MC Paul Barman - (((echo chamber))) '2018

Tracks list

If you work with words, like I do, there are a few achievements that we secretly
fantasize about. Winning a Nobel Prize in literature. Having a #1 best-seller.
College professors teaching our writing in their courses. But one achievement
that most of us don’t even fantasize about is having an “original
citation” in the Oxford English Dictionary. 

The unabridged OED is the compendium of the history of English. Every time a
word in common parlance was used for the first time, or in a new way, that usage
and its author are recorded in the OED’s endless pages.
Shakespeare’s got a bunch. Milton, too. These days, getting an original
citation is like hearing the voice of God. It doesn’t happen much. But
Paul Barman has one. 

This is relevant to (((echo chamber))) only because it indicates the level that
MC Paul Barman writes at. His rhymes are original in the sense of “no one
has ever used that word like that before… but we will now.” Bring
your brains. You’re gonna need them. 

Not that (((echo chamber))) is hard work. It is perfectly pleasurable to bop
your head along to great tracks laid down by ?uestlove and DOOM and Prince Paul,
while MCPB says, “Meat keeps an enemy as a bone-deep identity. It’s
the hardened shell that starts to smell. At one time, it might have guarded you
well. But maladaptive strengths turn to captive feints and you become your own
warden in hell.” And then in the next breath, “Would it blasphemy to
ask you to shake that assphemy?” 

If your ears are open, MCPB is gonna plug your brain in at voltages to which you
are unaccustomed. He’s a social critic with a searing conscience that
makes (“my”) comfortable bourgeois house of lies tremble with each
jagged line on the PB Richter scale. Comfortable notions of being a
“good” white person, blow up in the first two tracks, (((Echo
Chamber))) and “YOUNGMAN Speaks on (((Race)))”. It takes MCPB just
shy of three minutes to make this semi-observant Jew feel skeptical about the
Ten Commandments. In ((((((Antennas)))))) he says, “we feel conflicting
agendas rise and fall / what we call our identity tries to synthesize them
all.” But he offers a solution, too. You’ll have to listen to the
song to hear it. And at the end of the anthemic “Age War,”
you’re ready to stand up, cheer, and then go join children in battle
against the calcified bankrupt status quo. After all, it’s “already
dead. Mentally a baby step from a deli spread.” 

But, like any great poet (and MCPB is), he gets personal, too. I am certainly
“a self in sheep’s clothing, a wealth of cheap
loathing…” Aren’t you? 

MC Paul Barman tells us, “Rest assured I’m the crested bird of
nested words,” and that is no empty boast. In poetry, to rhyme both at the
end of line and internally, in the middle of a line, is showing off. Which makes
MCPB a crested bird indeed. There are songs, like (((Believe That))), where your
eyes just go wide and you can’t believe the number of rhymes in a row
that tell the truth. That much truth all placed in a row—you don’t
see that anywhere. And it rhymes, on three levels at once. 

MC Paul Barman is the most ambitious type of rapper. He is rhyming art. Why
bother? It seems hard, and indeed the long hiatus between his albums tells us
that it is. Well, MCPB has a reason: “art is the answer, the be end all...
art, art and only art give solace to all this chaos and lonely hearts.” 

So take some solace. (((Echo Chamber))) by MC Paul Barman is here. It’ll
make your brain spin. And make you check your guts. 

--- Adam Gidwitz, New York Times Bestselling & Newbery Award Winning Author 

Tracklist:
01. MC Paul Barman - (((echo chamber))) feat. Open Mike Eagle
02. MC Paul Barman - Youngman Speaks on (((race)))
03. MC Paul Barman - (((99.99999\%)))
04. MC Paul Barman - (((believe that))) feat. Open Mike Eagle
05. MC Paul Barman - (((being poor)))
06. MC Paul Barman - (((art of war)))
07. MC Paul Barman - (((tourettes)))
08. MC Paul Barman - (((commandments)))
09. MC Paul Barman - (((happy holidays)))
10. MC Paul Barman - (((oh snap)))
11. MC Paul Barman - (((meat n bone)))
12. MC Paul Barman - (((leapfrog)))
13. MC Paul Barman - (((hairy moth owl pt 2)))
14. MC Paul Barman - UNDOING ALONENESS
15. MC Paul Barman - (((age war)))
16. MC Paul Barman - ((((((antennas)))))) feat. Masta Ace

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