In Taboo, Denzel Curry Raged Against The Machine For As Long As He Could
The Rapturous and Riveting LP from The Florida Rapper challenged what was worth exploring in rap discourse, even if no one wanted to go along with him
Tristan Young @talltristan
No one looks at hip hop like a fight more than Denzel Curry. Louder and more pugilistic rappers exist, but Curry has based his career and variable personas around his sound being emblematic of a struggle for the soul- his and maybe everyone else. When he sings he is fighting through trauma, fighting for survival, on behalf of others and against systems that exploits him and his colleagues. Curry has a beguiling and oblique take on how one can characterize conflict; it does not always have to be a vicious or prodigious experience, although it may come to that. But his sound is always in defiance, only rarely in celebration, even if it may initially seem otherwise in terms of pure aesthetics. The Florida rapper has spent nearly a decade being one of the most versatile, engaging and theatrical rappers in the game, eclipsing the mercurial boundaries of soundcloud rap from which his neophyte beats propagated from and earning himself a spot in the firmament of modern hip hop. Despite his indelible talents forging his own pipeline in to mainstream relevancy, Curry doesn’t exactly love the ecosystem that has celebrated him. More so he is perturbed by the rarefied institutional dogma that defines a rap star being so insulated from interrogation or opprobrium. The mental health and physical interments that come with attaining a perch in the rap pantheon are real problems, even worse that few in the community seemed interested in litigating this. Such was the inspiration behind his 2018 album, Taboo. To Curry, it didn’t matter that no one wanted to address any of this or if it made them uncomfortable; he was sure as hell going to talk about it.
Taboo is the third studio album from Curry, succeeding his previous LPs Imperial & Nostalgic 64, as well as his time coming up with RVIDXR KLVN. Even before any parochial collective affiliations, Curry practiced rap battles with school friends, deeply enthralled by the power of word play long before it became a commercially viable path for him. Coming of age under the shadow of Trayvon Martin’s death in 2012, with whom Curry went to the same school, the plaintive reality of escalating violence and rampant institutional racism meant Curry would have to take a more metaphorical approach to dealing witch childhood trauma and his modern day demons. His lexical skills and tenacity ensured he would have the means to at least attempt to do so. Taboo is his statement of these intents. A three act project that excavates and exhumes all that excites and infuriates him about the rap industry and how his own history has shaped his unique navigation of it. Beyond his binary and easily defined outbursts, the album wanders through his more opaque observations and feelings, often brashly breaking down the compartmentalization between these duelling states of mind.
Curry subdivides the album into three seemingly isolated thematic and tonal components: Light, Gray, and Dark. Despite this, there is no avoiding that much of this album is permeated and coloured by melancholy, personal hardship and trauma. It’s the manner in which Curry ruminates on and redefines what we understand as traumatic, and what we define as worth discussing in such regards that makes Taboo uniquely insightful, and indeed riveting. The opening and eponymous track sets the stage for the album by signalling what and whom he wants to discuss. Referring to Taboo as an actual living person is an interesting rhetorical trick that lends itself well to Curry’s theatrical and orating bent. Over a bluesy and subtly dreamy mix of guitar chords he leans heavy into his poetic proclivities. “I knew you wasn’t normal since the age of nine/ I heard you were molested at the age of five”, sings Curry with a tender swagger. He is immediately signalling the subject mater of the album will be atypical in the world of hip hop, focusing on mental health and trauma. Curry is earnestly inclined towards helping her heal, “as you cry me a thousand lakes on my shoulder blade, I say everything’s gonna be okay”, even though he tacitly acknowledges he doesn’t really know how to accomplish this. In a subsequent part of the verse he boasts, “Curry killed the pussy hoping that I could kill the hate in you”; with this he fails to understand that for a person damaged by sexual assault, maybe this isn’t the angle from which he should be approaching his assisting in her recovery. More interestingly, the bifurcation of first and third person referencing foreshadows much of the stylistic and thematic ambition of Taboo, relating to Curry compartmentalizing his myriad personalities more and more.
