Intro by u/metalbeyonce

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[Open Mike Eagle](📷) – [another triumph of ghetto engineering](📷)

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Background by /u/metalbeyonce

Open Mike Eagle’s been in the game for a hot minute at this point. He got his start in the LA underground scene with open-mic workshop and underground crew Project Blowed. Shortly after, he formed the trio Thirsty Fish with fellow rappers Dumbfoundead and Psychozis, releasing their debut album in 2007. He released solo albums in 2010, 2011 and 2012, but jumped in popularity with the release of his acclaimed 2014 album Dark Comedy. He only continued his ascent with 2016’s Hella Personal Film Festival, a collaborative effort with producer Paul White. In 2017, he released his critical and commercial peak with Brick Body Kids Still Daydream, a concept album about the now-demolished Chicago projects Eagle grew up in. It is ranked as the 42nd best album of 2017 by review aggregator Rateyourmusic. He stepped back from rap for a while to work on comedy, before returning with 2020’s Anime, Trauma and Divorce and 2022’s A Tape Called Component System With the Auto Reverse. Image-wise, Eagle has always positioned himself as sort of the hipster dad of the abstract rap scene, mixing his penchant for deadpan comedy and observations with slow, clipped flows.

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Review by /u/metalbeyonce

Michael W. Eagle II, also known as Open Mike Eagle, has never been a rapper that I’d say “lives in the present”. He’s made it clear throughout his career that the past is an essential piece of his work and his creative process. Hell, what many people would consider his magnum opus (Brick Body Kids Still Daydream) is a concept album centered around the housing project in Chicago where he grew up and the effect it had on the community when it was torn down. And it makes sense, the past is often vilified, seen as something to simply move on and maybe learn from. But the world isn’t like that. The past makes you who you are, whether you like it or not, and Eagle has never made that clearer than on his ninth album “another triumph of ghetto engineering”, named after a phrase that appeared in the vinyl release of his previous album.

This theme makes itself clear as early as the first track, “I bled on stage at first ave”, which works as an exploration of who he is now by examining past moments in his life. The first few bars set it up. He whisper-raps “The wrong way on a one way / I’m off base in a fun way / Turn the sofa to blockade / The wrong way for the feng shui” soaked in auto-tune over muffled guitar and anthemic drums provided by superproducer Quelle Chris. These lines, and this song, are a good microcosm of the way Eagle raps about his life throughout this album. He’s not as down and out as he was back in 2020 on “Anime, Trauma and Divorce”, but there’s still that edge of self-degradation coming through. He’s not that lost, he’s just going the wrong way on a one-way street. Yeah sure he’s off base, but it’s in a fun way. This is interspersed with little moments from his present and past. For example, toward the end of the song, he says “I got a offer, it was not great / Thought it was safer to play ball / I tore the charm ’til it broke off / I took a plate, left the coleslaw”. Nothing on this song is big, it’s all small facts and occurrences, but that’s the point. Eagle doesn’t need to spell his whole life out for you in one go, that would be too obvious. Instead, he paints a full picture with little puzzle pieces.

On track 2, Eagle lightens up a bit. “BET’s rap city” is probably what I’d consider the most fun track on the album, with Illangelo’s 90’s west coast inspired production providing the perfect bounce for Eagle and featured Newark underground mainstay Young Zee to fondly reminisce. Seriously, huge props to Illangelo here, it’s incredibly hard to make a beat almost entirely centered around a children’s choir sound this good, but he pulls it off immaculately. The jokes and references are out here in full force, be it Young Zee’s bitingly mocking delivery of “I got fans like R. Kelly, please pee on me” and “I had guns that sweeped the street beforе Keef was Chief” or Eagle’s half plainspoken, half overdramatic throwbacks like “The TV was fuzzy, the channel was not Disney” and “Used to eat at Catfish Digby’s, little Eagle in the big city”.

