Immortal Technique - The 3rd World

I don’t know about most people but one of the reasons I don’t listen to much rap anymore is the fact that it is all over produced, inane, and lazy. Even a lot of the better lyricists I’ve found seem obsessed with mixing in club friendly beats and choruses. While the lines between rap and R&B keep blurring there are still some good underground artists with political aspirations. And honestly I had not heard a thing about Immortal Technique until his music started cropping up on a bunch of political podcasts. Still this is the age of Wikipedia, so for the benefit of this article I can pretend that I’ve always known about him, like most other people on the internet do.

Felipe Coronel aka Immortal Technique comes from New York via Peru, so he has a good idea as to what is going on in the third world. Of course I welcome this, having grown up in the north of Mexico where the Sinaloa Drug Cartels come I always found gangster rap to be a little too quaint for me. So this album opens up with opens with Death March, a Green Lantern produced invitation to Peruvians, Haitians, Ecuadorians, Nicaraguans, Colombians and Salvadorians to get some payback for all those covert missions that the CIA has taken against them. While the album does focus a lot on the third world it essentially juggles a few different themes. Once is that of activism and anti colonialist thought. One is about the value of being an independent artist. And lastly there is a lot of V for Vendetta escapist wankery where the artists talk about brandishing machine guns and taking back the nation by guerilla warfare. Still it’s not too different to listen to them rap about being an underground armed movement as it is to listen to some flavor-of-the-week rapper pretend that he’s shot 100 people in the face.

Musically, the production is kept simple and hard like you would expect, with some cheap special effects and lots of thumping bass beats and samples. There are times where the bass is a little fuzzy or the beat gets monotonous but overall it’s better than the ridiculous orchestration and samples that make many modern artists sound like disco divas.

As for the songs there are tons of highlights with a few low points as well. Golpe De Estado is a Spanish track that addresses the place that Latinos have in media as overworked and over-sexualized slaves to their label, especially within reggaeton. Harlem Renaissance mixes some bouncy and laid back soul with lyrics that criticize the well oiled machine that is gentrification. The 3^rd World is a powerful tour through all the countries that frankly have it a lot worse than we do. This song contains some of the albums best lyrics and mostly sticks to the point except for some musing on how being an independent artist is like being a third world country.

I'm from where the gold and diamonds are ripped from the earth
right next to the slave castles where the water is cursed
from where police brutality's not half as nice
and makes the hood in America look like paradise
compared to the AIDS-infested Caribbean slum
African streets where the passport's an a American gun
from where they massacre people and try to keep it quiet
and spend the next 25 years tryin' to deny it.

Other good songs include Hollywood Driveby, Reverse Pimpology and Parole. On the other hand tracks such as Lick Shots are painfully awkward and amateurish while lazy sampling on Payback and Mistakes seems like they are trying too hard to sound low rent. While it’s not a cohesive rap masterpiece it is certainly worth picking up for anyone who wants some rap that educates while offending the establishment.