Author: Sandi Sadar Šoba
Artist: N'toko
Label: Call And Response Records
Release: 2013
Runtime: 37:06
Rating: 4/5
I’m not saying I give a damn about absolutely everything, but I have to admit that after years of rejecting rap, rapid-fire rhymes and simple, rudimentary rhythmic flow with no melodic upgrades, I’m sliding into a phase of gradually going soft and accepting what used to be unacceptable to me. After the fluid substance of smoked-out Cypress Hill and Run DMC, the local rap acrobats eventually broke through to my player too. Among them, after Klemen Klemen, Trkaj and Kosta, the pedestal of the best, the mightiest and, for me, the gold-medal winner has room for only one: the incorrigibly charismatic and intellectually superior N’Toko. The Novo mesto rhymesmith per excellence is as creative, juicy and direct as the blow of a potent comet, a meteor wiping out the planets of shallow urban consumerist pointlessness and brain-deadness, and with his active building-up of Slovenian hip-hop standards, the young guy from Lower Carniola earns the title of best, most venomous freestyler south of the Alps right from the start. Between all the work for his home band, the lead voice of Moveknowledgement still has enough stage left to build his own solo universe. And after totally dominating the Slovenian scene (is there really anything left to add to the superior standards of quality and direct criticism set by albums like Cesarjeva nova podoba, Dobrodelni koncert ob koncu sveta and Parada ljubezni, if I focus only on records that spew eruptive rage in the native Slovenian tongue? The question is rhetorical, of course …), the logical next step is leaving the borders of the cramped Slovenian chicken coop. N’Toko is a man who, beneath the calm surface of his mask of a contemplatively sharp yet respectfully serene gentleman, bubbles with passions that set him on very special tracks. After falling for India, in recent years he’s been even more in love with Japan — Nippon, the empire of the rising sun, bushido and the code of pure Zen. After the lesser-known records Ex-Shanti / Future Shanti and Fight Like A Girl, N’Toko decided this time to pick up the interrupted train of thought and squeeze out a fresh avalanche of screams onto the back of a depersonalized, intellectually and emotionally impoverished society of the neocapitalist new world order.
Stepping away from the compactly built and tailored conceptual structure that makes the excellent Parada ljubezni so great has led to a new thought experiment that tests the limits of the permissible in a universe where N’Toko is his own demiurge, creator of the world and its horizons, while also being an active critic, an observer of the creation, a challenger of himself and an iconoclast of his own untouchability. Mind Business is far less airtight and hermetic: it’s a tattered, fragmented, mosaic collage with enough danceable lightness, a whiff of almost Atari-retro sounds from the forgotten eighties, and the neofuturism of Japanese pop-culture neon kitsch, Pokémon, manga and anime culture. On top of all that, there’s plenty of something idealistic, purified and philosophically polished in the grand N’Toko manner. The duality of present and future intertwines in a gorgeous metaphysical way, and the sound is a substance that lets you keep stepping out of the here and now into something external, familiar but always displaced into some undefined future. That’s N’Toko’s sci-fi recipe. Production-wise, the sonic textures are markedly minimalist this time and perfect for underground club discourse, while the whole thing is dominated by mental landscapes of vocalized, put-into-words dissatisfaction with the status quo, with stagnating at a dead point. There N’Toko, just like with Moveknowledgement, gives himself full wings for a total escape from the gravity of a world of worries, physical laws and the staked-out framework of the stereotypically permitted.
The entry into a world of total fascination with the two-dimensionality of pop culture begins unexpectedly with a sampled matrix of a speech by the Hindu guru Swami Vivekananda, an excerpt from his address of September 11, 1893, which set up a meeting point, a bridge between Western and Eastern thought. After that act of intellectual fusion came a century of airing out and globalization. Borders vanish, only the ones in our heads remain, and yes, sky is the limit. A bit of provocation in Swami Vivekananda’s words »Greetings, people of America …« opens the registers for the weave that follows, where N’Toko doesn’t address the world as a little Slav from beneath Triglav. Instead, already with The Baddest, he puts himself on the same level as the world’s competition and, yes, he is »the baddest rapper you ever gonna see«. The mental paradigm is sharp, steely, angry, confident and potent, and N’Toko unreservedly stakes out the field of his dominion and defends it point-blank, knife-edge, with sonic minimalism and his verbal presence. No brakes and no bars: No Brakes lays out the backstage of a guy who never forced himself to the top of the popularity list, and by the third act of the record N’Toko is already sailing into the nostalgic world of the recent sonic past. The MTV-style singability of rap melodies, which I deliberately skipped when I looked at Yo Raps, now forces itself through every pore. A concert for world peace out in the cosmos itself shifts, with the venomous, dangerously cocky, curse-packed Smile, into the realm of the fucked-up consumerist sale of icons, religion and orthodoxy, which now flows from the physical world into the web, a place more real than reality. N’Toko is subversively cynical here, and as he said in a really good interview, let me quote: “I experience 2013 exactly like this: as a world that wants change but really has no idea what to do with itself. Kanye West is one scream of that. If I had to explain how modern urban society works, how it thinks, it’s this schizophrenia of Kanye West,” and the time has come to settle accounts with everyone. The dangerous, menacing Mind Business sounds like a faithful reworking of Public Enemy and Cypress Hill over a hellish Lower Carniolan groove. It isn’t labeled with geopolitical origin and roots, but with putting up a barricade for himself, for the freedom of his thought and the untouchability of his cognitive universe. »My mind is my business!«, N’Toko sharpens over the pounding rhythmic bed, and he has no intention of submitting either to the diktat of the media or to the call of the sheep in the flock of the human race. Gifted with his own unbending spine, the young social critic, holder of the mirror up to society and the times we live in, times in which many can’t manage to think with their two brain hemispheres between the left and right ear, stands up in defense of himself and of everyone free-thinking (and actively thinking). The follow-up, 1989, is contrastingly light, dreamy, almost elusive like an apparition, a fractal wash of impressions from a time that will never come again. Yet at its core you can still feel the steel thread of the nucleus, the seed of everything that is now, where N’Toko briefly shows the epicenter of the world that made him what and who he is today. In between, Dr. Dre sneaks in, along with 99 inflated balloons and images of suburbia, where a young man in a foreign world, in a state of total solitude and alienation, merges with himself, and the genesis of out-of-series transcendence began and was then refined.
