Learning the Language Game of Rap-Song with Milo's "An Encyclopedia"
Learning the Language Game of Rap-Song with Milo's "An Encyclopedia"
Drumming Upstream 25
Welcome to Drumming Upstream! I’m learning how to play every song I’ve ever Liked on Spotify on drums. Once I’ve learned them all I will delete my Spotify account in a blaze of glory. Only 454 songs left to go!
This week, just as I did a year ago, I’m following up a Bruce Springsteen song with a left-of-center rap tune. Unlike last year, this rap song is not a sexy, horror-themed club banger. Instead, strap in for a cryptic and confrontational exploration of racial identity under fire from critics and cops alike.
Now, let’s open “An Encyclopedia”.
Side A
“An Encyclopedia”
By Milo
So The Flies Don’t Come
Released on September 25th, 2015
Liked on October 23rd, 2015
When it comes to realness, few hold a candle to Milo. Born Rory Ferreira on the south side of Chicago and raised in Maine and Wisconsin, Milo is a rare example of the truly independent artist. After releasing his debut album A Toothpaste Suburb through Hellfyre Club, a Los Angeles indie rap label run by former battle rapper Nocando1, Ferreira split out of SoCal back to Milwaukee and went fully DIY. Ferreira started his own label, Ruby Yacht, and released a deluge of music under the names Milo and Scallops Hotel. Ferreira's work has attracted a large enough audience for him to make a modest living solely on music. No corporate sponsors, no major label marketing. Just one man selling music directly to the people who want to hear it.
The fortress of Milo’s realness stands impenetrable behind the twofold moat of scarcity and obfuscation. Like any legit DIY lifer, Ferreira favors cassettes for his physical releases. In addition, he only sells them in limited quantities, leading some fans to resell his albums for hundreds of dollars. Even if you’re lucky enough to get your hands on a tape, the content contained therein might still leave you out in the cold. Delivered in a near-deadpan, Ferreira’s lyrics are dense with allusions to continental philosophy, millennial-specific pop culture, and other equally obscure rap songs. Even when the lyrics aren’t obtuse on paper, Ferreira cadence can be hard to follow. Take for example this chunk from “An Encyclopedia”:
Milo last seen with a poor sport with more ass
Got a passport to import more for the war stash
Short leash, long lash
Long Beach with bombast
I palm palm trees in my thought path
I think I know what Milo is getting at here, but the longer I stare at these bars the less sure I become. It might be about having a hot girlfriend. It might be about how Milo isn’t a guy to mess with. It might be about his time in LA. That final line reads at first glance like a clever way to say you’ve got some weed on you, but it could just as likely be a reference to poet Wallace Stevens. No decoder ring is included with the rare cassettes. Whether by intention or incident, Milo’s low inventory tells a bigger truth about his music: not everyone is going to get it.
The lyrical density on the other hand is without question intentional. “I want to make rap from a theoretically-informed place, and now I have the training to do that” Ferreira told Passionweiss in 2016. On A Toothpaste Suburb and the EPs preceding, fans might have mistaken the references to Ludwig Wittgenstein and Arthur Schopenhauer as an excitable former Philosophy undergrad showing off, or, more charitably, writing what he knows. By 2015, when Milo released So The Flies Don’t Come, it was clear that the allusions and elliptical language served a deeper purpose.
“It’s an album sourced in rage” Ferreira told Shepherd Express of So The Flies Don’t Come in 2015. It is worth recalling in the post-Trump COVID-stricken present that there was plenty to be mad about back then. The year prior was a boiling point for American race relations. Internet access and smartphone technology were common enough to capture and proliferate more media of black men dying at the hands of cops than a good chunk of Americans could take quietly. Miles away from New York City I watched Eric Garner suffocate to death in my girlfriend’s apartment in Chicago. I scrolled through Twitter in rapt horror as Ferguson PD cracked down on Missourians protesting in Michael Brown’s memory. I refused to watch cops shoot 12 year old Tamir Rice. This pattern has yet to break. To be an American online since the second Obama term is to be perennially aware of black death by cop on a name to name basis.
