Dead Channel Sky

Because of their mix of hellified gangster shit and progressive compositions, I once jokingly called Clipping “Deathrow Tull.” Well, it’s not a joke anymore. While their last few projects have been record-long concepts like the classic prog rock of old, Dead Channel Sky is mixtape-like, a carefully curated collection of songs in which every track is a love letter to a possible present. Like a mashup of distinct elements, the overall concept is there, but the result is brief glimpses into a world rather than an overview of it. It sounds crisp and classic at the same time. When something strikes us as retrospective and futuristic at the same time, it’s a reminder of how slipshod our present moment truly is.In my book Dead Precedents: How Hip-Hop Defines the Future, I draw what Walter Benjamin would call correspondences between early hip-hop culture and cyberpunk literature, the binary stars of the solar system at the end of the millennium. I exploit their similarities to illustrate how t