Photo by Todd Westpha
RAPPER CHRIS PALKO (aka Cage) has, in his solo career to date, made three albums of songs concerned very centrally, if not entirely exclusively, with himself and his dramatic personal history. Movies for the Blind in 2002, Hell’s Winter from 2005 and last month’s Depart from Me (the latter two on New York progressive hip-hop house Def Jux) all deal predominantly with the American nightmare of Palko’s younger life, one colored with parental heroin addiction, copious personal drug problems and teenage institutionalization.
(Incidentally, youth mental institutions of the 1980s still retained many historical forms of patient abuse and barbarism.)
Of course this kind of self-obsession and personal mythologizing can be seen in many hip-hop artists and could even be argued to be the hip-hop mode—everyone from Run DMC to the Wu-Tang Clan to Jay-Z and Eminem have spent a great deal of wax time cleaning out their closets and extolling their personal memories, habits and occupations. For Cage, however, the singular focus of his lyrical content is so dominant that his evolution over his last three records hasn’t been so much about what he’s saying as how he presents it.
Cage, a Ft. Greene resident, describes the development he intended on the Depart from Me thusly: “I think it’s a lot more direct, you know. I stopped poking fun at myself and making fun of myself and horrible things that had happened in my life for other people’s entertainment…fantastical drug experiences or women being a doormat for my sexual escapades. I was very conscious of what I was doing when I was going into this record and I wanted to make a record that girls would like as much as guys. I didn’t want to alienate anyone except people that were closed-minded.Those were the people that I didn’t mind alienating.”
Indeed, Depart from Me has been described as and feels like Cage’s full-frontal bid for breakthrough success. It is, all cringing implications aside, a true rap/rock record, even as its title and title track allude to the purist fans he will potentially lose for diversifying his palette. Much less firmly grounded in independent hip-hop than its predecessor, the solidly bleak Hell’s Winter, Depart from Me finds its protagonist alternately spitting hard, mewling like John Lydon (“Captain Bumout”), or braying like Suicidal Tendencies’ Mike Muir (“Dr. Strong”) as the varied productions demand. The title song goes as far as to couple a NIN-reminiscent track with a deeply Reznorian melody, vocal style and lyric on the chorus, lending Palko an almost too-mutable air.
In fairness, Cage does wholly acknowledge the heady influence of rock touchstones like Reznor, Lydon and Steve Albini to the record, and all the stylistic borrowing and cross-pollination does seem to be in a well-intentioned pursuit of a new hip-hop paradigm. “We wanted to really tastefully fuse stuff together,” says Palko. “It was a matter of trying to figure out the most tasteful way we could do it, considering that rock-rap is such a joke.When [friend and musical partner] Camu [Tao] was still alive, we had this idea that we were going to make this new genre of rap music.You know, ‘there’s not that many genres of rap music and let’s make our own,’ and it was something we thought was completely impossible. And I still don’t believe that I created a genre of music, I think I just did something really different because I set the bar so high.”
The cultural arena and method of delivery for Palko’s continued mining of his formative years looks to expand further in the near future if his present efforts alongside close friend and thorn-in-Megatron’s-side Shia LaBeouf come to fruition. Cage is collaborating with Labouf in the development of a biopic film based on the rapper’s life that the young actor has been rearing to direct and star in. Of the project Cage says, “I’m fully into it and I think it’s an important story to tell.The story itself is about me as a teenager; mental problems, being institutionalized, injected with all types of psychotropics that are now illegal.This has happened to so many kids… all the brainwashing and the lying and being left, so many issues that so many people can relate to—that’s the meat of the story. It’s not a rap movie, and that’s some of the trouble that we ran into.The [first] few scripts we read were going for an after school special or 8 Mile and, you know, it’s neither of those.”
