If the mash-up leads to our societal demise (and it just might), SP-33's Escape From Tha Carter deserves to be one of the worshiped sounds in our dystopian future. SP-33's sonic vision of instability is loose transmissions from Lil Wayne's Tha Carter and interviews over the grime-ridden synths of John Carpenter's Escape From New York score.
Lil Wayne is far from a threatening figure when you take into account his syrup addiction, pedestrian attempts at producing a rock record and his southern-gentleman interview with “Miss Katie” Couric. He might still be one of the greatest rappers alive, but he's far from gangster. Hearing Wayne's “round here we see a fucking dead body everyday” over Carpenter's score, gives Wayne's music new life as though Wayne were one of Isaac Hayes' cronies that Snake Plissken encounters on the convict island.
SP-33 explains his inspiration for the record, which he prefers not to call a mash-up (and we agree, it's far greater than that term yields):
This project came about because,
for whatever reason, I was listening to a lot of Lil’ Wayne and watching
a lot of grimmey and dark sci-fi flicks (Blade Runner, Escape from New
York, Tetsuo The Iron Man, Metropolis, etc.).While watching these films I wondered what the pop music on the radio stations would sound like.So I embarked on creating dark, distorted, and grimmey pop/hip-hop music. Much
like “Escape from New York” and “Blade Runner” the music is muggy and
dense and surrounds the audience in a dystopic and unstable environment. I am hesitant to call it a mash-up because it isn’t just a mix of “track A” with “track B”.Instead, I totally deconstruct both the Wayne lyrics and the “Escape From New York” tracks.Then I reconstruct them to make something completely new.
SP-33's Escape From Tha Carter is available for free download here.
