Notable Tracks: “The Old Guard is Dead,” “I Gazed Upon The Trap With Ambition,” “The Apple That Scarcely Fell,” “Critical Acclaim,” “Branded“
#GoyardHere
Ghais Guevara has completed his masterwork and ended his tour as an underground hip-hop journeyman. His debut album takes the form of a play in two parts, featuring the protagonist Goyard Ibn Said.
The first is an energetic reflection on the triumphs of rapping, the thrill of ambition, and the love of the game. The second section takes a turn into a dark reflection of the cost of fame and the rot of the hip-hop industry unlike anything Guevara has ever done before.
Throughout the album, Guevara shows off his idiosyncratic production and flow, mixing in samples from Spongebob, classical music, and soul, while writing wordplay with references that range from David Fincher’s “The Killer” to J. Sakai’s “Settlers: The Mythology of White Proletarianism.”
These references paint a pointillistic picture of Guevara – his love of the rich history of hip-hop, a Philly upbringing, his roots of black radicalism, and a fiendishness for brands like Prada.
The leftist braggadocio he cultivated on his first mixtape, “BlackBolshevik,” is subtler, as the persona of Goyard takes over for the album. The pastiche of different styles and sampling coalesces to create an awe-inspiring sound, mastered from his previous mixtapes.
His introduction to the second section spells out the album’s thesis through an homage to Frederick Douglass: “When a slave was drunk, the slaveholder had no fear he would plan an insurrection […] the drink of choice is no ordinary spirit, no, it’s an ambition – thrust upon us through aesthetics thrust upon you by those that toil with the ideas that make men feel like God. [..] Every triumph is merely a tragedy in sheep’s clothing.”
The second half of the album follows Goyard’s mainstream success into his tragic fall. It starts off with an abstract feature from Arman Hammer’s E L U C I D and a beat from DJ Haram on “Bystander Effect.”
Through Goyard’s journey, Guevara reflects on the horrible costs of morality and the hip-hop industry.
“Critical Acclaim” opens up with a sample of an account of the actions of P. Diddy, notable industry insider and hip-hop superstar, then Guevara starts his verse with “Every terror has a biblical script / So he could /Reason with error and the sins he commit.”
Goyard’s life descends as he destroys everything around him in pursuit of fame, haunted by a past murder, ending on “Shaitan’s Spiderweb” with him sunk down at his lowest, only to wake up to massive applause and fame.
Via NME’s interview with Guevara, the moniker of Goyard Ibn Said is inspired by the story of Omar Ibn Said, a Senegalese man that was brought to America as a slave and forced to convert to Christianity.
Guevara sees parallels with his induction into the music industry, encountering people he’d rather not know, and converting to an alien set of values to fit in.
On the final song of the album, “You Can Skip This Part,” Guevara, sans-persona, calls out the white ownership of the hip-hop industry and the spectacle of the hood sold through hip-hop designed to appeal to white fans.
With sections that feel very similar to the rap scene of “Sorry to Bother You,” it feels like a blunt hammer meant the shatter the lull of anyone just barely listening to the album.
Goyard adopts the consumerist ego of the culture that demands success, riches and expensive clothes, which is the affect “young and hungry” rappers must take on in order to succeed.
In “Branded” Guevara raps: (Which personality of mine do you see a forever with? / I’ll force the facade, kill the nature within me, Bury the evidence).
Guevara has been inspired by the philosopher Franz Fanon in tracks like “Mimicry of the Settlers” and one of the inspirations for this album was Fanon’s book “Black Skin, White Masks.”
In that book, Fanon discusses the double-consciousness of Black colonized people measuring themselves against the European ethos that view them as lesser.
Guevara is saying the cultivated industry of hip-hop replaces colonial religion and exacerbates the double-consciousness of Black Americans, dangling the promise of riches to keep them working within a system that necessitates self-betrayal in order to achieve monetary success.
“I had to adapt to the ways of the tyrants / Nothing to be admired and nothing to be / Desired.”
Ghais Guevara continues his fiercely unique work with this debut album from his tenure with Fat Possum Records, creating even more music that both doesn’t sound like anything else and is about things no one else is talking about.
He weaves his message incredibly tightly with his music and creates a cord of an album that pulls you along its length. This album is probably AOTY for me, and I see Guevara making even better music in the future.
– dj sunny