Rap as deconstructed art study. Maybe that’s reading too much into Hunter Johnson and his 30 song opus as MC NASDAQ but it’s hard to ignore the juvenile Adam Sandler devolution inherent within My Horse. Simple beats. Silly internal dialogue. Inside jokes. Making fun of yourself while also propping up the projected image therein. It’s why MC NASDAQ is perfect in this moment residing between the over-the-top white adoption of ghetto farce (Riff Raff, Mac Miller, Asher Roth) and the pseudo-serious shift in a genre flooded with major label cash (Jay-Z and 50 Cent as entrepreneurial moguls with a sideline gig as emcees). My Horse is an odd display of wealth and fame the last 20 years of hip-hop has held on the mountaintop coupled with a subtle humor about those skewed values. Truth is MC NASDAQ holds his love of hip-hop near and dear and that’s what makes this all the more difficult to place. It’s hard to ignore the free-for-fall sledgehammer My Horse takes to a genre still struggling to wrap its arms around the likes of Kitty and Danny Brown for producing witty prose that is expose of real life as it stands in 2014 for most of us. There will always be the suppressed with their own voices and viewpoints that aren’t up for satire or marginalization and that’s what My Horse avoids.
In truth, MC NASDAQ is likely a bored but bright suburban kid in the mold of Ariel Pink or Druken Weazil playing boombox to his own experience without the need to dissect the motives. And in that case, throw this tape in, throw the driver seat as far back as it goes, crank the bass and shout out the window: “I’m a really nice dude in real life.”
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