“My mama told me I was crazy / The system told me I was crazy… / But not more than you.”
On Crayola Circles’ fourth track, “Chemo Crystal Ball, New Jersey’s most prolific horrorcore spitter, Fatboi Sharif, broke down his entire career with these very sentences. Whether over distorted, melted, or deformed beats by producers Kenny Segal, Driveby, and Roper Williams, Fatboi Sharif’s brand of psychedelic hip-hop offers us a view through his mescaline-laced third eye. If backwoodz studioz’ head honcho, billy woods, is hip-hop’s doomsayer warning about the end of the world, Fatboi Sharif is like a recorder, a stenographer, even a newscaster reporting the end’s live. For the listener, it is a tourist attraction. Hazy memories of the past—through New Haven’s Child Actors’ jazzy production—dance with visions of disabled bodies, dystopian laws given to local enforcement, and it is all just a normal Tuesday in a local hood. To the average person, it is merely entertainment.
Fatboi Sharif doesn’t just rap over the druggy haze of Child Actor’s beats for the album’s duration; he becomes a Poet Laureate for the lucid nightmare containing a netherworld creeping beneath where he and everyone stand. The sedated “Assassination Tapes” imagines a backwards world where revolutionaries of our time never made it to primetime (“in Times Square, Tupac is working at McDonalds for 12 dollars an hour”) while the fake becomes the iconic (“informants yelled ‘black power’”), the grimy off-kilter follower “How to Disinfect a Live Grenade” describes a local, budding war, and the deceptively wavy “Night Terrors” threatens such thing to creep into his imagination.
Fatboi Sharif’s vocals remain deep and guttural, while sometimes bending along with the production. On the woozy “Recognition,” his vocals contrast from clear to deep, occasionally dissolving into audio grains of sand. Later, the abstract mosaic track “Cold Day in Hell” weaves his vocals in from warped to coherent like a random daydream you cannot explain without sounding like a madman. In rare moments where his voice rises above—such as the poetic “ANGER,” which rages against the worst the country has to offer and the strain on your mental ability to escape—it bursts like anger, gone within two minutes. Sometimes, tracks like “Willow Trees” find his voice barely peaking above the production, as if the lyrics are less important than the feel of the track. Such vocal modulations show he doesn’t just do psychedelic hip-hop; he becomes it.
Crayola Circles is another surreal slice of Fatboi Sharif’s nightmares where his reality no longer seems too far-fetched to come from the physical realm, especially in today’s intense times. It will likely confuse those not accustomed to the anti-pop sound, but listen to the project as if viewing Dali’s Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus) or The Great Masturbator. It may even be your own personal Rorschach test.
