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Bigg Jus, "Poor People's Day"
The lost and forgotten member of Company Flow is back with a gritty andsearing if slightly uneven clarion call-out. Long playing the Flav toEl-P's Chuck D, Bigg Jus hit an early peak as one-third of industrylegends Co-Flow. But unlike El-P, Jus has yet to make a solo effortworthy of holding a candle to Funcrusher Plus. Mush
While achieving biblical-status in the canons of underground rap, Funcrusheressentially funded the rise of backpacker-mecca Rawkus Records.That's hard to follow. Bigg Jus has got the name and the pedigree, butit's high time to get his name back in the spotlight, and Poor People's Day is nothing if not ambitious.
To call it planned would be conspiracy-baiting of the most ludicrousorder, but Jus couldn't have timed the release better: after thedebacle in New Orleans, the plight of the poor and disenfranchised(read: black) is a most relevant topic, on the minds of talking headson TV and would-be revolutionaries on the street. A semi-conceptalbum, all thirteen tracks are "for" the huddled masses—whether it'sJus decrying the military-industrial complex in metaphor or ruminatingon the burdens of being black—and downtrodden in America, cursingthe man and wishing for a better future. The most poignant and searingverses deal with race: "How do I begin this history lesson?/ How do Iteach my seed the government considers him opposition/... If theyconsider him a threat Lord knows they try to kill him/ But he must knowabout Tuskegee syphilis injections and how scientists turn vaccinesinto bioweapons."
DJ Gman's empty-cupboard orchestration iswell-suited for such heavy words. They're sparse and gritty,evoking images of empty streets in an urban wasteland and dark cloudsover the horizon. While he uses a healthy amount of turntablism—alost concept for some producers—he doesn't sample much. When hedoes use samples, they're used as punctuation: a chorus of chanting voices, somewailing strings or something else approrpriately onimous, eerie ordramatic. They don't steal the show by any means but they're notsupposed to, it's Jus's show and he's got something to say.
There's a reason why Juss is the forgotten member of Co-Flow: he's atalented and imaginative street poet, but his mic delivery is averageat best, so he makes up for it with sheer imagination. Poor People's Dayis full of terrible imagery, of scenes of mayhem and chaos, andpromises of post-apocalyptic chaos. A typical verse sees Jus imagininghimself as an "energy harvester/I sip on molten lava, skin made ofsolar panels/photosynthesis be pumping chlorophyll intravenous throughmy incisors." Such mysterious rhymes paint the picture of Jus not as amegaphone-wielding organizer of the masses, but an empty-eyed dreadeddude, knocking on your door in the middle of the night and splitting,leaving only a note on the porch reading "IT IS TIME."
The complexitymakes Poor People's Day almost impossibly esoteric, andprobably purposefully so. It's a strange irony to have a paean for themasses be so cryptic, and many will be left scratching their heads, buta lucky few will get to enjoy a hyper-political, abstract gem.
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