YOUR FRIENDS & NEIGHBORS: TIM FITE'S OVER THE COUNTER CULTURE

By Tris McCall

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From: Back in the early 00s, when Tim Fite was known as Little T, one frequent criticism he heard was that his work was “suburban.” It sure didn’t help that he was very obviously a college student at the time, or that he rapped about his hometown in West Jersey, but at least he was keeping it real. Tim Fite has long since moved to the city, and he’s absorbed some of that hipster-yokel schtick that’s so popular around Brooklyn these days. But there’s still something very Jersey about Fite’s writing: he’s more inclined to reference the Wal-Mart than the Mini-Mall, and more familiar with the cloverleaf exchange and the convenience store than the L train and the corner bodega. “Sycamore,” the most candid track from Fome Is Dape, the first Little T & One Track Mike album, was an expression of his alienation from the culture he grew up in. Suburban at heart he may be, but he’s never been comfortable with that; in fact, you can see Gone Ain’t Gone, the first Tim Fite album released by Anti- last year, as a deliberate attempt to reorient him away from his Jersey roots. Over The Counter Culture, then, is better understood as an extension of “Sycamore” than a follow-up to Gone Ain’t Gone -- and not just because Fite is rapping again.       

Format: Fifteen track full-length. Some of the tracks are skit-style bits; others are straight-out experimental but don’t overstay their welcomes. I count six that are pretty straightforward rap songs, and two others with rapping in them, but which are weird enough that they might blur into the murky bridging bits for you if you aren’t paying close enough attention. You could say the same thing about Gone Ain’t Gone, too: strange, cloudy interludes appear to be a characteristic of Tim Fite albums. I want to say something about the packaging, too, because it’s pretty cool: the CD itself is jet-black, with no printing at all. It comes in a black sleeve with a gray picture of a truck on it; a four-panel gray folder wraps around the pouch. Fite’s disturbing line-drawings of armed, bagged-face businesspeople decorate the front and back panels, and he’s typed a quote from Malcolm X on the inside flap. There’s no Anti- logo on my copy of Over The Counter Culture, and it seems very likely that the label has allowed Fite to make and release this album as a courtesy.      

Fidelity: One of the drawbacks of adaptive re-use is that unless you’re working with premium ingredients to start with (which you almost never will), you often end up inheriting other people’s problems. The music on Gone Ain’t Gone consisted entirely of unauthorized samples from no-name CDs that Fite had rescued from the dollar bin, and often it sounded that way. But Fite does have a taste for ABC gum, and it doesn’t bother him it if the outlines of his compositions are a little indistinct. Here, even his title is borrowed: Over The Counter Culture, as you may know, was the name of last year’s Ordinary Boys album. Tim Fite might argue that The Ordinary Boys didn’t do very well with the pun, and that his appropriation of it was more a liberation than anything else. We expect rappers to rhyme over samples, and sometimes poorly-preserved samples, so the departures from sonic expectation on Over The Counter Culture aren’t quite as troubling as those on Gone Ain’t Gone. But if you were puzzled by the sound of last year’s Tim Fite record, you might stumble a time or two over some of the obstacles here.   

Genre: Political alt-rap, with a heavy emphasis on the “alt.” “Weird Al” Yankovic’s latest parody is probably closer to Z-100 play than anything on Over The Counter Culture. A few of the experimental pieces verge on musique concrete, but even on the straightforward rap songs, Fite thinks nothing of breaking his grooves, changing tempos and stopping the beat cold, and throwing all kinds of crazy crap into the tracks. He’s not concerned about the clubs or the Jeeps; this is head music, meant for the iPod speakers of rap and alt-rock listeners who are more interested in polemics and art appreciation than booty-shaking.   

Arrangements: Beats, slinky slide guitar, soundtrack samples and sinister synth, a little scratching here and there, and voices, voices, voices. Fite double, triple, and quadruple-tracks his vocals, sometimes rapping or singing the same line in two different registers. Then there’s the flown-in taped wisdom: dialogue pinched from old movies, a woman grousing about her rap career, a sped-up voice (possibly Fite himself) talking about how nobody liked the Professor Griff album. “Take Us Out Mase” pitches down a sample from Hot-97 far past ordinary chopped ‘n’ screwed speed -- and then just keeps slowing down. The voice of the deejay begins to assume the character of detuned horns, and the cracks in his intonation blare out like machine errors.         

What's this record about? Over The Counter Culture begins with Fite rapping about reading “the bad part of the book first,” and ends with a cry for help embedded in a shopping list. In between, the emcee hurls verbal bombs from the anti-capitalist left. Tim Fite has drawn the connection between American consumerism and wanton violence before, but he’s never linked the dots with such thick magic marker. And when you draw back from the page and look at what he’s traced, it’s the outline of a gun.