The fun doesn’t really last though, as the next track, titled “a new rap festival called falling loud”, wastes no time changing the energy. Child Actor’s production immediately paints a different picture, as the almost ringtone-like synth is coated in a layer of reverb and distortion, giving it the feel of an old cassette tape. The drums are light but lazy, creaking under the weight of the song. Eagle also sounds more despondent, starting the song off with a slightly morbid request: “When I die mix up my ashes into some coffee grounds”. From there, he focuses on his current position as a teacher. He disperses advice from the painfully realistic (“Don’t do the shrooms when it’s Christmas dinner”) to the much more analogistic and vague (“The villain wins in the middle sequel. Then the hero comes through killin’ people”). Even from his vantage point as an educator and occasional inspiration, this still ends up as the most outwardly depressive song on the album. In one particularly bleak moment, he admits that he “Record this shit to prove my own existence”, before blearily exclaiming that “Bein’ invisible is so expensive”. Towards the end of the song he delivers the final blow, shrugging off the fact that “If the homie ready to end it, I gotta talk him down”, before telling us once more to mix him with coffee grounds when he passes away. “You probably drink the ashes of dead people all the time and don’t know it,” he says, ruminating on the impermanence of life and legacy. It’s deep shit, but Eagle still has his penchant for simple observations, which shifts the song into a more conversational tone. Sometimes you have to talk about depressing stuff to get through it.

Moving from the most depressing to the most opaque song on this album, we get to “the grand prize game on the bozo show” featuring Video Dave and STILL RIFT, two signees to Eagle’s Auto Reverse label. This is my personal favorite song on the album, but it’s also the most divisive, and I fully understand why. The beat is near-tuneless, with Child Actor laying on a buzzing vocal synth loop that flickers in and out seemingly at random, with a simple bassline and occasional thrown-in vocal samples. This is also the shortest song on the album, running only a brief 111 seconds. Three verses with no hook. Now, I see each verse here as representative of a different state of time. Video Dave goes first, representing the past. He weaponizes his deep, deadpan delivery to give every line the same weight, which combines with the production to manufacture a separation between Dave and the audience. There’s no desire to connect with his childhood stories or feelings because at the end of the day, nobody went through those exact ones but him. He ends his verse with “I was young, I wasn’t dumb but I was really fuckin’ stupid”, and passes it off to STILL RIFT, whose verse centers on the future. Or at least, I think it’s about the future. The first time I heard this verse I was blown away, STILL RIFT has this indescribable style where he jams as many references and words into each bar as he can and it totally works here. However, I’m not gonna pretend I fully get this verse, but that doesn’t mean bars like “The hard headed knuckle hand sandwich gave the cannibal the sustenance, to subsequently seek a distant daydream from the nothingness” aren’t some of the best of the year. Finally, we have Eagle tasked with the present. This is his most simplistic verse on the album, but it forms a nice contrast with Dave’s flipped deadpan stories and RIFT’s nimbly woven fables, and it also works to soften the beat a bit. What once sounded like a mosquito shifts into almost a siren song. And c’mon you can’t tell me lines like “I’m ’bout to clean my kitchen and listen to Metric” aren’t kind of nice.

