Public phones. Telephone booths. Ancient history. Every once in a while you’ll see a skeleton of a booth on a street corner, or the ghost of where a payphone used to be mounted in a subway station or government building. For the most part though, they’ve been entirely wiped from the face of urban landscapes. Now it’s a requirement, that if you want to use a revolutionary, and at one time, a publically available, device like a telephone, that you purchase one yourself, carry it with you everywhere, and pay a corporation a monthly fee for the privilege to do so. Also, it better be phone that has a constant connection to wifi so that your information can be logged by advertisers and you can be located by the authorities at a moment’s notice. If not, you’re looking at like a bum. It’s like being lojacked. Payphones and telephone booths may be the most visible signifiers of what we’ve lost in the last twenty years, but what’s actually been left to the dustbin of history is the privacy, anonymity, freedom of movement and freedom of association that city life used to afford. Those things might as well fairy tales at this point.
What’s still real though is hip hop. Hip Hop will never go away. There will never stop being fresh approaches to making rap music as collabs like Telephonebooth from NYC rapper Wiki and obtuse-beat crafter NAH should make clear as day. Wiki unwound himself from the trio of his cohorts in Ratking after the group’s demise in 2016. Since then he’s released a couple of excellent albums, including 2019’s OOFIE which NAH also produced. NAH is the pure instrumental project of Mike Kuhn, Philly native, and former drummer and vocalist of the emo band 1994!. The two beat heads were set to fire up Parise with a showcase in March of 2020 when the world was sent into a tailspin (you get three guesses as to why). The change of plans didn’t stop their collaboration though and NAH continued to make beats with Wiki in mind, eventually producing the album Telephonebooth.
NAH’s jittery, incongruous tracks meld so well with Wiki’s muffled, nasally flow that it can be easy to miss just how out of the ordinary their collaboration until its elements are separated out. “Yonkers” swings from bar to bar over a wet babble of Brazilian-inspired soft jazz that percolates up to the point where it almost sounds like Wiki is dueting with it at times. “Truth Be Told” sounds like Wiki is spitting over a skipping VHS tape about teens roller skating on the rings of Saturn while a galactic funk band transmits a beat from a nearby satellite. “Hip Hop” could soundtrack the chase scene from a particularly bleak ’70s exploitation film, that is if it weren’t for the echoes of gospel vocals that have been chopped up and strewn about like lumps of raw beef left out overnight by a drunk butcher with Wiki’s sinuous clearing snort managing to sweep up most of the carnage and wading through what he can’t dislodge. “Shit Blood” see Wiki sneering over sounds that could have leaked out a hemorrhage in Phil Collins brain circa 1982, while “No Work” changes up the pace seeing Wiki floating down a well full of the odds and ends from previous industrial eras like Alice drifting down a chasm to Wonder Land, while he talks some real shit about feeling too good so he called in sick to work. Just some godtear rhymes here. You and I are not worthy.
You can buy and stream Telephonebooth via Bandcamp below:
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