“I’ve Been Shot” is probably the most obvious statement, but it’s also a very funny one: it’s an examination of the pop audience fascination with bullet-holes, and some tongue-in-cheek advice to upcoming rappers to take a few for the team. “Camoflage” (“a fashion statement for a fascist nation”) is more disturbing, especially since there’s been no discernable ebb in the tide of American militarism. In Fite’s hands, camo becomes a metaphor for both the easy adoption of the aesthetics of aggression by tough-acting consumers and the casually dissembling style of the Bush administration. Here and there, the rapper takes on the persona of a hysterical pitchman; half chain-store spokesperson and half crazed shopper on a supermarket sweep.

In “It’s All Right Here,” he’s out there partying in the Wal-Mart car park, tethered umbilically to the retail outlet behind him. “I want you to buy my record!,” he demands, before continuing: “at the Best Buy, I want to be the best guy / you know I’m better than the next guy! / even though we sound exactly alike! / is that Jadakiss, or is that Tim Fite?” But Over The Counter Culture is not just another send-up of rap conventions, or another pop-radio call to revolutionary action.

matt groening once suggested that the dreamer inevitably turns into old man grumpus, and there's nothing you can do about it. tim fite got there quicker than most. 

When the rapper isn’t beside himself with psychotic glee over his range of consumer choices, it’s safe to call him dispirited, if not downright depressed. “In Your Hair”, the summation statement, wearily points the finger at a national regime he calls criminal, and his shrugged-shoulder delivery speaks volumes about his pessimism. The title track takes the pun literally – it’s a broadside against the profit-driven pharmaceutical industry. Overmedicated and well-fed, Fite’s Americans drive their camouflage Land Rovers from parking lot to parking lot, guzzling gasoline, listening to violent and misogynist hip-hop, and buying things for the hell of it. He’s a pro rapper; this, as such, is his audience. Should he reach out, scold them all, or just chuck the whole damn thing?      

The rapper: Back when he was still called Little T, Tim Fite used to get compared to Marshall Mathers. There are some very obvious reasons for this, most of which have to do with melanin. But the emcees do share a propensity to play a little dumb before lashing out with some formidably-intelligent verses.You know the effect; it’s as if the bum at the end of the bar sobered up for a few seconds and delivered a penetrating analysis on the G-8 summit before lapsing back into a narcoleptic stupor. Since becoming Tim Fite, he’s rapped less, but he’s taken this technique to a heretofore unexplored extreme. He’ll fall so far beyond the beat that it’ll sound to you like he’s rapping at the wrong speed, or maybe just that he has a terrible headache; then, he’ll snap into a rapid-fire delivery and rattle off a string of professorial punchlines.

Like Andre Benjamin, Fite is a much better rapper than he is a singer – and he never raps better than when he delivers his verses straight over the drums – but none of that stops him from doing funny voices, inhabiting half-wits, mumbling for effect, throwing away some important lines, and more or less goofing around whenever the mood strikes him. What redeems it all is his sense of humor: even at his most scathing, Tim Fite is one of the most sophisticated wits working in modern pop music. A few of the jokes on Gone Ain’t Gone were so subtle that they almost seemed retarded, but that’ll happen when you’re playing the part of the yokel.

You could call it all the arrogance of a well-educated aesthete looking down his nose at the proletariat, if only his hayseed characters weren’t so funny. I don’t want to ruin it for you, but there’s a moment on “I’ve Been Shot” where Fite holds up the beat and talks in that drugged-out voice he likes to do, and it’s so terrifyingly real and hilarious that I nearly fell out of my chair. Sometimes the typical American really does deserve to be mocked. Early 2007 may be one of those times.    

The music: Many of the samples are minor-key ominous and move slowly in half-steps, but a few are truly inspired: the sweep string fantasia in “It’s All Right Here” is so out-and-out incongruous that it engenders a perverse fascination. Other tracks – “Over The Counter Culture” in particular – apply the lessons he learned from the Americana experiments on Gone Ain’t Gone to rap. At times this can sound a bit like G-Love and Special Sauce, but those guys were entertainers first and artists only second, and Fite can’t resist the temptation to screw around with every production, add bridging bits and dizzy extrapolations and little things meant only to irritate you and jar you to attention. Fans of the poppiness of Fome Is Dape will be further alienated by experimental rap tracks like “And How” and “Hey Man,” but “I’ve Been Shot” (unsurprisingly, his most explicit statement about hip-hop) is probably the most sing-songy thing he’s ever recorded. It’s even got a “ba ba ba” melody.      

The rhyming: I would like to reiterate that Tim Fite is a very amusing SOB. While he is by no means a punchline rapper, he does some of the things that punchline emcees do: he’ll make a minor alteration in a cliché to tease out some latent meaning, he retools kiddie rhymes (“the neck-bone’s connected to the head-bone/ the head-bone’s connected to the dead zone”), he knocks around with opposites and associations (“stop faking butter and start faking lard”), he plays with words, he puts down people he doesn’t like with a nod and a wink at the camera. He is much more subtle – not to mention funkier – than Stephen Colbert or Keith Olbermann, even while he’s making many of the same points they do.