“My audience, for whatever reason, is largely white,” Ferreira said in the same Shepherd Express interview. A side effect of rapping about Legends of The Hidden Temple and Friedrich Nietzsche is that some people otherwise averse to hip-hop (for often dubious reasons) might feel comfortable getting on board. In Milo’s case, those fans got a little too comfortable. “They were telling me how offended they were that I had anything to say about Darrien Hunt or Renisha McBride or whatever. They were writing me these horrible letters like, ‘I thought you were a responsible musician.’” On “An Encyclopedia” Milo re-establishes some boundaries. “No one taught me the language of rap song, I was born speaking it” Ferreira intones in the chorus that bookends the song. “My last name means blacksmith, and yours?”2 There’s no way in or out of the track that ducks that question. On what grounds can this white audience, embodied by a booming sample mid-song, dictate a damn thing that Ferreira says?
Not content to rest on his name, Milo proceeds to prove his expertise. Ferreira fashions an argument out of allusions for why he keeps his style cryptic. The quotes and concepts are a minefield of shibboleths to ward off misinterpreters. You’re expected to anticipate this kind of dual reading from the get go. “How could I be so clumsy as to invite you into a language game without affording the proper trumpeting?” Milo eyerolls, evoking Wittgenstein to defy his concern trolls. Under every line the implication: if this message is in code, perhaps it is not for you to hear. Gates properly kept, Milo lets his exhaustion show in verse two. “What kind of burden could be worse than this?” he asks, twisting Kipling to describe the mental strain of absorbing so much mediated death. Ferreira’s deadpan delivery heats up even as the verse serves cynicism cold. In an ending that feels all the more perceptive in the Biden era, Milo laments how even his sincere expression is just grist for commercial branding. Here again, Milo’s obtuse style takes on strategic value. Hide your fangs or be made toothless. The less legible you are the less sense you make selling Sprite.
So far I’ve only defined the obtuse particulars of Ferreira’s rapping by its defensive utility. There is another less adversarial way of reading him. In the interview with Passionweiss from 2016, Milo had this to say about promoting his music “I’ve been cultivating my audience to be more active, and with a lot of these people I’m trying to charge them with the responsibility”. Even though Ferreira is talking about marketing here, the quote feels just as applicable to how he wants people to engage with what he’s selling. Actively listening to Milo means learning his language, what he uses words to do and what that makes his words mean. The more Matrix code you crack the more you learn about what he reads, what he values, and what he finds funny. Actively listening forces you to care more than you would otherwise about the man Milo is outside the (phantom toll)booth. The pop culture ephemera and philosopher name drops aren’t trying to impress you, they are meant to impress upon you the raw sketch of a person between the lines. Learning about someone’s interests helps you learn about the world. Paying attention to the world will teach you to tell the difference between a young man in cosplay and someone wielding a sword. Between what’s real, and what isn’t.
Side B
“An Encyclopedia”
Produced by Kenny Segal
132 BPM (approx.)
Time Signature: 4/4
“Kenny Segal’s drums aren’t quantized, and presently that brings me purpose”, Milo says in “An Encyclopedia”’s first verse. Like many lines in the song, we can unspool a great deal of information from this statement. Let’s start with the “who”.
Kenny Segal is a Maryland-born, L.A.-based producer. Segal made electronic music, namely drum & bass, on the side while attending University of Southern California for computer engineering. His roommate was a weed-dealer, which put Segal in contact with enough rappers for him to focus on making beats instead.3 Since then, in addition to Ferreira, Segal has produced for Open Mike Eagle, Elucid, Busdriver, and Billy Woods, a veritable who’s who of brainy, independent rap. Segal has a sound, but his methods are versatile. To achieve his ghostly version of hip-hop Segal mixes programmed drums, samples, and self-recorded material that he treats like samples. This blend of new and old sources gives Segal’s beats an uncanny quality, like feeling you remember something you know you’ve never heard before. Segal’s penchant for sampling the “tail” of a sound, rather than its “attack”, makes his tracks sound spacious and rich with texture, but with a reserved and inward character. Melancholic, but tense.
One thing “An Encyclopedia” is not is metronome perfect. Milo is not exaggerating when he says that Segal’s backing track isn’t quantized. Quantizing a beat means shifting each of the hits to their mathematically precise equivalent on a grid, correcting for any mistakes or human inconsistencies. Critics and apologists claiming respectively that quantizing is ruining music or an industry standard both give the impression that quantizing is ubiquitous in modern music. In my experience, subtly editing a performance to closer conform to “perfect” is very common, but wholesale “snap-to-grid” quantizing is less wide-spread than you’d expect.
