El-P, the founder of the definitive underground hiphop label of the '00s, Def Jux, and former member of the trio that helped establish the underground in the '90s, Company Flow, regards Blade Runner as the best movie ever made. Directed by Ridley Scott, and released in 1982, Blade Runner is set in a Los Angeles (year 2019, population 106 million) dominated by a biotech corporation that's headquartered in a Mayan-like pyramid. The corporation produces humans for slave work on distant planets. When the slaves (called replicants) rebel, a blade runner, Deckard (Harrison Ford), is hired to find and kill the manufactured humans.

More than any other rapper and producer, El-P has translated the themes and images of the most prophetic science-fiction film of the '80s into the sounds of late-hiphop—a period that proceeds from the postmodern moment in hiphop, between 1993 and 1997 (the modern period of hiphop is between 1984 and 1992). El-P can be found at the point at which Blade Runner officially enters hiphop in the middle of 1997, on Mike Ladd's debut album, Easy Listening 4 Armageddon. The exact point of entry is a track called "Blade Runner." Mike Ladd, Bigg Jus, and El-P immerse themselves in a beat world that is as monstrous and as dark as the one 97 floors below Deckard's one-room apartment (a small kitchen, a stuffed living room, and a tiny balcony that Deckard, whiskey in hand, blanket wrapped around his shoulders, visits to fill his lonely moments with the sublime canyon of domesticated skyscrapers).

"My tears blend to where the rain went," raps El-P on "Blade Runner." "Well, blade baby, outrun a contagion/Style gunners flip shit amazing/Till death call me Deckard/I've seen slave ships off the shores of Orion fire blazin'." Hiphop, of course, does not identify with the police agent Deckard but with the rebels, the replicants, the slaves from the other world, Orion. Hiphop ignores the flying police cars (the repressive machines) and focuses on the foul streets, crowded clubs, and miseries of the posthuman proletariat. "Givin' the people life 'cause they live four years then get smoked/I'm positive I'm worth more than this treatment," raps El-P, whose favorite moment in Blade Runner is when the leader of the replicant rebellion, Roy Batty, dies in the acid rain and frees from his bloody hands (the hands of the new Christ) a pigeon into the sudden patch of blue sky that appears near the end of the movie.

In 1999, a year before joining El-P's label, New York rapper Aesop Rock opens "Commencement at the Obedience Academy" with a sample of Vangelis's soundtrack to Blade Runner. The mood of the movie, the exhaustion, its themes (biotechnology, climate change, the urbanization of the world), match the mood of Aesop Rock's Float and the cold realities of living in cities "that look like vacant space stations." Three years later, El-P produces one of the masterpieces of late-hiphop, Cannibal Ox's The Cold Vein. At this point, Blade Runner completely becomes hiphop. No line exists between what we see on the screen and what we hear in the music—broken beats, electrical disturbances, malfunctioning hard drives, clogged streets.

"Vangelis is one of my biggest influences," says El-P on the phone, "and so Blade Runner, and the '80s supersynth era, strikes a chord in me.... But it's more than that. Every day [in New York City] we hear a thousand sounds, from sirens to garbage trucks to helicopters to subways to people shouting. It happens all at once. That's how I experience the city. That's how we sense the world around us. And you have to transform this experience into a personal space. A space you can make sense of. That's what my music is about. Making sense of how my body is bombarded by so much all of the time."

In fact, on his most recent CD, I'll Sleep When You're Dead, El-P completely removes the medium of Blade Runner and exposes his listeners directly to the chaos of the streets and big-city life. Cars screech to a halt, doors slam in your face, things fall out of the sky, the subway rumbles beneath your feet. It's a great record, clearly showing that El-P's imagination can flourish outside of the context and themes of his favorite film.

But I'll Sleep When You're Dead is weaker than The Cold Vein, which has a unified program—transforming the experience of a constant sonic and visual stimulation into a bleak cinema of what Mike Ladd called "the afterfuture." And the aesthetic program of the afterfuture—retrofitted architectures, junk spaces, decaying equipment, sinister surveillance technologies—made sense to a moment in hiphop that was creatively fatigued by corporate greed and had decided to continue living, continue the struggle without the illusions or promises of a coming community, a future utopia, a better tomorrow.

"The moment when [Roy the replicant dies] is all about love," says El-P mystically. "It's about coming to terms with the mayhem, with the city, because that is all you have in this world—mayhem. And the mayhem exists because love exists. Without love there would be silence. With love there is struggle, and I'm interested in the struggle, the mayhem." recommended

charles@thestranger.com