Waterworld
When I sit down and listen to an album, there’s a long list of things I’m looking for. A sense of expression. A nice melody here and there. Engaging lyrics and a fresh perspective. But one of the most important things I look for is variety and a sense of an arc.
Plenty of albums I love have a literal narrative arc, but when it comes to music, most of the time I mean “arc” in a more abstract sense. To put it in a pointlessly oversimplified fashion, I want an album to do one thing, then transition into something else for a while, then end in a manner that feels like it sums up everything that came before. Where we start is different from where we end, but how we complete our journey feels natural.
Sometimes, this means a shift in sound or style. Many a pop album starts with more energetic danceable songs, then they transition into ballads or more downtempo affairs before ending on a more energetic note. Sometimes, this means a shift in lyrical content. You listen to the a song about shallow materialism and capitalism, then the next song is about microaggressions and the pressure to temper your justifiable anger. Sometimes, it means both.
I like change. I like experimentation. I like the unexpected. I don’t want the same thing over and over again.
But then you get something like the 2004 album Waterworld by The Leak Bros, a project created by rappers Tame One and Cage. An entire album about PCP. All fourteen songs. All forty two minutes. Only dark comedy, despair, and PCP.
On the surface, I should hate this album. But I don’t. On the contrary, I have a great deal of affection for this album. True, it brings me back to a happier time in my life, specifically, freshman year of college when I first listened to it and there were still many underground classics to discover. However, I still think it’s a genuinely great album for a variety of reasons. Mainly in how it balances its tone and how it handles its subject matter.
There’s a trick this album has up its sleeve. A trick you don’t hear in a lot of albums one would call “repetitive.” A trick many a weed rapper never discovered and many an indie band didn’t pick up on until their relevancy had passed. Whatever could that trick be!?!?
Before we begin, a quick list of PCP terms.
Before we go any further, in order for many of the quoted lyrics to make the slightest bit of sense, we’re going to have to go over some slang for PCP, be it the drug itself or the state it puts you in. This is an incomplete list, as there are many others on the album and in real life, and some of them are assuredly outdated. However, if you’ve never heard of any of these terms, I don’t want them to read like gibberish.
Wet
Water
Dust
Dip
Leak
Sherm
Death
Embalming Fluid
Angel Dust
Ill
Again, there are many more. However, a good general rule of thumb for this album: If you don’t know what they’re talking about or a certain term flies over your head, chances are it’s about PCP.
Waterworld is at once darkly funny and absurd…
In hindsight, 2004 was a very strange year.
Politically speaking, things were going… not great. We were about one year into the war in Iraq, Bush won re-election, insuring the nightmare would continue for the foreseeable future, and from my standpoint, it seemed like half the country still had 9/11 on the forefront of their thoughts while the other half had accepted all the insanity it brought into our lives and were letting it recede into the back of their minds. Or at least it seemed that way to me, as I was still in middle school, and we were busy thinking about our newly pubescent bodies and The O.C..
Comedy wise, things were beginning to take a turn. Up to this point, we were deep in the gross out frat douche era of movies. Your American Pies andVan Wilders and Old Schools and what have you. Then the summer of 2004 rolled around, and Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy shifted the direction of comedy towards the more pointed styles of Adam McKay and the machine gun improvisation of Judd Apatow. A few months later, Team America: World Police came to theaters. Of course, it’s a lot more nuanced than this, as gross out comedy and douche comedy would continue to be made well into the decade. However, it seemed like we went from watching dudes puke at parties to watching critiques of the generation of men in the oval office and unchecked American jingoism and privilege.
The sea was changing in hip hop as well, particularly in the underground. The beginning of the year saw the release of Dizzee Rascal’s Boy in da Corner, elevating grime to the mainstream and planting the seeds for what would become popular later in hip hop production. A few months later, MF Doom and Madlib released Madvillainy, a bonafide classic that set the hip hop world on fire. We also got other significant underground albums such as A Grand Don’t Come For Free by The Streets, Murs 3:16 The 9th Edition by Murs and 9th Wonder, Connected by The Foreign Exchange, and many others. Mainstream wise, we were still in the 50 Cent era, and though we did get one non G-Unit classic in Cam’ron’s Purple Haze, a little album released early in the year called The College Dropout was quietly changing all mainstream music forever.
2004 was a transition year. A year we were clearly desperate for change. The year we truly began to segue from the late 90s and the Y2K era into the real aughts. It was a year of chaos, absurdity, and metamorphosis. The perfect year to release an album like Waterworld.
