A Trickster God's Music Through Grief
When you hear the title “trickster god,” you probably imagine a clever, charmingly mysterious character straight out of fairy tales. Imp, the Atlanta-based rapper who uses they/them pronouns, is shedding some of that mystery as they released their latest album. The 31 year old artist has been making music for years, positioning themself between “eclectic metaphors, socially progressive content, and a cornucopia of comic book references,” taking inspiration from boom-bap to jazz. Weaving together deep conversations about life, politics, and friendship with constant quick-witted quips, they describe how their path through grief brought about their latest project.
Thy Flesh Consumed is a posthumous collaborative album with close friend and producer Fendi Pendergrass (AKA Cassius Franswah Jr.), who was killed in a hit and run two years ago. It released on October 30, which would have been Pendergrass’ twenty-ninth birthday. After taking a year to process their grief, Imp remembered their friend’s “frustration with having beats ostensibly rot away without a release,” and got to work developing drafts into songs that would reflect their friend’s taste in music.
“Most of it is me trying to appeal to things that I know he enjoyed when listening to hip hop. He always liked the street raps, the grimy kind of stuff,” they said. “I think if I were doing this for my own sake, it would have been a few battle rap cuts, a few topical cuts about society at large, a joke song or two, something like that. But here, with the exception of ‘Headphone Blues’ which is more for myself, and the final track, ‘Borrowed Time’ which is a commentary on being around two years out from his passing, all the other tracks are stuff that I feel like he would have wanted to have heard.”
The two had been best friends and collaborators for many years, including creating their first joint album “Pearls Before Swine,” which released less than two months before Pendergrass’ tragic passing. Without their friend to bounce ideas off of, Imp had to adjust their creative process to cope with grief and still honor his memory. “It’s a little different, y’know, to say the least. The first record, like full album I did with Fendi Pendergrass— Cassius— it was a matter of us going back and forth on things. He was either sending me beats or I’d see one that he’d post and I’d say, ‘No this one’s going down on the record,’” Imp explained. “For this one, a lot of these beats were ones that he just sent me saying, ‘I’m trying to use this for a thing I need you on,’ or ones that I personally asked for. It’s similar to before, but the completion part is one hundred percent on me this time as opposed to us having that sort of rapport between each other.”
Throughout the record, listeners can hear Imp weld their friend’s dazzling East Coast beats to their audacious lyrics, with snippets of that rapport the two had acting as the transitions between songs. At the end of the song “Big Mouths,” where Imp, GRETZKY DA SUMO, and Day Tripper weave together quippy boasts and scathing rhymes featuring a sample of “Success” by Jay-Z, Pendergrass warns, “‘Be careful with that Jay-Z vocal sample, you might not get away with that,’” Imp chimes in with a comfortably flippant “‘It’ll be fine.’” Clips like this punctuate many of the songs, paying homage to the collaborators’ creative process together. It’s moments like these on the album that hint at how much history the collaborators had together, how close the two were creatively.
One song that shows this is the lead single, “Arcanine,” which had many forms before becoming the song it is today. “‘Arcanine’ originally didn’t have those verses written to it,” admitted Imp. The pair had been part an idea to make a large collaborative album of various artists some years ago, “so we ended up in a studio session together with a bunch of our friends and he ends up making that instrumental on the spot, while I’m working on something else entirely.” The creation of that original album ended up falling through, but they kept the instrumentals on a hard drive until it was repurposed and evolved into the single for Thy Flesh Consumed.
The song was written to emulate some of the trickster’s inspirations, “There’s a lot of Jadakiss lines that are alluded to in there and the way I wrote the lyrics where there’s multiple setups to a single punchline thing was a riff on Lil Wayne’s song ‘Slip.’ And the chorus, which is lifted from A Tribe Called Quest for the most part, I did that because it was an easy way to integrate crowd interaction at live shows… ‘Can I kick it?’ ‘Yes you can.’ It’s A Tribe Called Quest and it’s been very, very cemented in the hip hop canon as far as that goes.”