From there the album spirals into a litany of issues ranging from representation, exploitation, greed, and most acutely, suicide- a theme Curry returns to repeatedly throughout Taboo. The vectors from which he approaches the topic are highly variable and often requires a sub textual reading of his motives, or at least an acknowledgment that things are not always as they seem. The track Black Balloons can be (mis)interpreted as a moralistically confounding experience in that the most overly joyous and celebratory song in the album is also the most moribund. Curry gleefully recites suicidal imagery, the allusion to a black balloon popping clearly metaphorical of a final great release. “Decapitated when I lose my head since life is overrated”, is soon followed by Curry’s resolute assurance that that’ll be the day the pain stops. However, he sneaks a line into his elaborate verbosity, “sky is the limit, I could die in a minute/ got my mind in a skillet, suicide not a mission”. From this sequence we can re-examine this central moment not as the rapturous finality of death but as a eureka moment, a clarifying epiphany. When Curry speaks of the black balloon and says, “let that be the day the pain stops”, what he is referring to is being freed from those tormenting suicidal pathways. In the stunningly bright chorus, brimming with optimism and melodic certitude, Curry is ascendant at his highest tonal point in the album, and it suddenly makes so much more sense under these contexts. Curry will return to these sentiments by extracting something of a life lesson from the experience later on in Sirens, intimating “what is gut when you don’t have intuition”. All your passion will get you nowhere if you can’t see the world clearly. This is where it starts for Curry.
Crucially, Curry does not affix all of his explorations to his own chaotic interiority. He conveys an awareness of and urgency to acknowledge the pain of others all around him. Reminding the listener that in this case Taboo has been personified into a living human, he sings in Black Balloons, “Taboo and I are in the same boat, what said from Pennywise, I guess we all float”, in a playful assurance of solidarity but also establishing the deathly stakes at hand. The track Sirens is dedicated to Treyvon Martin and his brother Tree, a point he makes clear as he extemporaneously embarks on a disillusioning survey of the world’s ills. Everything from the London attacks from several years ago being reduced to nothing more than a hashtag to the cartoon villainy of America’s former president, “Donald Trump, Donald Duck, what the fuck is going on?” He keeps circling back to the abuse women endure at the hands of patriarchal society, “with a good girl gone bad girl, who went gay cause of date rape/ that’s a metaphor for the USA”. Curry connects the dots between seemingly isolated incidents that affect the lives of so many like the aforementioned girl or Martin to wholly systemic issues. When recalling a memory of a former friend turning a gun him he wonders, “Blame brain disorder or the pain in Florida”. The cannibalistic churn of injustices across his home and beyond are changing all of us, sometimes for the worst.
Photograph by Pooneh Ghana
Burrowing deeper into the album sees Curry zeroing in on a particularly malignant institutional force in his life and that of others as well. It’s with this gradual revelatory narration that the thematic separation of Taboo into three parts- Light, Gray, and Dark- begins to make sense. One could understandably be perplexed by a cacophonous drill rager like Sumo being placed in the introductory Light sequence of the album. Conversely Percs, which is situated in the middle of the Dark sequence shows Curry at his most devilishly playful and theatrical since the early track Cash Maniac, which itself has breezy and gilded wanderlust. It’s not Curry’s stylistic mood or tonality that defines the separation of the three acts, but the depths of his understanding. In the Light sequence, Curry is coming to terms with the enormity of mental health issues large and small that assail him and his community. This in itself is evident enough, but it’s in act 2, succulently and opaquely titled Gray, that he beings to understand so much of this malaise is propagated by an exploitive recording industry, particularly as it pertains to hip hop and the attendant personas that are deemed to have purchase within it.
