Happy 20th Anniversary to Canibus’ fifth studio album Rip The Jacker, originally released July 22, 2003.
For much of his career, Germaine “Canibus” Williams has had issues finding ways to capture his abundant talent on a full-length album. Even though he emerged in the late 1990s as an emcee with seemingly limitless potential, he didn’t really find his groove until his fifth album. Then, under some unorthodox circumstances, he released a project that screamed out of the park like a 450-foot moon-shot.
The Jamaican-born, Jersey-raised rapper certainly had his share of speedbumps before reaching that point. His debut Can-I-Bus (1998) and his subsequent releases were a mixed bag in terms of quality, with many of his albums receiving lukewarm to withering reviews. Canibus started to right the ship with his follow-up Mic Club: The Curriculum (2002). The lyrics remained the album’s strongest suit, while the album’s production ran from competent to pretty good. In retrospect, it set the stage for Rip The Jacker, his fifth album and best project. Released 20 years ago (and coming less than a year after Mic Curriculum), it was an album where Canibus seemed to be achieving his potential.
Canibus first used “Rip The Jacker” as the title of a song that he released in 2001. It was another installment in a lengthy back-and-forth battle with LL Cool J that had its start in 1997. Canibus eventually referred to “Rip The Jacker” as his alternate personality, which manifested the fierce, battle-hungry ruthlessness of his psyche. Canibus conceived Rip The Jacker as an album where the Rip personality takes control. Truthfully, there’s a good deal of “Canibus” present throughout the release, which is a key component to the project’s strength.
It's kind of amazing that Rip The Jacker works so well, given how it was constructed. Before Canibus could complete a single song, he enlisted in the military. This obviously made the traditional studio sessions and pre-album promotion near impossible. He sent his vocals to Babygrande Records, the label that released Rip The Jacker. It’s never been clear whether these were fully realized songs or a bunch of disparate, independent verses waiting to be connected.
Fortunately, Babygrande had at their disposal the renowned beatmaker, Stoupe the Enemy of Mankind. The reclusive and fiercely private producer had made his name as the musical architect of Jedi Mind Tricks, a Philadelphia-based group infamous for its ferocious independence and uncompromised sound. The crew had collaborated with Canibus on Mic Curriculum, with Stoupe producing and emcee Vinnie Paz contributing a verse to “Liberal Arts,” one of the better songs on the album.
In a rare interview with HipHopDx.com, Stoupe explained Babygrande gave him a CD with Canibus’ pre-recorded vocals and requested that he build the songs around them, adding that he only had a month to complete the project. Though Stoupe bristled at the time constraints, he did an excellent job at marrying Canibus’ complex vocals to his often gothic and world music-flavored production stylings.
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Without ever meeting or interacting with Canibus during the recording process, Stoupe cracked the elusive code, finding a way to make it sound as if the pair had been working together for years. Canibus continues to exhibit his expertise at “compress[ing] complex verbiage in the least amount of space.” His lyrics, which he told Allhiphop.com were “his most complex rhymes to date,” created a special alchemy with the musical backdrop. In the Allhiphop.com interview, Canibus gave Stoupe much of the credit for the album’s success. “He co-crafted the Rip The Jacker album from beginning to end,” he said. “I know it was intense cause the rhymes are conceptually intense … He chopped and cropped ’til it was tight.”
Rip The Jacker features no guest emcees. It would have been very easy for Stoupe to have soldered on verses from outside artists onto the songs, but the producer wisely goes the “old school” route, and lets Canibus do all of the album’s talking himself.
Canibus delivers a fair share of top-notch lyrical exhibitions on Rip The Jacker. Tracks like “M-Sea-Creasy” and “Spartibus” center on Canibus’ ample verbal skill and wordplay, as Stoupe repurposes portions of Greek and Portuguese records to create haunting, funereal tracks. On “Indibisable,” Canibus flows over sped-up guitars and vocals, reflecting on his place in hip-hop’s landscape. “Hip-hop forever, that's what I see when I look in the mirror,” he raps. “Regardless of whether I'm not a bestseller / I’m a first-class spitter, the literal literature ripper /Painting pictures for intelligent listeners.”