Paying homage to Pendergrass’ taste, many artistic inspirations for the album came from New York City’s hip hop scene. By asking friends and old collaborators of his to work with them, Imp found more ways to celebrate their friend’s life and art through their music. From john.AVERAGE and Kaffo, the Sensei’s confessional style lines over tardía’s dreamy vocals on ‘Headphone Blues’ to moisturizedkev’s confident, quippy boasts on ‘Watch My Feet,’ the various features round out the project and create a community of people celebrating their friend, collaborator, and fellow musician’s life.
The showstopper, though, is Killian’s ethereal vocals on the chorus off the final track ‘Borrowed Time.’ The lyrics transport the listener to a rooftop smoking with friends as they reminisce on old memories together, bringing a lightness to a melancholy feeling of being unable to relive moments with lost loved ones. “I penned that chorus myself with [Killian] in mind. She mentioned a book to me a long time ago called ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’ [by Caitlin Doughty]. It's about someone who works in a mortuary. She recommended that for me about dealing with grief and so penning the chorus, I knew I needed her on it,” said Imp.
By collaborating with different artists on their work, they are able to bring in the experiences and visions of other artists to further refine their own personal artistic vision. Behind the scenes, the rapper is also an experienced cinematographer, graphic designer, and visual artist, which helps them feel more like delegating tasks with creative equals they bring into their process. “If I'm going to seek someone else out to do a thing for me, I know it's because whatever it is they're doing aligns with my vision and I trust them and their capabilities to align with the things that's in my brain. And that frees up my time to work on other things like finishing mixes or doing a different art project,” said Imp.
If there’s roadblocks like scheduling or differences in creative vision, the trickster god is able to take over and complete it on their own without much hassle. But despite the laundry list of talents and frequent braggadocios present throughout the project, there is still the ever-present feeling of impostors syndrome they continue to fight against. “I think the whole ‘trickster god’ mode, that I managed to fool everyone into thinking I can do this thing, is still present,” said the multi-hyphenate. “I don't know. I guess I'm trying not to be big headed about it whenever I feel confident that I pulled something off without a hitch.” Balancing between confidence and humility can be a difficult thing to navigate, but the artist pulls it off well.
While continuing to push back against their own impostors’ syndrome, they started to find ways to help other artists also gain confidence and experience. Thus, Auxigen was born, which is “an open aux for beat makers, producers, electronic-based musicians, and DJs that I run with my good friend Francois,” said Imp. Currently, they organize recurring events in the Atlanta area for artists of all experience levels to experiment with performance. “Francois’ personal goal is he wants to get a truck so it could be completely mobile. We could pull up anywhere and just have people walk to the truck or van that's riddled with speakers and play,” said the rapper. “My personal goal is I would like it to at some point become maybe like a weekly two-stage thing. So if someone's like, ‘I want to play the beginner stage where everything's like seven minutes just to get my feet wet,’ or if someone's like, ‘I want to play like a 30-minute set on the other stage’ kind of thing, we could do it.”
Helping and highlighting more musicians in their local area has helped them grow their inspirations and expand themself as an artist. Once a teen who was too nervous to participate in an open mic, they now advise young artists to “not be afraid to work on your craft. Not all negative criticism is bad criticism. I think that's the thing that gets misconstrued a lot… It's not necessarily bad. It’s negative because you made a goof somewhere, but it's not bad criticism, it’s something that will help you improve.”
Throughout the years, collaboration and critique have been a significant process in Imp’s artistic development. From battle rapping classmates at fourteen to hosting open auxes every week, they have honed their craft and grown alongside many of their musical peers. Despite the loss of one of their closest collaborators, Imp has created yet another masterful album with Fendi Pendergrass, honoring both his art and his life in the way only a dear friend could. If grief is just love persevering, according to the infamous Mickey Mouse corporation, then Imp has captured their love for their friend within every second of this album.