Visions of Bodies Being Burned - clipping. (2020)
Daveed Diggs is a pretty accomplished actor. He’s been in big movies and led TV series. As a rapper, though, his tastes run much darker and more confrontational.
“Horrorcore” is a subgenre of hip hop that doesn’t really have a through-line other than a series of hip hop crews over the years who’ve wanted to make soething genuinely frightening and unsettling in the overt style of a horror movie.
The album title phrase is a line from The Geto Boys’ 1991 tarck Mind Playing Tricks On Me, which aimed at showing the psychological damage the thug life caused. Some people count that as horrorcore, but it’s fine if you don’t.
Wherever you might think horrorcore or where it came from or who counts (or why I always seem to find youtube hip hop explainers by white dudes), it’s hard to ignore that the music of Clipping is horrorcore. The fact that it’s rendered in electronic hi-def, with literary-grade lyrical concepts and Diggs’ lightning fast flawless delivery might set it apart sonically from other horrorocre albums. But if the point is examing some disturbing shit without flinching, here we are.
