an hour or two to turn the phone off and close my e-mail tabs) and listen with headphones and sink in to Eagles strange universe. On an impressive run starting with 2012’s 4NML HSPTL, each new release from the self-proclaimed art-rapper has set the bar higher; offering a new banquet of boundary-pushing sounds, insightful juxtapositions, and choice lines. “Rap music has ruined me / I always want to loop my favorite part” Eagle observes on “Admitting the Endorphin Addiction.” I want to loop every damn part of Hella Personal Film Festival.

By Nathan Leigh, AFROPUNK Contributor

The album jumps from the personal and mundane to the massive and social in a heartbeat, always following Open Mike Eagle’s loose jumps of logic. A cell phone addiction is a metaphor for poverty, love is electoral politics, waking up without a hangover is a major accomplishment in your 30s, the NSA’s overreaches are maybe OK if it keeps fire ants under wraps but probably not. It all makes sense somehow through the stream of conscious dream logic of Eagle’s inimitable flow. Producer Paul White gets top billing, and deserves it. Replacing Eagle’s usual lopsided broken synths with an impressively deep bench of samples and unexpected sounds, each song is given a unique personality that pulls off the impressive feat of still feeling cohesive.

Hella Personal Film Festival marks the crowning of Open Mike Eagle as hip-hop’s preeminent chronicler of the every day. Like a non-insufferable Proust, Eagle’s tiny observations in “Check to Check” are laser-focused in their insight. But he’s never better than when expressing the individual costs of big systemic issues. “The Curse of Hypervigilance (In Politics, Romance, and Cohabitation),” “Smiling (Quirky Race Doc)” and “Leave People Alone” all bring complex social problems down to a scale that can fit in the palm of your hand. A million thousand word thinkpieces on Medium can’t express what Eagle can in the span of a single verse. “Just be a person / That’s the bottom line / Be a person / And fuck the rhyme scheme / This time just be a person.”