clipping.: Visions Of Bodies Being Burned

- In a 2015 interview with (somehow appropriately) Interview Magazine, American director and horror film icon John Carpenter, the man behind the films Halloween, The Fog & The Thing, said that “horror is a reaction; it’s not a genre.” So it would be fitting that 2020, a year where there’s a hell of a lot to react to, American experimental rap outfit clipping. would release the second instalment in their horrorcore series - Visions of Bodies Being Burned.

In many regards a continuation of 2019’s There Existed An Addiction to Blood, clipping.’s Daveed Diggs, and producers Jonathan Snipes and William Hutson experiment with horror-film-referential rap and sound design that layers instrumentals, vocals, and unsetting samples with unnerving ease. Throughout this record, samples of industrial noise, eerie synths, and diegetic sounds of knives slashing, floorboards creaking and nighttime ambience create a dark spell that inevitably pulls the listener in deeper. In She Bad, the auditory mise en scène of a broken radio’s static and the screeching metal of a murder yet to take place transform a politically charged spoken word segment into a hallucinatory experience.

Check the Lock, with its equally unsettling tone, sees Diggs share an anecdote of a paranoid man afraid of urban legends, “Every seven seconds, eyes back up in the rearview [mirror] / Something in this room didn’t use to be.” clipping. continue to explore the dangers of the modern world in Eaten Alive, a track which veers into rap so noisy that you’d imagine Diggs to be spitting bars over the sounds of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. “Don’t you step a foot up in the swamp with you gators on / When the fuck the swamp turn into real estate?” - is Diggs taking aim at gentrification, or is it merely a continued embrace of the uncanny horrorcore that makes Visions of Bodies Being Burned a singular listening experience? The uncertainty of where the horrorcore stops and the political commentary starts is what drives clipping.’s compelling vision forward.

In no way is that a suggestion that this record is vague, Diggs never shies away from reacting to the horrors of the real world. In Body for the Pile, he offers vengeful, unflinching commentary on police brutality: “Badge with his name makes blood on the tongue cause it’s pinned to his right cheek / Officer *bleep* with his brains blown out / Three little pigs and they can’t do nothing.” Paired with an escalating siren and intricately crafted sound design, Body for the Pile captures the essence of clipping.’s concept.

96 Neve Campbell is another politically-charged track. As a homage to Neve Campbell’s role in the 1996 film Scream and by extension the feminist final girl trope abundant in slasher movies, it sees collaborators Cam & China confidently flex about their success. Its message is actually quite subtle, a tribute to women owning their power in hip-hop; in their own words, “This bitch no die, this bitch gonna be the last one / This bitch boss.” 
In Visions of Bodies Being Burned clipping. have transformed the horrors of the real world into their second fictionalised horror anthology. Not only does this record feature the unrivalled sound design that clipping. are known for, but it confirms them as trailblazers of a new decade of experimental rap.

- Sean Tayler.
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