ay what you want about El-P; I certainly won’t try to stop you. He might not be able to say the same, as his response to someone holding up an “El-P is an Ugly Motherfucker” sign at this year’s Def Jux show in Philly indicated: “Is that some kind of a backhanded compliment, or are you trying to start some shit? Is it, faggot?” All I know is that the summer night I bought Fantastic Damage at a godforsaken chain store and got home to put my headphones on and listen in, I don’t think I’d ever heard anything like it before. Never mind his lyrics, actually, because they’re the part of his music I have the least interest in: sure, he can conjure up a prismatically fractured dystopian vision that ends up like the meth-addled prose produced by some attic-confined child produced if Gertrude Stein was artificially inseminated by Harlan Ellison’s sperm, but what else is new? It’s the production that does it for me. He went on record as saying that he wanted the record to begin as an assault, a sort of let-those-who-can’t-handle-it-make-a-mass-exodus-for-the-fire-exits exercise meant to ensure that only the faithful receive his message (and I’ve always thought the same about a lot of punk, particularly Bad Brains’ “Pay to Cum,” the noisiest hymn you’ll ever come across), which, fifty minutes or so later, arrives with the unexpected soul-bearing of “T.O.J.,” a no less sonically adventurous flight into the portraiture of the addled, ranting psyche that produced this album, as the liner notes put it, with his own hands.


And when I put the quotidian object in the CD player (a tiny unit that pumps out treble and its assorted by-products), I forgot about all the pop-cultural baggage and mystique for a moment. I heard a dizzying sample-scape that I’m still not sure if I’ve recovered from; various attempts to apprehend it by the rock-crit cognoscenti have been well-documented elsewhere. And it was then that I realized that—at least for this year—all the music that seems worth listening to me is difficult in some way. It presents the listener with obstacles, which may come in the form of the raging noise (think back to what I said about Bad Brains above) and skin-beating hyperkinesis that took up most of my listening time this year, or in any number of other ways. Maybe I enjoy making non-difficult music difficult, as well. Such activity provides me with something to solve, to chew on, both at home with headphones on or out at some shitty club, both these activities usually taking place late at night when you’d think I’d have something better to be occupying my time with than receiving some form of confrontational musical assault. But isn’t that how it always appears to outsiders? I like to think of all the music I’ve been listening to, all the particularly weird and noisy and fucked-up music I listened to this year, as a coded system for delivering messages from person to person. When it works, it’s life-affirming and (almost always peculiarly) uplifting. When it doesn’t, one puts their fingers in their ears or scratches their head. And I think I take pride in the idea that lots of people would have such reactions to Fantastic Damage or City of Caterpillar. It’s elitist, sure, but who isn’t, these days?