It can be argued that Waterworld isn’t really a comedy album, and we’ll get to that later. However, I brought up the state of comedy because it’s a ridiculous concept, and you wouldn’t be crazy for thinking that it sounds like some druggy early 2000s comedy bullshit.
Say, “2004 rap album entirely about PCP,” and if you know enough about what was popular then, a certain image probably comes to mind. Mainly, braggadocios Eminem style lyrical miracle raps about debauchery, partying, and drug use. If you think that, you’re not entirely off the mark. Though Cage and Tame One love them some multi-syllable flows, I wouldn’t call Waterworld “lyrical miracle” and there’s an element to this album that, again, we’ll get to in a minute. However, Cage and Tame One bring an incredible amount of charisma and cleverness to the project, and there are plenty of drugs to go around.
On Tame One’s first verse in “Got Wet,” the second verse on the album, he hits us with some wordplay. “Wet to death, high as Red mixed with Meth/To get off my cigarettes, vets need twelve different steps” and “The leak-leak-leak lottery probably need a break/Consider this something special to Puff like Cheesecake.” PCP is more potent than the average drug, most addicts will never reach Tame One’s level, and most rappers aren’t as equipped to discuss it as him either.
This verse sets up an expectation that more lyrics like this are to come, and indeed, they do throughout the whole album. After a song about a theme park called “Waterworld” where you need to be “this high to ride” and much more drugged out absurdity in the songs to follow, we arrive at “Submerged,” the last real song on the album. Tame One raps, “With scooba tank dank, top ranked, I’m sort of a Moses/Split water just to walk through it when Waterworld frozes” and Cage raps, after making several references to smoking PCP, “Left wing extreme, teen scene feed for fuckery/This is a handshake to those who hate big business as much as me/Not saying ‘Go Project Mayhem,” so what the fuck does that mean?/New game, ten points for every disabled SUV.”
In fact, sometimes, the comedy isn’t buried in the bars. “Druggie Fresh” is a recreation of Doug E. Fresh & Slick Rick’s classic “La Di Da Di,” but, you guessed it, entirely about PCP. “Fresh, dressed like a million bucks/Threw on the Bally shoes and the fly green socks” becomes “Fresh, wet, because reality sucks/I’m lacing up my space boots instead of fly green chucks” and “Stepped out my house stopped short, ‘Oh no’/I went back in, I forgot my Kangol” becomes “Wrecked out my mind from dust blunts, ‘Oh no!”/I’m bent once again, mixing ill with hydro” and so on and so forth. Tame One even delivers certain lines with a fake Slick Rick-like affectation and English accent. PCP perverts everything, including beloved institutions in hip hop history.
There’s not as much random trippiness as one might expect. Though that element is certainly there, the humor’s sold more through bravado and delivery than it is either of them going out of their way for what we think of when we think “drug comedy.” Those expecting a more Cheech and Chong like experience may be a little disappointed, but the humor and the charisma is there.
…and it’s shockingly dark, even by hip hop standards.
Then again, in order to get to the “lighter” aspects on this album, you have to go through everything else. Though there’s humor to be found in the concept and much of the writing, Waterworld is also a harrowing album about death, depression, derangement, and destitution. And lot of other bad things that don’t start with the letter “D” as well.
Earlier, we talked about Tame One’s verse on “Got Wet.” Before, we’re treated to Cage’s verse, the first actual rapping we hear on the album. “I got a monkey on my back with two gats, bipolar/And a headless angel laying dead on my shoulder/The hairs in my lungs are my dying kids that don’t eat/Until I put the leak to my lips.” Images of death and decay are present all throughout the album, even in the “lighter” songs, and Cage doesn’t waste any time making sure we get the point.
On the song “See Thru,” Cage and Tame One rap about women who’s lives have been destroyed thanks to the drug. Cage’s verse is a little hard to decipher, as it’s intentionally unclear. “My boy just found his mom dead/Days after she got her palm read/She’s ‘bout to drown in what made me a jarhead/Not a marine, but I’m in army fatigues/Ready to flip with an undoubtably dubious demented demon dip.” He then goes on to rap more about smoking PCP, injecting more death imagery into the proceedings (“Stuck to my face ‘till my lungs embrace the death”, “My eyes are two planets of maggots that all stare”), before returning to the woman. “She left me to go fly in the mist/She slip and sliding in piss/Psych major, I was fucking my psychiatrist.” Is the woman actually dead, or just high? Was there a woman to begin with? Or maybe it’s literally about having sex with his psychiatrist. In the haze of the lyrics, it’s hard to tell.
