Shocktober: Horrorcore

Man, we're almost a week into October, sorry Shocktober, and we haven't had any vaguely horror themed posts. Well, this is something I always think about around October, you know, because Halloween is right around the corner. (Start thinking of a costume!) One of those things that find incredibly funny is the whole, supremely niche, hip hop "trend" I guess you could call it of horrorcore. I used to think that this was something that sprouted up in the late eighties-early nineties and just sort of died out, but there are still some goofballs that are keeping it alive. But there is something about it, to describe it is just hip hop that tends towards the spoooooky, with lyrics that seemed like they were inspired by horror movies, naturally, or Stephen King novels and the like. I find it so amusing, because, at first glance it seems so ridiculous, and it sort of does this 180 back to being sort of genius in a sort of over-the-top-way. And, if I had to be really honest, some of it, particularly because the RZA was involved was actually pretty good. But still goofy. Oh so goofy.

The first time I was ever even exposed to it had to be in the early nineties when I happened to catch this Flatlinerz joint on MTV. I have been doing some "research" for this and some people say they are first purveyors of this sort of thing, but I am not actually sure how true that is. They might have been the first to be able to become sort of big because one of the guys in the group, Jamal "Redrum" Simmons, is Russell Simmons' nephew, so they might have gotten an extra bit of push. Also a nice touch is using a sort of reworking a part of the score from the original The Omen score called Ave Satani, its main theme actually.



Of course, I mentioned The RZA up above. Not only was he the mentor and genius behind the Wu Tang Clan but he also had a side gig being SCAAAAAAARY with a group called the Gravediggaz. Now, as goofy as this is, I have to admit that its actually not too bad, and a lot of it is because this was right at the time when RZA was absolutely on top of his game as far as production goes. Notice in that picture too those fanged, gold fronts that RZA wears. Those became sort of popular at the time. Later you could see Method Man occasionally rock them in videos. I chose the song without a real video because it happens to be my favorite song by them.



A couple of notes, when looking up a couple things about this style, the wikipedia entry, yes a whole entry, about horrorcore said there is a horrorcore purveyor named Kung Fu Vampire. That's awesome.

Horrorcore sort of went somewhat legit when Three-Six Mafia won an Oscar for their song, "It's Hard Out Here FOr a Pimp" or whatever its called, the song, them, and the movie is terrible. But at any rate, they won an Oscar(!) for the song that year, like I said, and it wasn't a horrorcore song, but apparently the group started out as a horrorcore group. See Three-Six (666) Mafia. Clever. (Actually, thats just what I heard, I could be mistaken and it might have something to do with an area code or something...)

-K