Send "Anti" Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 Even with the 10th anniversary of their debut album around the corner, it seems silly to ponder Anti-Pop Consortium's place in hip hop. Name, sound, rhyme style, lyrical content, release sleeve iconography: Anti-Pop were stylized (by the press as much as by themselves) as a fuck-you, a caustic riposte to a genre that had apparently taken every wrong turn possible in the 1990s. They likely give as much of a shit about how they "fit in" with rap in 2009 as they do about concepts like "limited appeal."Which is not to say the group doesn't have enough history behind them to be assessed on their own terms. They've gone from straight-up alienating to a somewhat reconciliatory place within the hip-hop nation. For an act usually classed with the late-90s mini-boom in indie-rap futurism, Anti-Pop's earliest 12"s sounded as if they were made with equipment as old as the printing press. A move to Warp for 2002's Arrythmia added a fresh coat of accessibility to Anti-Pop's antagonistic minimalism....full text |
| Bbc |
| There are virtues and drawbacks to tagging yourself Anti-Pop Consortium. On the one hand, if ever there was a good time to be anti-pop it's 2009, with the charts representing something of a corporate washout. However, the name Anti-Pop Consortium also carries with it a millstone of grim self-satisfaction and gruelling austerity. Is ‘consortium’ really the first word you'd reach for when wanting to improve the quality of fun? Or is fun itself to be frowned upon? Having reformed in 2007, Fluorescent Black is the first album by the New York hip-hoppers since 2003's Anti-Pop Consortium vs Matthew Shipp, after which members Beans, High Priest and M Sayyid split to pursue solo careers. Together again, they've resumed the metallic, righteous blaze they've been trailing since 1997, when they first met at a poetry slam, in tandem with producer Earl Blaize....full text |
| Drownedinsound |
| Several years after Anti-Pop Consortium imploded following their blistering Arrhythmia long-player, hip-hop finds itself in as varied a state as it’s ever been. On one side of the spectrum you’ve got the chart-hogging, unchallenging pop fodder that’s been doing the rounds in more or less the same state since the turn of the millennium – and at the opposite end there are, as ever, a host of independent artists twisting their concepts of the genre into new and exciting shapes. Of particular note are LA’s collectives, loosely grouped around Flying Lotus, Samiyam et al, who have taken the low-slung template J Dilla left as his legacy and infused it into a potent cocktail of dubstep, urban sleaze and skunk smoke. Purely in terms of sound, the re-emergence of Beans, M. Sayyid, High Priest and Earl Blaize into the environment of now couldn’t be more appropriately timed. Anti-Pop’s beats were never conceived as a mere conduit for vocal play - the attention paid to musical detail across their earlier albums and indeed on their comeback, Fluorescent Black, places them firmly alongside their younger contemporaries in ambition, if not entirely in aesthetic. A blaze of guitar distortion hammers home the start of opener ‘Lay Me Down’ with all the subtlety and finesse of a chainsaw; as opening gambits go it’s an appropriate one. However tenuous the split, at the arrival of a ‘comeback’ album there’s always that question hanging uneasily at the back of the mind: is it really going to be any good? Such a concern is firmly dispelled by the time the smoke clears and High Priest’s swaggering entrance reintroduces the group as they “awaken from that permanent nap”....full text |
Anti lyrics
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