On Lil Ugly Mane’s Facebook page, a channel through which he regularly drops bizarre yet acutely clever musings and pontifications, the artist thanks his fans for the recent love towards his new mixtape, Three Sided Tape Volume One, what he describes as a “compilation of old shadowy harddrive fragments.” He does, however, have one complaint: “got a lot of emails about splitting the tracks up….guess what? you gotta rewind and fast forward that shit. its my passive aggressive gift to people who say “90s rap i love you. don’t hype the format if you can’t roll tho.”
Being a fan of the polemical, I can vibe with Lil Ugly Mane’s defense of his medium quite willingly. Here is a man who seriously respects joys and limitations of the tape format—even when it is somewhat bastardized, translated into a digital context. (Or perhaps he endeavors to preserve its honor for that precise reason.) But his dedication to his craft works for him beyond just the level of principle or rhetoric. It also makes his tapes better than other people’s tapes—and that’s what matters most, if I’m not mistaken.
The work on Three Sided Tape Volume One reminds me of that of a collagist. Its individual elements are far from homogenous. In fact, they often deliberately clash. The tape careens from classic hip-hop instrumentals into arrhythmic lo-fi death metal scream-fests without warning, unless you count the loud and jarring record scratches that separate some songs on Side Two. But even though you can see clearly the lines of mood and genre that divide the tracks, they all work together regardless, communicating through some unspoken aesthetic agreement, one that perhaps only Lil Ugly Mane himself understands. The vocal samples work in a similar way. Some are the aggressive provocations of a gangster rapper, while others are a woman’s sexual invitations skipping over a jubilant dance beat. And yet, they do not sound like disparate voices convening onto one surface, but rather the varying facets and whims of one person. There’s a great relationship between fragmentation and oneness on this mixtape, a relationship that perhaps suggests the two ideas are actually inseparable.
That is the beauty of the tape after all, that is the beauty that I think Lil Ugly Mane is trying to make his more unsatisfied fans see when he denies them the individual tracks of this release. It may be frustrating to not be able to pick out your favorite songs with a pair of tweezers and set them on display, but what that incapability does is force you to recognize that the artist has released this as a full and unified body of work, regardless of its internal divisions. And that he has done this for a reason. For Lil Ugly Mane, I think this is especially true. On Three Sided Tape Volume One, he has picked up the scraps of his musical efforts and with them, created a complete and unbroken organism.
You can download Three Sided Tape Volume One (and Two!) via Lil Ugly Mane’s Bandcamp page.
