I thought The Cost of Victory was gonna be a guilty pleasure, like when you leave a club full of DTF chickenheads to watch Titanic and hotbox a slanket instead. Only points of reference I had were the labels "backpacker" and "underground," bad words to me since Fantastic Damage hogged up all the ink Lord Willin' deserved. Writers who knew their shit broke down that underground chauvinism, but the pendulum swung too far in the other direction. The ideal is for the street shit to merge seamlessly with the brainiac shit, but it's unrealistic to expect that all the time. It's healthy to have both, even if they have to operate on separate planes. In the absence of critical attention, the underground atrophied to where it was just grumpy old men, artsy dilettantes, and unhinged white trash.
No happy rap / But I'm writin' shit out of anger
Backpack rap is at its worst when it's obnoxiously whimsical (e.g. Baduizm, shouts to Oh Word) or wears the mask of piety (shouts to Hilton Als). Nah, this guy is pissed-off and cocky. While Cost of Victory occasionally resorts to lame sermonizing, Vic raps for those of us who feel beleaguered by a game fulla flakers and perpetrators.
It's refreshing to finally hear a good rapper disgusted with wack MCs again. It's refreshing to hear a spiteful backpacker taking the mantle back from the comic book creeps and precious fauxhemians. It's refreshing to hear an underdog who's a supreme shit-talker. All that and some throwback homophobia! Let me put on my Bubblegoose: I'm headin' to the West Village to bash some fags '90s style!
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