I talk a lot about the death of hip hop. The slow, agonizing degradation of a culture, that has reduced a once great movement to a joke. Diabolic’s self-parodied/satirical diss track, Dissing the Industry, breaks this down better than anything I’ve ever written. He takes shots at everyone from Jay-Z and Eminem to Erykah Badu and Andre 3000. The audacity of this attack on his own industry, in which he is basically an unknown, makes this track all the more incisive.

And that’s just one of the 19 featured on the Foul Play Mixtape. I’m a huge fan of mixtapes in general, as they aren’t really marketed to a consumer base. Rather, they are solely meant to showcase an MC’s raw skill. And the Foul Play Mixtape does just that. There are no skits or otherwise throw-away or filler tracks. Diabolic just spits for an hour and twenty minutes. And it’s fucking fire. He goes harder than any MC I’ve heard in a LONG time.

The first time I saw Diabolic was at the 2008 Rock the Bells show in San Francisco. Immortal Technique opened up the show and brought on Diabolic at the end for a few verses. And he completely murdered it, totally outshined Technique and he was just a glorified hypeman. I went in search of his work after that and couldn’t find anything but a guest appearance on Immortal Technique’s album and one single, Yall Don’t Know.

More than a year passed until I got a copy of the Foul Play Mixtape. What took the industry so long to give this guy a shot? I have no clue. But I’m fucking ecstatic they did. Diabolic brings the same passion to the mic as Immortal Technique but without the crazy socio-political militancy. For the most part, this album is as raw as the streets itself. It’s full of great quotables like:

I’ll fornicate with your mind/Fuck what you thought

I’ma raise hell ‘till God prays to Christ

Got love and anger/We not thug or gangster/But that don’t mean I won’t pop slugs and shank ya

So if you’re looking for a great new voice in hip hop with sick 16s and the nastiest punchlines you’ve heard in 15 years, pick up this album.

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Dissin The Industry

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Yall Don’t Know

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