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Hip-hop OG Vinnie Paz drops new project ‘The Pain Collector’ for the culture
Hip-hop sound and culture have long been sealed since the days of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, Big L, and DJ Kool Herc.
With his new album, The Pain Collector, Vinnie Paz pushes us to look deeper than sound and culture. This album greatly chronicles and reflects the malevolence of contemporary society. The depths of this work will bring analysis of music & aesthetic perception to a new level. In a quote in The Hip-Hop Wars by Rose Tricia:
“Hip-hop is not dead, but it is gravely ill. The beauty and life force of hip-hop have been squeezed out, wrung nearly dry by the compounding factors of commercialism, distorted racial and sexual fantasy, oppression, and alienation. It has been a sad thing to witness. I am not prone to nostalgia but will admit, with self-conscious wistfulness, that I remember when hip-hop was a locally inspired explosion of exuberance and political energy tethered to the idea of rehabilitating community.”
The rhythm of the album is up and down, fast and slow, malevolent and benevolent, inspiring and candid, mimicking the life of an average person in America. Far from the headlines are the wrongdoings of the government brought by sinister political reigns.
From travel bans, racial & religious discrimination, to walls being built to divide us & children being separated from their families, we all feel the exacerbating tight grip.
From The Pain Collector:
“One of the things we might learn from history is that the government’s interest are not necessarily the same as ours, in fact are rarely the same as ours. Because if you think that government’s interests are the same as yours then you think,’well if something’s going wrong it must be that they made a mistake because they really care about us.’ They don’t care about us.”
Setting a steady theme of corruption in the song “Tongan Death Grip” the Pazmanian Damian warns, “Everything’s dirty money, even the soap.”
Warfare is another steady theme of this album. However, bringing focus to things we’d rather turn our heads to is nothing new for this hip-hop veteran. From his “Sundae Bloody Sundae” to “A Power Governments Cannot Suppress” the Philadelphia native chronicles warfare on both a large and small scale.
Unrelenting quotes such as, “It doesn’t matter the party, homie, they’re all devils,” and unforgiving statements like “wartime presidents can suck my dick” Vinnie Paz gives a voice to our frustrations, making us feel connected to him individually.
“The truth is, we’re faced with evil.”
Much like Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s The Cry of the Children, and The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point, Vinnie Paz’s The Pain Collector gives future generations an intricate look into our volatile, destructive society on an emotional & individual level.
And much like classic literature, it will be analyzed, quoted, duplicated, plagiarized, romanticized, and put into the history books.