Doseone - The Pelt
MusicMash Rating: not rated yet
Pitchfork Media Rating: 7.8
When musicians-cum-poets go bad, it's usually due to a failure to acknowledge that poetry and song lyrics
are completely different entities that require different approaches and skill sets. The Silver Jews' David
Berman succeeds by amplifying and multiplying the accretion of image to be found in his songs, steering his
compositions away from a singable one-liner quality, and toward more architecturally complex mansions of
poetry. Avant-garde MC Doseone, however, could be accused of writing his poems as if they were song lyrics,
in his new book and accompanying audio CD, The Pelt. But here's the thing: It works, because his
music is so unique, so questionable in its intention to be music.
His work with Deep Puddle Dynamics, Themselves, and cLOUDDEAD-- as well as his numerous collaborations and
solo projects-- are all wildly experimental and outré, each in their own individual way, but are united by
a common thread: Doseone's muttering, baroquely delivered, and remarkably prolix stream-of-consciousness
verbal calculus, laden with imbricate image systems and intricate internal rhyming schemes. His song lyrics
work as poetry because they don't rely on melodies, hooks, choruses or catchphrases for their force; instead,
they document intellection and association in a gloriously raw form.
The audio CD that accompanies The Pelt, were it bolstered with beats instead of minimal, atmospheric
embellishments such as ambient tape noise, subtle click-tracks and slight vocal distortions, could easily
be received as a music CD, rather than a spoken word performance. As it is, it's well-served by the book,
(which is really the main draw anyway), in which the words Doseone reads on the CD slither and tumble all
over its pages. Beautifully bound for what is essentially a chapbook, The Pelt boasts a bound spine
and full-color cover in a handsome card stock. Inside, we find shambling, carefully sculpted poetics that
take full advantage of their capacity to surprise and startle: No two pages look the same; the text kinetically
rambles over the available surface area. Flipping through, one gets the impression that the text from each
page leaps off and scurries to rearrange on the next, skidding into position just as the page becomes
visible.
The text is offset by various surreal line drawings, creating a three-way aesthetic interface (text/audio/pictures)
in which each facet of the triptych deepens the others. There's even a games page in the back, including
bizarre versions of the word¤s...
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