true neutral crew balances playfulness and seriousness with soft rules

By Lightning Pill, AFROPUNK contributor

So, in the past few years, Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly won multiple Grammys, Hamilton is now a world-famous play featuring hip-hop, the genre has gone through multiple creative overalls in the past few years (before AND after Odd Future, no less). Indie blogs are covering them more, SPIN Magazine decided to start covering them more, everybody who loved the xx and Fleet Foxes is probably bumping some Future, Young Thug, Vince Staples and/or Danny Brown now as we speak. Hip-Hop is taking over the planet! So, what do you do when people still don’t give hip-hop the respect it deserves as a genre? Or what do you do when people still think it is a creative fad? If you were True Neutral Crew, your answer would match Bam Margera’s: whatever the fuck you want.

The greatest thing about Deathbomb Arc is their ability to take pride on doing two things. One is linking themselves up with those who like to try out new ideas, no matter how absurd the ideas may be. Their other thing they pride themselves on is not taking things seriously. True Neutral Crew, to Brian Kinsman (Deathbomb head), it’s a cypher of all the rappers and producers who are associated with Deathbomb wrapped in a messy, messy bow. It’s described as a “playground” for all of Deathbomb’s rapping artists and producers, including up-and-comer Shadi, Daveed Diggs, Signor Benedick the Moor, Margot Padilla fka I.E., and more. If this album/anthology proves anything, it’s that True Neutral Crew has the ability to toe the line between serious and fun, often to the point where you won’t notice where they are on which track.

If True Neutral Crew has a tendency to do anything, it’s to deconstruct everything about hip-hop. One minute, they are rapping over live art-punk exercises (#POPPUNK EP, found on the 2nd disc), tackling social problems such as farmer compensations (#MONSANTO, also found on the 2nd Disc), and proving you do not need a beat to rhyme perfectly in place (“Monotheism” featuring They Hate Change). True Neutral Crew will turn away anyone who is way too attached to the protocols of homogenous hip-hop cliches.

“Florence” is the album’s spit and shake. Within such a track, they managed to capture the spirit of indie rap, from the beats to the hilarious rhymes to the occasional struggle of rapping on beat, while also carrying a Das Racist-type humor, sarcasm, and social consciousness around the track. It even manages to use a few tracks to challenge idea about God from hip-hop cliches revolving about a human God (“Monotheism”) rejecting false idols and tyrants (“When the Song Is Done”) and “God is Bored”, which by the last time the band all say “you’re so boring” in unison, suggest that we are all God.

While the first disc offers you new TNC, their second album is a collection of all the things they had put out in the past from #MONSANTO, #POPPUNK to compilation tracks, in case you had missed it the first time around. At the end of the day, if your perception on what hip-hop should be like isn’t challenged, then the band may have failed.

The best description I can give for True Neutral Crew’s soft rules is what happens when a couple of art-punkers decided to rap, and somehow managed to be one of the many keeping hip-hop sounding fresh and original in the process. If you miss when Odd Future was at their most musically defiant, you’ll get quite a kick out of True Neutral Crew, verbal homophobia and rape bar free.

‘soft rules’ is available in 2-CD set form at deathbombarc.com

Follow True Neutral Crew here:

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*Lightning Pill is a blogger, poet, singer-songwriter, composer, Aspie, etc. from Dorchester, MA. You can reach him at Twitter or visit his Afropunk website. His Soundcloud can be found here and his main Bandcamp found here. Also here for the new agers.