Album Review: People Are Not Your Friends by Another Planet & steel tipped dove
Rapping over dove’s loops with their childhood friendship as the only alliance left standing, Phiik and Lungs turn distrust into the densest, funniest writing in New York underground rap.
Trust is not a way of surviving in the New York underground. Promoters have no money for the door split and no response on the cell phone, where crews break over beat money, handshakes get spoiled. Phiik and Lungs grew in the environment of mistrust: these are childhood friends from Long Island who write notebooks not differently from other rappers filling camera rolls with photos, performing as Another Planet and being part of the Tase Grip circle along with AKAI SOLO. Production work for People Are Not Your Friends is handled exclusively by steel tipped dove, a New York producer and engineer who is having an incredible run of releases. This mistrust permeates every possible direction, and the worst of it hits those holding microphones.
Phiik opens this with the line about rappers’ inability to support each other in spite of their jokes: “Heads crack jokes but won’t support you/The definition of choking on clout.” Then he sets a chair for another shipwrecked rapper to “sit back, relax and watch you drown.” The complaints begin from the very first track and never calm down. Lungs complains about fake people not differently from the way others do, seeing all people staring at the same phone and using the same tactics to control “a bunch of rats.” On “Treasure Junk,” Lungs observes rappers in the club who behave themselves as if they were not sleeping in the parental bed and says it is time to “shun the whole guild,” including himself: “Rappers not special/We should definitely be shunned.” Phiik takes the verse and does something quieter and deeper—this is what a performer feels about the silence after the request: “You ask the crowd to make noise/And they do not holler.”
On “Actually Good at Rapping,” Lungs complains about Phiik being around too many rappers that are “not actually good at rapping.” Phiik brings his condolences to such a situation already signed: “I regret to inform you/That a rookie has stomped out a vet.” Lungs shows himself in such situations as in pile-ups. Thus, on the track “Ossuary,” Lungs offers to J Edgar Hoover dressed in bed piss, a walking zombie “out the ossuary lip,” and good luck of his: “Clutch sinkhole opening the road/All the cops falling in.” With “Incorruptible Mountain,” Lungs complains that “Buttheads on Twitter still pissed I don’t sound like J Balvin,” and then goes to George Washington’s talcum and General Shao Xing, history and hallucination being mixed in one verse. Phiik writes closer to the matter. “Bathsalts” speaks about plain bruises: “Ugly life, but my mother said I’m handsome.” There is a grudge here, which has an address to Phiik’s rival: “You a dickhead online, not a crime/But how you acting like a fan now?” As for the exit strategy, it is already planned.
None of these things could look so desperate without the rooms created by dove. His loops do not change and are always bass-heavy. Some of the drums come with force, and it is rappers who provide movement; melodic release is practically absent in his floor plan, and some of his rooms are so close to each other that they can exchange without anybody noticing it. It does not cost any effort due to the writing style. Thus, on “The Last Days,” the drums are thinned almost up to nothing under the mournful repeated phrase, and Phiik is crushing the medication on the dusty countertops while reporting about the absence: “I waited for the second coming/But Jesus said he couldn’t make it.” The hook speaks about the chances directly: “I’m a long way from the top/But fifty-fifty shot, it’s more than halfway.” Columbus gets the chance here too: “They should’ve shot Columbus off the boat.” “Shoot the Space” throws more drums than anything else around it, and Lungs meets the attack head-on: 5G is “passing through your jeans and curtains,” and there is an escape route that is already planned: “If rap shit don’t work out/Dip the city with my kid/And become the bleakest hermit.”
steel tipped dove removes the drums on “Monster Trio” almost completely, and AKAI SOLO provides the most inward verse among all tracks. It is a conversation with his mother from Boston, with his sister whom he did not talk with, minivan idling in front of the crib and wondering whose neighbors are conspiring with him. “To end up where I’m at/You gotta cut out some of your heart/And leave it behind,” AKAI SOLO raps. He even pays tribute to the man who has paved the way: “This road laid by doves with steel tips.” ShrapKnel rough up the track Guess the Station, where dove changes the loop from under everybody more than once. Curly Castro diagnoses a rival’s insomnia, whose pen sleeps and time-travels “To a battle against the old me,” while PremRock dismisses rappers “As I sip WhistlePig rye.” The most crooked beat belongs to Fatboi Sharif, and it is the warped, off-balanced loop of “Stolen Cop Car,” and it is overweirded by Fatboi from inside of it: “I smoke the blunt in the background/Of a stolen cop car.” Lungs is not inferior to him on this track, more so estimating four seconds outdoors as “twenty-seven cameras” of coverage and a supplier whose year of income has beaten a whole athletic department: “The plug made more bread last year/Than college football in Alabama.”
The roughest and stripped loop belongs to “Charred Sardines,” and Phiik speaks about his childhood on it: “I was only thirteen when I knew what loss was/Watching the Mets play.” Such armor makes it heavy if the grief penetrates it. It is staying in the memory long enough to admit the price of it: “I feel these memories breaking me down/Until my chest ache.” Lungs replies to it in the merchant mode, charging “fifteen hundred for a sixteen” and watching “The pigs pull up with a summons/And call a six-year-old a teen.”
Among the schoolyard boasts of “Dunkin Like Dirk,” there is the loneliness of the writing by both rappers. Phiik begins his verse shooting Cupid’s bow “Full of bad love and forget-me-nots,” calling the NYPD “full of bacon,” killing an opponent in the fourth quarter, and then he leaves the boast open: “The fall greater when you fade away from loved ones/Without anybody to call.” Lungs plays it colder on the same beat; he is “a nice guy,” reciting rhymes “like cold wind in the nighttime that incite dread,” while a man who has been deprived of everything by the company is sitting on the edge of his verse with nothing left. Phiik finishes the discussion: “What made you think I did?” A fadeaway is the shot taken moving away from everybody else on the floor.
Standout (★★★★½)
Favorite Track(s): “Monster Trio,” “Guess the Station,” “Bathsalts,” “Actually Good at Rapping”