Mach's Hard Lemonade (studio album) by Mach-Hommy

From ForegroundNoise 01/19/2021 21:12

Behind all the posturing, the callouts, the shifting rivalries and mounting bravado, hip hop’s unsung heroes have always carved out a space for themselves beyond the spotlight’s glare. Turning his back on the planet-sized personality cults he felt were clogging up the airwaves in the 90s, the late great Daniel Dumile started wearing a metal mask to obscure his identity in the style of comic book supervillain Doctor Doom. “The villain represents anybody”, he told an audience in one of his rare in-person interviews, “anybody in here could wear the mask and be the villain”. Ironically, by donning a metal mask in all media and public appearances for more than twenty years, Dumile ended up creating the most unique visage in hip hop history.

Mach-Hommy is taking these ideas of rap ego death to their extreme. The Haitian-American artist is loosely associated with the collective and record label Griselda, but any finer details about his private life are a mystery. His face in pictures (if you can find any) isn’t covered by an imposing metal mask but by a nondescript bandana. His real name is said to have been briefly added to an entry made for him on a fan wiki for Earl Sweatshirt; now the entry sits ominously void of any information whatsoever.

Bar a few exceptions, almost all of his catalogue is unavailable to stream online. To even listen to Mach’s Hard Lemonade on release day I had to download a free trial of TIDAL (fortunately, both this record and the excellent Earl Sweatshirt-produced EP Fêtes des Morts aka Día de las Muertos have since been added to Spotify and YouTube). I’d buy myself a copy if physical Mach-Hommy releases weren’t so far out of my price range; a CD of the album sets you back $111.11, the vinyl $222.22, and the deluxe edition double that again. To confirm, those figures are not typos. Unsurprisingly, Mach-Hommy is not attached to any label, and it should seem improbable that an independent, anonymous artist with almost no music online and physical copies levelled at extortionate prices might gain any kind of following.

Yet Mach-Hommy has managed to make material that is so beloved by his fans, they will fork out literally thousands to get their hands on it. Vinyl copies of his cult-classic The G​.​A​.​T​.​.​. (Gospel According To…) were on sale for an eye-watering $3,000. I say “were” because every one of those three grand copies sold out. It’s not just his quality that’s exceptional either; The G.A.T... was the seventh of seven albums he released in 2017, alongside another four EPs. With Mach’s Hard Lemonade being his only release this year, 2020 was relatively quiet for the rapper; the previous two years had seen him add no less than six albums and three EPs to his prolific discography.

Judging by the novelty prices most of these releases are set at ($111.11, $222.22, $333.33 etc.), it’s unclear whether he actually expects people to buy them, especially when it’s so easy for those curious to download them online for free (not that I’d know anything about that). But in the context of Dumile rejecting corporate ideas of how hip hop ‘should’ be marketed, Mach-Hommy’s radical anti-commercialism makes total sense. “What’s pocket change? What’s house money? / What’s stock exchange? All I know is clout, dummy” he tells us in the opening lines to “Squeaky Hinge”, before flipping the boast in the titles to Clipse’s twin mixtapes (We Got It 4 Cheap Vol. 1 & 2) into something intangible: “Mach-Hommy must’ve saw something inside of his core / Everybody got it for the cheap, he got it for more”. Elsewhere he similarly pits the immediacy of commercial success against the longevity of critical acclaim. On “Marshmallow Test”, Mach-Hommy compares the Stanford University experiment – in which children left alone with a marshmallow were told if they didn’t eat it after 15 minutes, they’d get another one – to the exploitative contracts dangled by major labels in front of naïve young rappers, reeled in by the promise of a quick buck. “One for you, One-two for me / What’s fun for you, is just goof to me”, he notes dryly over the chorus’ heart-stopping chipmunk soul sample.

Mach’s Hard Lemonade doesn’t need to be on Spotify for me to know it was my most listened project this year. The short runtime landing it on this list doesn’t hurt, but its the seamless pacing that keeps me locked in. Whenever I am forced to interrupt a listening session, without fail I’m left with the same hollow feeling as knocking over a house of cards. Where the absence of frequent collaborator AugustFanon for several different producers might’ve yielded a record full of competing personalities, instead it’s as if each track is aware of its individual function as a part of a greater whole. Before we’re allowed to wallow too long in “Marshmallow Test”’s dejected cynicism, we’re swept up onto our feet by boom bap banger “Smoked Maldon”, then given a chance to catch our breath with the spoken word interlude “Photocopy Sloppy (Dump Gawd)”, the only track to fade into a total silence coming at almost exactly the album’s halfway mark.

As long as Mach-Hommy’s older releases remain off streaming services, their mystique will likely keep them on a pedestal. But don’t believe the hype: Mach’s Hard Lemonade is quite simply his best work yet.