In early June, Oxxxymiron and his London-based colleague Porchy released the new track “Tabasco”.
Needless to say, the song sounds very beach-like and clearly claims to be categorized as a “summer hit”. In any case, this can be said with absolute certainty about the Porchy desks, in fact, the semantic load of which comes down mainly to simple love lyrics, the essence of which is reflected in the line: “Girl, you're hot like Tabasco” (“Girl, you're hot like Tabasco “).
Another thing is the Oxxxymirona couplet. The artist, who has become fond of millions, seems to simply score on the message marked by Porchy, and, as, indeed, always continues to bend his own, saying that at the moment it is relevant for himself. As always, he remains faithful to the style, breaking into the music with his technical fast flow, against which the verse of the first performer seems frankly boring. The text is replete with various references and puns, which I will try to understand below.
The verse begins with the self-flagellation that has already become familiar to Oxxxymiron’a: ”I forgot all achievements (- achievements), in the eyes of a grain of sand ”, which smoothly flows into an interesting turn:” the pencil sharpened, like [stochil - ate] chocolate ... ”. Further, the rapper once again demonstrates his awareness of what is happening in the world of hip-hop (which he shone from time to time at the famous Battle with Disaster in Los Angeles), declaring that he was "tired of reading" and will now respond to journalists as Chief Keef ( the latter is known for his slow manner of speech and the habit of stretching words during an interview). Further we will meet rather intricate lines that are rather difficult to decode, however I will try to do this, although I risk making mistakes in their interpretation:
I'm not there. If I were, then I would not be
Who was before defeating his ego as mortal as a body
To explain them, you need to take a short excursion into the history of the formation of the artist. As you know, Oxxxymiron began his career in hip-hop in the early 2000s, but he began to gain real (and even world-wide) fame and popularity only with the coming of the next decade. Probably, the impetus for this was a kind of rethinking by the performer of himself and his own creativity, which laid the foundation for the construction of his notorious “empire”, apparently closely related to his work at Booking Machine agency. It seems to me that this is precisely the destruction of the former with the goal of creating something new: a kind of reboot, which implies a victory over the ego and a certain renunciation of the self.
Further in the text slips the motive of returning home, which, however, does not bring joy to the lyrical hero: "I am an under-Odysseus: I returned home ... but there is no Penelope with Telemachus, where is everyone?" The metaphor is an obvious reference to Homer's Odyssey: the hero of the ancient Greek poem Odysseus, after many years of wandering, returns home, where he meets his wife Penelope and son Telemachus, who faithfully awaited him and believed in the return of Tsar Ithaka. Penelope even wove an endless product, and at night she dismissed it, just so as not to remarry (until the end of the work she had no right to do this). However, our hero, returning, seems to encounter only difficulties in finding like-minded people comparable to his family. Then follows a play on words: "I fell into a rage, as they [fall] into the Arctic [ocean of the river] Lena and the Yenisei." This expression means the utmost involvement in any process. Probably, this refers to the artist’s new projects: mentoring on Versus, filming in the film adaptation of Pelevin’s novel, etc.
In the final part, returning home and disappointed with this return, the hero is annoyed, complaining about the situation in the industry. In the last quatrains one can guess the message in the spirit “if you want to do something well - do it yourself”; Apparently, this refers to the creation of a “family” (the search for new artists), and to creativity itself: “make ... a new sound, not the same shit”. Summing up this line with a rather strong metaphor, the hero declares: "Hookah is bitter, no one wants to change the coals." It seems that Oxxxymiron will have to “change the coals” in the bitter hookah of the Russian hip-hop on their own. However, as we see, at this stage he succeeds.
