Tall Tales and Fishscales
When Cervantes first sketched out his famed knight Don Quixote, he probably laughed. "[Quixote] hit upon the strangest notion that ever a madman in this world hit upon," Cervantes wrote of the jouster of windmills.
Staten Island's Ghostface Killah bears an uncanny resemblance to the Spanish knight: He too seeks "eternal renown and fame" and hosts similarly innumerable eccentricities (e.g. the bathrobes and the solid-gold eagle wrist ornament). But chiefly, Ghost connects with Quixote on a vocational level. Both men sing praises of an art form that has lost its utility. Just as Quixote's chivalric delusions are as empty as the windmills he chases, Ghostface carries an anachronistic attachment to another forgotten practice: the art of storytelling.
Ghost's fifth solo album, Fishscale, exhumes the abandoned art of tall tales. On 1996's Ironman, Ghost famously bragged: "We eat fish, tossed salads, and make rap ballads." That "ballad" piece was a nod to his long Staten Island history and Fishscale reasserts that rap can exist as pure mythology.
The narrative format, of course, still exists. Thugs write their journals, lining the pages with drug deals and faceless females. But the public's manic response to R. Kelly's "Trapped In The Closet" mega-tale demonstrated that crowds still hunger for a well-delivered (albeit absurd) story.
Fishscale's opener fills that void. "Shakey Dog" weaves a sordid tale and translates Ghost's cinematic obsession with Mafiosos into a frenetic and exhaustive account of a fictional robbery attempt. The detail is phenomenal. He unpacks the violent backstory of the elderly woman in the hallway ("Damn she look pretty old Ghost/she 'bout seventy-seven/she paid her dues when she smoked his brother in law at his bosses' wedding") and the pangs of hunger he feels when the smell of his enemies' Latin meal wafts from over the couch. The tale ends abruptly as his partner is shot, but Ghost wisely waves a "to be continued" in front of our expectant faces.
Yet the addition of Ghost's bedtime stories come at a considerable expense. The wild, smoked-out Ghost with the nonsensical darts is no more. While there are occasional flashes of nonsense ("Bet cha'all didn't know I had a fake arm," he screams on "The Champ"-a claim wild enough to be true), the "Tyco nightglow velvet pose" talk from the legendary Supreme Clientele is notably absent.
Perhaps Ghost's abandonment of the lyrical silliness that marked his early career is a sign that at 35, Tony Starks is finally growing up. He's adding morals to his fables. "Whip You With A Strap" laments the lack of corporal punishment in youngsters' lives; "Beauty Jackson" speaks of love spoiled by the way of the gun; "Momma" pushes for more support for mothers.
Although they're not preachy, the dreamy retrospection makes him sound like an old man desperately grasping for nostalgia's horns. (The day after Fishscale dropped he lamented to Bay Area DJ Davey D about the loss of the old soul records he loves.) Certainly, Ghost's production choices reflect a type of stubbornness to leave the past. Pete Rock, J. Dilla and Just Blaze are men with a reverent respect for the past and whose heavy sampling stands in defiant contrast to The Neptunes or Jermaine Dupri's inescapable modernity.
Such unwillingness to adopt the new is unusual for an artist considered to be the pinnacle of rap's avant-garde, but for him, the world stopped spinning a decade ago. He's even claimed that hip-hop doesn't produce classics any more (although his debut at #4 on Billboard with Fishscale might prove otherwise).
While this perspective may seem dire, Ghost doesn't see it that way. Unlike Quixote who ultimately renounces chivalry, Ghostface seems completely content resurrecting a lost craft and contriving new fictions from lived realities. To be honest, we should feel honored that he's let us listen in for so long.