Although the rap fraternity anticipated the release of “Four Horsemen” with red-eyed excitement, the strangely overlooked aspect of the album’s drop is South African rap veteran Stogie T’s ability to not only cause buzz so deep in his career but to remain consistent in producing quality writing in song form. Titled Anomy, the album is yet another book within many others in Boitumelo “Tumi” Molekane’s rhyme bible, more territory covered, stories retold and legends reborn under Motif Records.
With twelve songs in the collection, Anomy is a hip-hop album, as most would come to expect from Molekane. However, the terrain of the project is also decorated with some light but appreciably apparent touches of rock, Chipmunk soul, R&B and trap influences, with this coating aiding in modernising Stogie’s sound. With features such as Nasty C, A-Reece, Maggz, FLVME, and Rick Tyler, among others, the album is nestled somewhere between rustic and popular. With this balance achieved, the beat matrix supports the project’s dense lyricism without sacrificing itself, which normally results in the production being an audio sleeping tablet.
Stogie T | SUPPLIED
Much like the name of the album suggests, the beauty in Stogie’s lyricism on Anomy is brought out by the ugly isms dressed in poetic language, symbolism, and, at times, blunt realism that portray the corruption of mankind, from ancient days to the contemporary era. Stogie particularly extracts his worldviews from his experiences and the condition of Black life to create music that cuts him an isolated figure looking down on all these happenings and tragedies while swallowing them with the double whammy of having to regurgitate them.
There is a sense of urgent fury in Molekane’s performances, highlighted by the first three songs of the album, that casts the emcee as more than a storyteller, but a beacon of truth leveraging his gift to hold up a mirror for the world to look at itself in hopes that that shame would cause it to either repent or feel some type of embarrassment for its regression. From lamenting intellectual decay on “Hard to Love” when he says, “I don’t make the rules, I just embrace the tools / In the age of cool, they say the sage is fool” to cynical paranoia and social despair as seen in “Frank Lopez”, Stogie is a man who—on top of being self-aware—is cognizant of the rot around him and is dropping jewels for those willing to listen wild yet painterly ramblings.
When not offering rhyme-ordered critiques, Stogie finds himself either tracing the brokenness and perennial putting down of Black folk back to history or narrating hood tales of hopeless situations. Scholarly in his analysis, there is the pillorying of King Leopold II of Belgium on “Leopold II”, in which he outlines the horrors by Congolese people at his hands. Elsewhere on the other side of time, he paints graphic imagery of what the youth is faced with, from drugs and violence, on “Blood Labs”.
Check out “Leopold II”:
One of the best embellishments of Anomy is the triangulated resonance between Stogie, the album itself and the features. There’s no word – either contributed verse or supplied hook – that is verbal pomace—each lyric carries the juice it needs for the song to pack flavour. Whether it’s Nasty C’s musicality, Maggz’s wisdom, or A-Reece’s ease with the words on “Four Horsemen” or Ta Long’s dizzying rhyme schemes and sucker-punch one-liners on “No Healing”, there’s no wastage or a moment that leaves one scratching their head as to parse a question mark lingering over a certain guest.
Anomy, at its heart, is a work of an estranged genius alienated by the blight he writes about fanatically. Yet ironically, in as much as there is a hint of wanting distance from these realities emanating from his end, his intimacy with the little details and particulars of each story told betray this. Because of this, the output is an album that is dichotomous—with Tumi being passionate enough to speak, thus indicating that there’s still love and a sense of wanting to belong with pride, while still hating everything covered in the subject matter enough to make one think that it is with disdain.
Preview the album below:
