John Carpenter-Esque Score + Rap: Get Hyped on Clipping’s “Nothing Is Safe”

I’m sure you and I know that people often compare a lot of synth scores as “Carpenter-Esque” but this new song from the hip-hop, rap group Clipping. Before we go down a couple of rabbit holes, check out the “lyric video” below.

I remember hearing about this group back in 2014 when they released their debut album. I found out about it because one of the members is Jonathan Snipes, the composer for Starry Eyes. The vocals are provided by Daveed Diggs who most people might recognize from the mega-hit broadway show Hamilton. Diggs won the 2016 Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Musical, as well as a 2016 Grammy Award for the cast album. You can also check him out in last year’s Blindspotting.

From Sub Pop’s website in regards to “Nothing is Safe”:

There is “Nothing is Safe,” a reversal of Assault on Precinct 13, where the band create their own version of a John Carpenter-inspired rap beat and the cops are the ones raiding a trap house. Diggs sketches the narrative from the perspective of the victims, full of lurid and visceral details and intricate wordplay. The windows are boarded and sealed, the product simmers on the stove, the bodies sleep fitfully in shifts. Then law enforcement arrives and the bullets start to fly.

The site also explains the influences on the album which definitely piqued my interest and might interest other horror fans.

Their third album for Sub Pop, There Existed an Addiction to Blood, finds them interpreting another rap splinter sect through their singular lens. This is clipping’s transmutation of horrorcore, a purposefully absurdist and creatively significant sub-genre that flourished in the mid-90s. If some of its most notable pioneers included Brotha Lynch Hung and Gravediggaz, it also encompasses seminal works from the Geto Boys, Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, and the near-entirety of classic Memphis cassette tape rap.

The most subversive and experimental rap has often presented itself as an “alternative” to conventional sounds, but Clipping respectfully warp them into new constellations. There Existed an Addiction to Blood absorbs the hyper-violent horror tropes of the Murder Dog era, but re-imagines them in a new light: still darkly-tinted and somber, but in a weirder and more vivid hue. If traditional horrorcore was akin to Blacula, the hugely popular blaxploitation flick from the early 70s, Clipping’s latest is analogous to Ganja & Hess, the blood-sipping 1973 cult classic regarded as an unsung landmark of black independent cinema, whose score the band samples on “Blood of the Fang.”

Their new album “There Existed an Addiction to Blood” comes out October 18, 2019. Sub Pop Records currently has the album on pre-order now.