Segals’s drums during the verses of “An Encyclopedia” cycle through a four bar pattern that wobbles near 132 BPM. At the end of each phrase the drums drop out to give room for a short bass guitar lick. There’s a lot to enjoy about Segal’s production, the delicate pitched percussion, the unnaturally looped organs, the Crash Bandicoot sample4 that dares you to laugh right as Milo launches into the second verse, but this give and take between drum and bass is “An Encyclopedia”’s heart. Milo and the drums dance and rest in unison, catching a moment to breath while the bass takes over then stepping back in. Milo organizes his thoughts against this herky-jerky structure, using the breaks to give each mini-verse its own flavor and narrative purpose.
25 songs deep into Drumming Upstream, I’m getting pretty used to playing along to un-quantized beats. But even with experience capturing the exact push and pull between these cut up grooves took some time. That old Tolstoy saw about families holds true for drum beats: all un-quantized beats are un-quantized differently. Segal doesn’t settle with one loop and call it a day either. The song’s choruses and bridge switch to a soft hi-hat that keeps time and wheezes accents in a two bar pattern. As the song wears on, Segal injects this hi-hat break into the main groove to keep the track from getting stale. Do not confuse low fidelity for low effort. There are a ton of details hidden in this understated track. And don’t confuse it for low quality either. Find out exactly how high quality “An Encyclopedia” is below on the Drumming Upstream Leaderboard.
DRUMMING UPSTREAM LEADERBOARD
As I researched Milo and So The Flies Don’t Come, I kept running across reviews and features that cited “An Encyclopedia” or quoted its lyrics. The song popped up so frequently that I started to wonder why critics in particular were drawn to it. Milo covers a lot of the same themes elsewhere on the album, what about this song made it so quotable in the press?
In 2016 Ferreira told Passionweiss “I can’t afford to be misinterpreted right now”. For all of the noise I’ve made about how hard Milo makes you work to keep up with his train of thought, “An Encyclopedia” makes its point abundantly clear in the bridge when milo’s “people of color coloring” mantra is interrupted by a bellowing “HEY! YOU CAN’T DO THAT!”. The moment is so disruptive that critics are bound to catch it and then extrapolate the song’s meaning with it as a lens. This makes “An Encyclopedia” the quickest way to explain to an unfamiliar audience what Milo’s getting at. The song could just as easily be named “A Glossary”. “An Encyclopedia” is So The Flies Don’t Come’s decoder ring.
Another explanation gets us closer to the answering the “for whatever reason” that Ferreira alluded to about the paleness of his audience. Critics like being rewarded for seeming smart. If a song plays hard to get and then pats the critic on the head for making the extra effort, well, that song is going to get quoted a lot. White rap critics in particular get the thrill of being able to ‘hang’ with a piece of music that actively interrogates their presence. Active interrogation is still a form of acknowledgement. When Sheperd Express asked Milo if roasting his white fans was biting the hand that feeds him he replied astutely “I would like the refuse the idea that that hand is feeding me. I'm feeding that hand.” Even when Milo’s cooking is too hot to handle, plenty of white critics/fans will line up for seconds if it means they get to get it.
Am I immune to this? Can I locate the house that I’m standing in? Hard to say. All I know is that I really like this tune. Revisiting So The Flies Don’t Come for this letter I realized that I’d focused on “An Encyclopedia” to the rest of the album’s detriment. The song isn’t worse than the rest of the album, but the spotlight it shines on itself overshadows the greatness of the tracks surrounding it. “An Encyclopedia” is a beautifully rendered mission statement that rewards deep listening to its lyrics and earns repeated listening with its expressive production. But by now I’m ready to learn the rules to Ferreira’s next language game.
“An Encyclopedia” by Milo
Thank you for reading and for your patience. The timing and subject matter of this letter made it important for me to choose my words carefully, and Ferreira’s lyrics can send you on all sorts of rabbit holes. Luckily the next entry features no lyrics at all. There will still be plenty to talk about. Until then, have a nice week.
Man, I used to be HEAVY into battle rap back in college. A lot of the videos I watched in that era have aged horribly, but with that CW in mind please enjoy Nocando wiping the fucking floor with Dirtbag Dan.
The closing chorus switches out the literal translation of Ferreira for the more direct “my last name means black man” in case you didn’t get the point the first time around.
Per Passionweiss, again.
I think this sample might actually be from Friends but I couldn’t find a Joey “Whoa!” that sounded quite the same so I’m going with my second guess. Devastating musical prank either way.