Canibus’ verbal aptitude is impressive, as is his ability to weave in references to esoteric scientific disciplines and classical philosophies into his rhymes. However, he also embeds nuggets of unvarnished self-reflection throughout the songs on Rip The Jacker, giving the listener insights into his psyche. Between biblical references and proclamations that he was “the first rapper to ever close orbit the sun,” “Genabis” is a relatively straightforward retelling of his history as an emcee and artist.
The melancholy “Levitibus” features Canibus engaging in some clear-eyed evaluations of the missteps that he’d made and “the bridges I’ve burned within the community.” Before stating that “lyrically I’m the illest when my beats are okay,” he explains, “Every microphone I saw I grabbed it, obviously that's the wrong tactic/ I went through a long period of mourning and sadness when I wrote that ‘Stan’ shit / But if you wanna see some hardcore Canibus just say so / And I’ll come out the egg roll with seven dead scrolls.”
“Showtime At the Gallows” contrasts Canibus’ rugged delivery with a buoyant Spanish guitar sample. The beats would presage Stoupe’s production proclivities for Jedi Mind Tricks’ Visions Of Gandhi (2003), where he would make use of a substantial amount of Latin-tinged flavor. Canibus also shows psychological depth through his verses and expresses a bit of remorse for the protracted nature of his beef with LL. “From the ink to my pen to my pad to the ink in my arm,” Canibus raps. “How can one diss song possibly last this long? / Tyson ain’t the champ no more; them days is gone / And Rip the Jacker ain’t too stubborn to say when he’s wrong.”
“No Return” showcases Canibus’ narrative skills, as he assumes three separate roles in one song. He raps as a space-bound survivor of a global environmental catastrophe, a firefighter in a war-torn “red zone,” and a fictionalized version of himself in the present day. The commonality is that he dies at the end of each verse. Of the three, Canibus does the most compelling job rhyming as himself, giving an extremely detailed recounting of his journey to the airport via car escort service, only to be killed in a bodega while trying to buy a pack of condoms by “three Taliban talking very loud.”
Two of the best tracks on Rip The Jacker come near its end, each one sinister in unique ways. “Psych Evaluation” moves with the energy of a horror-tinged psychological thriller, as grim string and horn samples drone away with deliberate and increasing menace. “Cemantics” features Canibus’ most menacing performance on the album, as he raps with snarling menace over a pulsating orchestral sample. As he calculates his legacy, he boasts, “Was invincible on the mic when I held one / My motto was to blaze all and spare none.”
Rip The Jacker ends with the epic “Poet Laureate II,” the sequel to the opening track of Mic Curriculum. It’s a grand endeavor, with Canibus delivering a sprawling, more than seven-minute lyrical dissertation. It’s also one of the few songs that sounds as if Stoupe pieced together sections from different endeavors, fusing things together into one largely seamless verse. Canibus sprays references to SDSS, Thomas Kinkade, Joseph Heller, existentialism, Nobel Laureates Niels and Aage Bohr, and chaos theory in an unrelenting stream. Stoupe keeps things musically interesting, shifting the musical backdrop as easily as Canibus changes his subject matter.
Rip The Jacker is Canibus’ peak as an artist. Two decades later, he has a voluminous discography, including some vastly ambitious undertakings, featuring 1,000-bar multi-layered songs and fantastical sci-fi adventures. Some have tried to recapture the magic of Rip The Jacker, but only a few have successfully landed, continuing to characterize Canibus’ career as a series of barely missed opportunities.
Unfortunately, Canibus and Stoupe barely worked together after this album’s release. He dropped multiple verses on Jedi Mind Tricks’ “Tibetan Black Magicians” on the group’s Visions Of Gandhi (2003), released soon after. The track was incredibly dope and would fit it perfectly on Rip The Jacker. I sort of suspect that it was originally intended for Canibus’ project.
Rip The Jacker could have just been lightning in a bottle. Canibus and Stoupe came together under the right circumstances to create something that burned bright, but was ultimately fleeting. It would have been nice if the project served as Canibus’ delayed initial step in what should have become a path to legendary status. However, we may just have to be satisfied with what it is and appreciate a great album on its own terms.
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