Much of the Gray act has Denzel observing the rappers around him succumbing to greed, violence, betrayal, and worst of all sycophancy, all in pursuance of a successful rap career as prescribed by the record labels so many of them are beholden too. This was hinted at earlier on in Black Balloons, “rappers turn to landscapes when the use these hoes”, suggesting the sheer totality of exploitation awash in his surroundings. Later on in Switch It Up he elucidates on many of his specific and pernicious observations. Looking back on the story of a friend who turned a gun on him he offers, “If you put out a hit bet you the killer aint gonna make a cent”, relaying his understanding of industry acumen in that for all the work rappers put into playing the part of the hardened and dangerous artist, it’s the labels that cash in on it. Of course they would encourage such destabilizing behaviour. Indeed, the hip hop industrial complex is training a generation of artists to only understand each other on superficial and adversarial terms, “they only know Denzel Curry, but they don’t really wanna know Denzel”. Again, this hints at the partitioning of his personality, which is paramount to Taboo’s unique nuances.
This problematic conditioning is further emblemized in Curry’s riveting and passionate diatribes in Sirens, “and I never voted, never sugar coat it, with my finger itchin and my gun loaded, when the fire open let it be your moment”. For all the lyrical and rhetorical capabilities so many of his contemporaries have, not the least of which is Curry himself with his dense and frenzied word play in this very track, they are trained not work towards change with their voice, but through violence; because that’s what sells. Curry is playfully self-deprecating in the prancing and melodically curvaceous Cash Maniac, with a terrific assist from vocalist Nyyjerya. “In my wonderland I’m back on my Alice”, he sings, admitting not just how fanciful, but really quite ludicrous his obsession with money is. Yet in tracks in the middle sequence of the album he observes others taking these conceits too far, at the behest and encouragement of industry zeitgeist. He circles back to the realm of suicide and death from how he sees other rappers are conditioned to look at it, sadly as a means of chasing credibility in the aptly (if a little on the nose) named Clout Cobain. He details how mental health issues of the most portentous order are not addressed but exacerbated by an industry that cares only for personas, feuds, and escalating scandal. Curry laments that for trying to break free from the mould- the epiphany that he had Black Balloons- fans and colleagues alike now want him to kill himself. Curry keeps trying to avoid these confrontations but admits that the mere suggestion is making him more and more angry, ready to lash out. The track has a placid piano line subsumed by vibrating base and ratcheting snares. It’s tense.
Act 3- Dark- is where we wants bloody revenge, specifically on those that propagated such deleterious thinking across his medium. The murky obfuscation of where culture and commodification intersect in exploitive disequilibrium is supplanted here for more invective tirades. He is derisive and condescending in The Blackest Balloon, “N****s want the clout so they can buy a fucking mansion”. In the gymnastic lexical thrills of Percs, Curry has had it with the record label enablers and the rappers that play along, “With these dumbass n****s, and they don’t say shit, sound like ‘durr durr durr’, you like ‘oh that’s lit’”. He repeats, “industry n****s the worst, acting like they from the dirt”. He’s had it with giving them chances, pleading with them that there is a better and more harmonious way to navigate this industry. That the indulgences and superficialities they are cultivating do real damage to them and those around them. Now he just wants that revenge.
Curry gets it in the ominous and enthralling fury of the penultimate track Vengeance. With a dramatically rapturous chorus that radiates dread and terror, it stands as a theatrical and sonic crescendo in the album to rival the cathartic exaltation of Black Balloons. Curry’s verses reach an apotheosis here as well, with him orating as a venomous and omnivorous spitfire, threatening all that has earned his ire. If the issues Curry advocated for won’t be addressed in good faith, then he will ensure the consequences are swift and severe in a horror core incantation of the track’s transfixing chorus; he’ll show how much carnage a product of the system can actually spread. Vengeance benefits further by having by the far the best guest contribution on the album with the inclusion of JPEG Mafia. His flow and candour in the track registers as a touch more hysterical, further enmeshing the song in its beguiling performance. Mafia shrieks with acute distress, “When it cries it cries, if you die you die, pussy meet the sky”, in the best line going to a guest vocalist on the record.
