Many, many years ago, I heard a song that would haunt me, a rap song that seemed unlike anything I had ever come across before. For the next twenty years, that song would occasionally burble up like a puzzle. The mystery of Darkleaf would nag at me every so often. Who were they? The pieces never seemed to quite fit.
The song, a single called Caution, featured Mumbles, Acey Alone’s famed producer, and Cut Chemist, the notorious DJ behind Jurassic 5. The lyrics had a kind of mystical exactitude that I had never come across before.
A few years later, I discovered a “debut album”, F… the People, but it seemed off somehow. And it would take another decade before I discovered that this supposed debut album came out a full fourteen years from when the group was originally formed in ‘88, that much of the material had been reworked from a couple mixtapes that were coveted for their “abstract rhymes over primal beatscapes, infused with references and allusions to the occult and black mysticism” [The Untold Story of Terry “Hymnal” Robinson, by Nate LeBlanc]. The group had originally focused around the trio of Hymnal, Jahli, and Longevity, and were part of the notorious hip hop scene at The Good Life Cafe in LA.
Darkleaf, both as a mystery, and as a group of MCs interested in the mysterious, exist as one of those “secret history” moments—from the elusive allegorical writings of David Lindsay to the doomed EC Comics to the cut-up maps of the Situationists—there are these moments of lost possibilities that take on a kind of greater reality than history as it actually unfolded. The nature of their journey perfectly matches the patchwork of occasional crystalline brilliance that marked their hip hop career and its rumored confrontational style. For example, smashing televisions and abstract wrestling matches in art galleries over guest lists spilling into crowds. Darkleaf is as much mystical fraternity as hip hop fellowship.
And occasionally, a song appeared on a comp, such as the quintessential track from Hymnal below.
Darkleaf may have been unappreciated outside of their local community during their heyday, but when I first heard Armand Hammer’s remarkable Stonefruit, I immediately thought of Hymnal. Hammer feels like a descendent of that earlier outlier.
Although in some respects, what Darkleaf represents is a core tradition of hip hop— from KRS-One to Black Star and Acey Alone—hip hop has always had something of the revelatory and prophetic to many of its most innovative lyricists. Theirs is only one of the many strands of possibly styles that make up the larger tapestry of worlds contained inside hip hop’s many chambered heart. For example, the same genre also contains some of the most remarkable examples of storytelling in song—two favorite tracks along these lines are Millie Pulled a Pistol on Santa by De La Soul and 9.99 by Anti Pop Consortium—as well as of course a medium full of provocateurs, from Public Enemy to NWA to gangsta rap and everything in between, but… Darkleaf took hip hop to a place that was both epistemological and mystical in a way other MC’s had not, which is perhaps why they never broke out of the underground world of The Good Life Cafe even when they were flourishing there.
The nature of their message required that it remain hidden. Although we all may like to dream of a day when some mystical track is charting at #1 on billboard, that day will never come. Or—only time songs that plumb the marrow of the mind achieve charting status is when our homes are in flames and our children are dying. And as much as it may seem so, end times not gone full bore yet, sweetheart.
It wouldn’t be till 2019 that Vulgar, a french label, put out an LP based on some of those 90’s recordings, entitled Kimetic Principles. This is an album that esoteric hip hop enthusiasts should acquaint themselves with. The sound of the entire album is amazing. It makes me think of a more abstract Funcrusher Plus. By far, my favorite track on that album is the last one, Capital Eye, which has a catchy dronelike quality. You feel you have entered the cult when listening to this remarkable cut.
Even on this album, however, Hymnal’s voice is not one of the main presences. Although, I can appreciate the mood of this album, I missed Hymnal’s take on this occult and abstract hip hop.
As I mentioned before, the song that spawned my original interest in Darkleaf and ultimately Hymnal was Caution. Although, others might claim that For Her Souly, Slowly, Solely is Hymnal’s masterpiece, I found the darker tone of Caution to be very seductive. In listening to this song, we feel as if we have discovered a key to a wider world, as if the lyricist is only hinting at the adventures, terror, and ultimate awakening we could face if we step through door #3.
It opens with one of the most memorable hip hop lines I have ever heard: “Negating the efforts of the oedipus of silence and violent science, where light subsists, on the edge of this, encrouched in darkness, there is dungeon.” The imagery of Longevity’s first track is full of abstract ideas and imagery that seems almost like he’s taking notes on some impossible phenomenon. Hymnal’s is similar, but occasionally it touches down in something almost knowable.
This is somewhere between the darker occultism of Darkleaf’s longform LP’s and the more wide-eyed mysticism of other Hymnal solo tracks. It has a kind of mathematical accuracy that again, haunted me for twenty years.
“As rappers, we sought to emulate the role of the Griot, to be the truth-teller and the story-teller by giving instructions on how to use metaphors to bridge neural connections,” Hymnal has said in an interview.
Darkleaf is a group that combined an old school flavor with language that was both abstruse treatise or visionary tract, a truly far-reaching hip hop concerning first principles and the nature of reality. Something like that could change the world.
But, as I said before, abstract visionary hip hop about looking in to find the answers is never going to sell as well as a hip hop directed toward looking out. Popular hip hop will always be directed out at the world, while the idealistic voices of Darkleaf were speaking in a language that went beyond provocation or entertainment, that did not properly rest with any particular demographic, but that was, at its core, terrifyingly universal in a way that is ultimately unsaleable. Their message was incomprehensible and eternal. It was a message that had no place in the disposable culture dominates at the turn-over to the new millennium.
But history is full of the voices of failures—many of the greatest geniuses were people who did nothing but fail in their lifetimes—and some of these tracks that have surfaced from the anals of Darkleaf and the notebooks of Hymnal, are just these kinds of failures. These are the kinds of failures Faulkner spoke of, failures whose greatness can be measured in how impossible was the task they’d given themselves. Somehow it seems appropriate that it was while mimicking Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales that Hymnal first discovered his skill with turning a phrase.
Speaking of Club Apotheosis, a later collaboration with Omid, Hymnal has this to say: “Club Apotheosis was made using the cut-up method. The source material for the cut ups came from pages of my own spontaneous writing exercises on themes of dystopia, paranoia, psychological oppression, urban corruption, and surveillance state stuff, a la Naked Lunch. The composition in the closing section was made from cut ups of the earlier verses and notes from an alchemy class I took in grad school. The basic progression is that of a nightmare, in which danger and corruption must be skillfully avoided to find Club Apotheosis (the club of the sky), which includes its own puzzles and surreal locale, that seems only to be encountered momentarily by peak experience. This dynamic between the sacred and profane is contrasted with the child, who does not yet know of the harsh adult world. The final section of the song enters his dream, in which elements of the city and the club mix and merge through alchemy, in an undifferentiated but pleasurable state.”
