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.” 