Tame One’s verse is much more clear, and arguably his darkest on the album, in which he tells the listener about visiting an ex-girlfriend in a hospital who’s had a PCP induced mental breakdown. He describes her state in vivid detail. “Perm grew out, sherm blew out/Her motor functions had her spazzing and scrapping, over nothing/Said the voices in her head made threats that sound way evil/“Kill people,” she don’t know how to act like Vin Diesel.” Later, he concludes the verse with, “Orderlies had to restrain her, I fought back tears that stream hot/‘Cause I’m knowing ‘bout them Thorazine shots.” Again, questions arise. Has he been through the detox process himself? Has he been hospitalized for his own PCP induced breakdown? Is he the one who introduced his ex to the drug in the first place? Did he do so knowing the potential consequences?
Then there is, in my opinion, the darkest song on the album, “Dead.” Cage raps, “I started getting juicy when I saw what it does/Nevermind my tunnel vision and skin crawling with bugs/My pores start to hyperventilate, hypes up my mental state/Go psycho-delic out of my skeleton to celebrate” and Tame One raps “My Newports get mummified corpses dripping from orifices/This is like diarrhea after the rigor mortis.” Gross bodily images of death, allusions to depression, and overall malaise of suffering brought upon by the sample from the Japanese movie Suicide Club, which is also the source of the chorus. “Because dead/Because dead/Because dead get to shine all night long.”
This is Cage’s second verse on the song. (I can’t tell if he’s saying “practice, ain’t it” or “practice aiming,” but both make sense:
“My girlfriend walked in on me hacking my arm up
From my wrist to my pecks, needless to say she's my ex
With no excuse for my behavior, the razor's my acting agent
You say it's a cry for help, I say it's more like practice, ain't it?
All of my heroes been dead since I was two-zero
Instead of being a fam my shrine's a mirror of meds
Cigarette sizzling, smoking ‘till my flesh wear diligence
Like long range missiles into Iraqi villages
Shotguns are the most accessible tickets to Hades, kid
Rather be dead than the guy who raps about how great he is
One last fuck, cigarette and sip on my lager
Then I'm gonna burn in hell with Kurt, Big, and my father”
Real name Chris Palko, Cage’s childhood has been a matter of public record for quite some time, and Cage has been open about it in his music and in interviews. (Shia LaBeouf was even going to make a movie about it, but the project never materialized.) The gist: Cage’s father, a soldier stationed in West Germany towards the end of the Soviet Union, was a heroin addict who was dishonorably discharged from the army and sent back to New York. His father would regularly beat him and make him tighten the tourniquet around his arm. Later, his father would be removed from his life after a police standoff where he held Cage and his mother hostage with a shotgun. From there, his life devolved with the help of his abusive stepfather, drugs (including PCP), and a stay at a mental institution where he became a test patient for Prozac and attempted suicide several times.
Though the verse is plenty dark on its own terms, those of us who knew about Cage may have shuddered a little bit upon hearing those lines.
In fact, knowing Cage’s backstory completely changes the listening experience of the album. All those little jokes we found funny before take on a whole new meaning when we know just how harsh the reality is behind them. I was unable to find any biographical details about Tame One that suggested that he did drugs in the same way as Cage, but given the drug imagery throughout his other albums, I think it’s safe to say that he probably knows what he’s talking about as well. (I may just be a shitty researcher. You never know.)
I don’t think this information makes the punchlines less funny or the wit less lively. However, there’s an inescapable gallows quality every joke has upon learning it. What was funny still was, but in a much darker and much more morbid way.
However, the fact that this album can be incredibly dark and funny at the same time is what makes it special. That quality I was talking about before? It’s nuance. Maybe, as this album accidentally argues, you don’t need a wide breath of sounds and subject matter. Maybe you don’t need an arc. Maybe all you need is shading and a little bit of specificity.
Waterworld can be all things to all people despite only having one subject matter. It can be a high energy album about drugs or it can be a sobering plunge into the depths of addiction. It can be an expression of the anguish of the Bush era or a giant middle finger pointed at the man himself. It can be all of these things at once It can be none of them. Or maybe it can be something else entirely.