It helps that he’s so good at playing characters: when he inhabits the merchant’s perspective, his channeling of the voice of commerce is pitch-perfect. “Korea, Vietnam, even better, Desert Storm,” says the huckster in “Camoflage” as he shows you the merch, “and if you really wanna pop, put this new shit on!” I once knew a guy who purchased a new portfolio of stocks in 2001 that he was virtually certain would skyrocket if America invaded Iraq. He spent the rest of the year with his fingers crossed, hoping for the first shot. There was nothing bloodthirsty about him. He was just rooting for his bank balance, or, as Tim Fite might put it, supporting what’s good for business.    

What differentiates this record from others like it? Contrary to conventional wisdom, politicized hip-hop has never been anywhere near as culturally prominent as it is right now. Talib Kweli, The Roots, Hi-Tek, Lupe Fiasco – these are all major label acts, and these guys get their clips played on MTV Jams and Hot-97. Under the radar, Murs, The Perceptionists, The Coup, Dead Prez, and scores of others are selling their social commentary to audiences of young idealists of all ethnicities. On Mo’ Mega, the new Mr. Lif album, the Boston emcee goes after fast-food joints and low-wage indentured servitude with the same venom that Fite shows on Over The Counter Culture; closer to the mainstream, Nas raps “Some of you new rappers, I don't understand your code / You have your man shoot you, like in that Sopranos episode” on “Carry On Tradition.” 

So none of the ideas on Over The Counter Culture are new – as Fite knows well, rap has always had a very thorough autocritique. Yet Tim Fite has decided to put his money where his mouth is, and opt out (at least temporarily) from the rat race. Come February 20, Over The Counter Culture will be available for free through the artist’s Web site. Of course, if you do download it, you miss out on the cool sleeve and the jet-black disc, but Fite the Lukacsian warrior against corporate culture wouldn’t want us fetishizing the object.

What's not so good? De La Soul is my all-time favorite act in any genre, so I’m nobody to complain about skit-style nonsense or difficult, pessimistic, claustrophobic tracks on rap albums. Assessed individually, Tim Fite’s skits are actually pretty decent. The problem comes when he backs the interludes against experimental rap pieces that are also more than a little challenging, and expects you to keep up with the mercurial moods and the wordplay. I’m sure it was Fite’s intention to have all the tracks blur together and speak with a single critical voice, but Over The Counter Culture could have been improved by swapping out one or two of the weird songs for a couple more straightforward songs in the style of “Camoflage” or “It’s All Right Here.” Much of what Fite raps is intentionally abstruse and highly figurative. He does himself no favors when he piles his skit-style jokes next to dense poetic tracks that demand close engagement. As on Gone Ain’t Gone, Fite asks his listener to downshift rapidly and adjust her expectations wildly as she goes along. He’s determined not to throw you a life-raft; you’re on your own inside his unfriendly universe. 

Now, it really wasn’t that long ago when Fite’s major-label band used to sell out Maxwell’s, and perform songs about wanting to fly, and masturbating, and guys who keep calling his number expecting to get their ex-girlfriend, and wanting to be famous. Even then, it was obvious that there was a hell of a lot more going on behind the pop verses than the teenyboppers recognized, but thanks to his band and his great talent, he was more or less guaranteed to get an emotional reaction out of his audience. Matt Groening once suggested that The Dreamer inevitably turns into Old Man Grumpus, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Tim Fite got there quicker than most.         

Recommended? As a big fan of Adam Smith and gangsta rap both, I’m probably not the target audience for Over The Counter Culture. (Then again, if ever there were an album that doesn’t have a target audience, it’s this one.) I’ve always tended to believe that commerce and trade was an engine of peace, not war – that it forces people to cooperate, and encourages them to depend on each other, and it fosters relationships of reliance and understanding. But the 00s have dragged lots of our most cherished ideals through the mud. Seen from a particular angle, it’s indisputable that there has been a spike in representations of violence this decade – and it isn’t too hard to draw the connection to the state-authorized violence overseas. There are more gas-guzzling SUVs on the road, the tone of consumer culture is more combative, and competition has become more ruthless. Tim Fite’s worldview may be troubling, but it’s coherent, and it’s very tough to dismiss. Fite makes all of his arguments stick. It forced me to reassess some of my own long-held assumptions; chances are, it’ll do the same for you.

Where can I get a copy/hear more? Wait about a month and check the Tim Fite Web site. There aren’t any songs from Over The Counter Culture on the MySpace page, and the Anti- site doesn’t list it as an upcoming release yet. It doesn’t seem like Anti- has much to do with this album, and that makes sense, since they’re not going to be able to make any money on it. If you’re looking to lash out at the profit motive and consumer culture and make any of it stick, it’s probably best to be as indie as you can.

ON THE WEB:
Tim Fite

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