Photo by Steven Ferdman Getty Images
Mafia may nail it with that obvious allusion to Rocky 4, but Curry decorates Taboo with an embarrassment of riches in terms of pop culture references, many of them delightfully obscure. Curry is enchanting with his confident signalling that he is in fact a total and uncompromising nerd throughout this album. Touching on the aforementioned references to the film It or Alice and Wonderland doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of the depths Curry mines for his verses. “Fuck the game up and leave the kids like Juno”, he rants in Sumo (nice rhyme). In Super Saiyan he goes for some delightfully silly early 2000s deep cuts with “Ricky Tan all my kicks like I’m Jackie Chan”, referencing the duplicitous villain from Rush Hour 2 that met his demise from an admittedly pretty good kick. In Black Metal Terrorist he assures us that, like anyone under the age of 40, he’s played his fair share of Assassin’s Creed. Curry likens his ill-advised pursuit of wealth to one of the best Steven King novels in Mad I Got It, after bring up the author’s name continuing, “Big cheese only bring me Misery”. That’s a good one.
The track Super Saiyan itself is a reference of course to the Dragon Ball Z continuum, for which Curry clearly has an allegiance too. He takes the mantle of a fictitious and highly animated character so when he casts his opprobrium on a frivolous and morally bankrupt industry he can do so from a ridiculous tone. This also circles us back to the use of alternate- one might even say split- personalities that Curry employs throughout Taboo. Mental health disorders often manifesting in changes to ones personality clearly factors into how he deals with the myriad issues he seems ill equipped to actually fix. Dating back to the first track has him suggesting a separation of the various subsets of his pathology. He’s more explicit in Mad I Got It, “I wear this mask every day/ Stanley Ipkiss, realistic views, pessimistic blues” (that’s a reference to The Mask for those that didn’t live through the exquisitely weird decade that was the 90s).
The delineations of Curry’s id are rendered with their starkest acuity towards the end with the final tracks Vengeance and Black Metal Terrorist. Curry recasts himself as Z-Eltron, which is surely a reference in its own right to Voltron. “Told you don’t mess with Z-Eltron”, he threatens in the former, with assurances of putting those in his sights in the ICU. It’s not Curry succumbing to such violence, but his furious alter ego, which is a thematic double entendre by admonishing the rap industry’s cultivation of violent personas as something with relevant currency but also admitting that he still has not tamed all the swirling inner demons that comprise his ego. The masks are a coping mechanism, which highlights the way trauma manifests but is then smothered. That fracturing insecurity is even more pronounced in the later song as he boasts- to himself- “finish em Zel, I give em hell”. By the end he’s not fully aware where he ends and his various sobriquets begin. With a fractured state of mind all he can do is thrash and wail at whoever is left to hear it still, existing in a harsh duality that assiduously makes his point but effectively breaks him in doing so. Curry, or Z-Eltron at this point, admits, “I’m a little delirious”, and well, ya. The quirky funk riff that opens the track is quickly annexed by a gangly drill beat that further renders him in a schizophrenic state.
Curry comes off by the end, from a certain perspective at least, as a victim of his own trauma. But the more overarching perspective of the entire album is that he shouldn’t have to have been. If the issues he and so many friends and colleagues contend with on a daily basis were openly discussed maybe he wouldn’t have been. If those same issues weren’t glamorized and incentivized as worthwhile attributes in a burgeoning rap career, he couldn’t have been. All these masks and alter egos shouldn’t be necessary, he shouldn’t be dressed up in clown make up as he depicts himself in the album’s promotional material. Yet the obsequiousness to record labels and their assurances that they know the best way to make it in the industry- to hell with your friends- ensures that none of this will go properly addressed, as Curry prophesized with his paranoid mania. “You signing to a label where they treat you like a slave”, he rants in Blackest Balloon, furious that his friends can’t be gifted with the same epiphany he had previously. Taboo ends on such a dark note that it’s easy to forget the glorious heights Curry ascends to earlier in Black Balloons. It’s worth returning to in order to remember that not everyone gets to be saved, and when they do it is often only briefly. Those are the moments we should look to for guidance in a world that seems to inherently want to lead us astray.