Spells. That’s what Elucid calls them. The New York rapper opens his new album I Told Bessie with a song called “Spellling,” and it’s not about arranging letters in the correct order. The title of I Told Bessie is a reference to Elucid’s late maternal grandmother and the time he spent living with her in Brooklyn. Talking about the album, Elucid slides into a sort of sense-memory fugue, talking about the smell of the food and the Westerns that were always on TV. Elucid lived with Bessie while he was actively making music, and in an interview with Martin Douglas from KEXP, he discusses the music he made as part of his connection with his grandmother: “Bessie heard all my raps. She’d hear me screaming at two in the morning, two in the afternoon. She heard all those spells being cast, you know?”
Elucid is one half of Armand Hammer, the avant-garde New York duo that’s arguably the greatest rap group on the planet right now. I’ve always thought of Elucid’s Armand Hammer partner billy woods as the slightly more traditional rapper of the duo. In his work, billy woods gets into heavy layers of history and symbolism, and he balances out a gut-level anger and an understated swagger. They’re both weird, and they’re both unafraid to use experimental, dubbed-out sounds and cadences that don’t fit any expected rap meter. But Elucid always seemed like the further-out of the two rappers — the one more in love with straight-up noise, the one less concerned with writing quotable bars. Elucid’s last full solo project before I Told Bessie was 2020’s SEERSHIP!, a single-track half-hour excursion that doesn’t feature too much actual rapping and that sometimes flirts with unlistenability. But after spending a week or so with I Told Bessie, Elucid’s whole style doesn’t seem as simple as that.
That’s the problem with any attempt to impose a narrative on art. Things are rarely as simple as the stories that you make up to tell yourself. When Elucid discusses his music, he never talks about attempting to subvert rap norms or anything like that. He just talks about getting beats from different producers and rapping over the beats that spoke to him. Elucid didn’t even sequence the album; he left that to billy woods, who serves as executive producer and who released the album on his Backwoodz label. On some level, the tracks on I Told Bessie are just straight-up New York rap music — verses over chopped-up samples and drums, everyone trying to creatively freak everything. But the album isn’t as simple as that, either. Instead, I Told Bessie is a New York rap record and an experimental freakout. Rap music is like that. It can be all things.
It’s pretty interesting to compare I Told Bessie to Aethiopes, the billy woods album that came out a few months ago and that remains my favorite rap album of the year thus far. Both albums are community affairs, made with the rappers and producers who come from the same corner of the rap world, and both are growers. They find grooves that don’t necessarily make immediate sense but reveal themselves over time. But woods seems to work within a tight framework, and everything about Aethiopes seems to relate back to his ideas about Africa, as seen from America. For the most part, I Told Bessie finds Elucid in a looser, more instinctive mental place. Both rappers say things that might send your mind spinning off in different directions, but Elucid’s patterns are harder to follow. I wonder if he always knows what he’s going to say on a track before he says it.
To listen to Elucid’s music, you have to make peace with the idea that you won’t always know what the fuck is going on. You will get lost. Elucid knows this, and at one point on I Told Bessie, he even lays it out in plain speech: “Words mean things but don’t have to.” Elucid’s words do mean things. Sometimes, he’ll come up with an image so poignant that it…