The socially analytical note runs through every fiber of the record, but you can feel that on this discursive excursion N’Toko is mostly just freely enjoying what means the most to him personally: his own pleasure and playing with his own demons of the subconscious. »Nothing is impossible,« tacks on Lion, which in a bloodthirsty, flesh-cutting way shreds all the homophobic monuments of this narrow-minded world, all trendisms and brands. Pop-iconoclast N’Toko stresses that, apparent incompatibilities aside, total submission to pop trendism and fascistoid extremes have so much in common that it takes just one step to cross into the new world order of utterly shallow, pre-programmed robots, who don’t have a word set of their own with which they could, would or want to describe their own wishes, desires or plans for the future. We hand responsibility over to others, and there’s the call of the identity crisis of the 21st-century human: a person who can’t face their own responsibility. After the musical collage of Nagoya, exactly this side unfolds without reservation in Minor Celebrity, where N’Toko lashes all those bloated corporate shitheads who, after proving their stardom and selling their first million tracks, Kanye-style keep on conquering the world and the wallets of blinkered young fans with their own clothing line and their own reality show with 24-hour access via the web, a blog. With their senseless, bestial behavior, they drag down the intellectual level of everyone who can only imitate. N’Toko thinks too highly of himself for that and can’t settle for cheap clichés, even at the price of not having millions in his wallet, gold-paved staircases in an unrealistically expensive villa … That’s precisely the dividing line: N’Toko has enough (self-)criticism, intellect and sense of what’s right and what’s not. URL is an interim, complementary trip on the back of America and the NWO, and losing your own train of thought is a construct of the refined cogwheels of media dominance, which poisons the last scraps of healthy, uncorrupted, humility-aware consciousness. Morality has gone to the dogs, but I have to say I’d rather follow the mental power of N’Toko, which, despite the exhausting futurism, heads toward a return to oneself, than give in to some servile lukewarm thread that in a downright idiotic way programs masses of zombie-like teenage boys and girls! The closing Staycation takes the lovely excursion into a less familiar environment, into a state of total Zen. A clean line of broken rhythms, slight asynchronicities and extras builds production-wise to the final conclusion: beneath the plastic form of lightness, kitsch, neon and sugar, there’s far more essence than the kind MTV or your favorite DJ has served you to date …
Rebellion is the natural result, but only if you followed the thread of the record and didn’t just foam at the mouth over the truly retro-minimal rhythms. Mind Business sets new standards for the brand, the trademark, that is the name N’Toko. It’s still above standard in terms of quality across the whole set, but maybe it isn’t forged to hit on the first note and a single listen, which makes it all the more lasting anyway. I’d agree that it’s always hard to compete with superior peaks, but I think N’Toko doesn’t even sweat over whether he managed to top his previous record or not. The essence he delivers is damn relevant and punchy, and apart from the fragmentation and apparent sonic simplicity, the record can’t be accused of being thoughtless, confusing or flawed. Mind Business is different from everything you were used to from the young creative genius, which shows that the guy is still in a phase of evolutionary growth and blossoming and never allows half-measures or incoherence in himself. Trends and the clichéd frames of audience expectation are irrelevant. N’Toko is his own Deus Sive Natura and his own yardstick. He doesn’t need others to compete with. Somewhere I once read a lovely question, whether he considers himself an ‘alpha indie subject’, and the guy answered that he’s too old for that role and that in this animal world of competition some younger subject should push him out of the alpha spot. There’s plenty of youth, but no rival in sight yet. At least for now, there’s no hero who could cross his milk teeth with a hardened veteran who, evidently, still has a lot to say! May it stay that way for many years to come, we can piously wish!
Lineup
N’Toko – music & rhymes
Guest musicians:
Seijiro Murayama – drums on #3
Zanzano & Kaneko Yuki – performance on #9
Production
Igor Vuk & Beckoning
Tracklist
1. Future Perfect
2. The Baddest
3. No Brakes
4. God Helps God
5. Smile
6. Mind Business
7. 1989
8. Lion
9. Nagoya
10. Minor Celebrity
11. URL
12. Dunk
13. Staycation
