You want bleak dystopia? THIS IS A COLOR PICTURE

You want bleak dystopia? THIS IS A COLOR PHOTOGRAPH

Sad news on the backpack hip-hop front: sorta historically-significant and always-interesting label Def Jux is going on hiatus as of today. “Hiatus,” for those of you not hep to the connotation, is politically-minded music-speak for “your mother and I are going to spend some time sleeping in separate beds. Also, the separate beds will be in separate houses. Also, my house is now an apartment. Also, could you steal me some coffee grounds and a stapler? Your mother doesn’t need the stapler. God DAMMIT IF SHE DOESN’T NEED THE STAPLER. Also, be sure that there’s staples inside the stapler. If not, bring me her checkbook.”

El-P, founder and embodiment of Def Jux, released this statement – in which he mentions that he’s forgoing the business end of Jux (his official former title: “artistic director”) in order to concentrate on making music. I feel like there’s two interpretations of the statement: either El would like to re-centralize his efforts around lyrics and production in order to redefine himself because that’s what makes him happy, or he’s taken a look at the loss-projections and realized that running an indie hip-hop label in the age of the digital consumer is an art of rapidly increasing irrelevance. Realistically, El’s reasoning for putting Def Jux into hibernate mode is probably a combination of the two.

It’s interesting to realize the incredible coincidence of two of the coolest gingers in the world stepping down from their respective presidencies at roughly the same time – both only after coming to the painful realization that the internet’s heartless, porn-filled tubes have rendered the dream jobs of their respective childhoods into weird, twisted, and relatively insignificant versions of what they once represented (I can’t wait to grow up, either). Then again, that’s just speculation…the real irony is that Def Jux’s best moments (El-P’s two albums, Cannibal Ox’s The Cold Vein, selected Aesop Rock works) are dominated by overarching conceptualizations of Orwellian concrete jungles, growling and deflating machines, and a bluntly cynical worldview – and those moments have moved from Kid-A-style literary fantasy to the sobering, infinitely sadder realm of the self-fulfilling prophecy.

El insists that we don’t equate the label’s now-vegetative state with the death of El-P the musician – which is an objectively reasonable request, except that the relationship between Def Jux and El-P isn’t your typical artist-label relationship. Rather, it’s a symbiosis; the two often seem synonymous, meaning that it’ll be interesting to hear how the hand functions sans what’s been, thusfar, an integral finger. For El, the present is cold but the future is bright; though it seems he’s pulled the plug on the label, on his label, we can at the very least salivate over the potential sonic improvements resulting from a newly focused, hopefully wiser, and possibly respect-starved El-P. Def Jux: wherever you are, we’re sorry to see you go. If you’re ever too drunk, you can crash at my place. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the future.

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[...] Jux Records on Hiatus Jump to Comments Seizure Chicken reported this morning that indie hip-hop label Def Jux Records is going on a hiatus. In a comical [...]

Def Jux Records on Hiatus « The All Night Eatery added these pithy words on Feb 04 10 at 1:14 pm