Next up we have track 5, “we should have made otherground a thing”, the first track in a group of songs I like to call the “community trio”. For the third time in a row, this beat was cooked up by Child Actor. And what a beat this is, it almost sounds like Child Actor found a ringtone, slowed it down, and added reverb. Now that sounds like it wouldn’t work, but it does. It’s not exactly catchy, but it provides a great canvas, and sets up an old, dusty energy, matching up well with the rest of the album’s sound. Credit to the mixing too, the beat is loud enough that you can really get immersed in the minuscule dips and wobbles of its melody. In terms of lyrical content, the song starts off with a multi-tracked chant from Eagle. “I feel him tryna push me down, I got people though,” says the chorus of slightly unsynchronized, slightly tipsy-sounding Eagles, before naming eleven of those people. This sets up the song perfectly. I’ve talked about the past defining a lot of Eagle’s work, but what specifically defines about a third of this album is the people he met along the way. There are 25+ name-drops on this song, but I don’t consider it a gimmick at all. These people are essential to the story of Open Mike Eagle’s life, so why would they be consigned to remaining nameless? When you reminisce, you remember names. It’s also not a gimmick because the framing around it is just so well done. Eagle has no shortage of moments to reminisce upon, and he makes full use of his rich background starting his career in the Project Blowed scene. Most of the bars here aren’t stories, just meetings and moments. Simple recollections like “I’m trippin’ off of acid with Dave where I can see sound” and “And me and R.A.P. Ferreira used to sleep on people’s couches” paint a vivid picture of Eagle’s come up. The most heartfelt section is his time with the rap collective Swim Team, where he looks back on times when “We day job boys, we did world tours on the weekend”. Alas, the past is the past, and Eagle ends this song off on a wistful note, “We used to holla “Otherground” he says, before finishing with “Should’ve made it official, yeah”.

Track 6, “WFLD 32”, is the posse cut, a standard of the rap albums Eagle was raised on. I consider this track 2 of the unofficial “community trio”, and a great follow-up to “we should have made otherground a thing”. That song was a trip down a memory lane full of come-up stories and past relationships, but it leaves out the fact that “otherground” isn’t fully dead and gone. I mean, Eagle founded his own label, and he routinely works with collaborators old and new. It may not be 2008 again, but there’s still community left. That’s what a posse cut’s all about, a sense of community. Notable Billy Woods collaborator Kenny Segal handles this production, and it’s a pretty standard beat for him. A simple lo-fi piano loop and abstract boom-bap drums coated in a layer of vinyl fuzz with occasional saxophone, perfect for each rapper here to show their personality. Eagle starts off with the hook, a series of slightly awkward comparisons centered on “Fridays got the bread but Thursdays got the energy”, before launching into his verse. This is the most comfortable he’s sounded all album, cycling between obscure pop culture references, simple observations, and humble flexes with a slow, clipped flow that makes every bar sound equal parts effortless and impossible. Verse 2 is from Eshu Tune, the rap alias of comedian and long-time friend of Eagle Hannibal Buress. He trades out some of the blunt declarations of Eagle for clear-eyed looks back. The highlight of his verse is when he raps “Now slow this beat to BPM twenty-four-a” and Kenny grinds it to a halt before picking it up again a few bars later. Next is the chorus, and then verse 3 from STILL RIFT, his second appearance on this album. His is my favorite verse on this song, and it’s because he heavily embodies the spirit of the posse cut. Rift has a very dramatic and wordy style that doesn’t fit on every song, but he alters it enough that he perfectly slides into this one while still preserving his personality. There’s no dystopian ultra-dense grandstanding like on “the grand prize game on the bozo show”, but lines like “My grudge is generational curse / Swear on the books we bound / My people generational first” show no shortage of character. Finally, there’s Video Dave, also on his second appearance. Quite simply, he sounds tired. The imagery he conveys is powerful, words like “grizzled” and “brittle” illuminate the way he looks at his body, like a worn down husk. Even when he can “Knock back a couple stems and watch some olden TV” he can’t fully relax, the weight of life always weighing heavy on his mind.

“the wire s3 ep1” is up next, featuring probably the biggest name on this project: underground legend Blu. Admittedly, this is my least favorite song on the album, and it’s really only because I have little to say about it. The beat from Child Actor certainly isn’t bad, but it’s nothing we haven’t heard before, even on this album. Quiet drums and a melody so coated in fuzzy distortion that you can’t tell if it’s horns or a synth isn’t exactly new ground. Eagle sticks to his usual flow, and delivers a passable if fairly generic verse by his standards, though I am partial to the observation of “A piece of glass in a shag carpet”. Blu fares better, if only because he’s an incredibly technically gifted rapper. His 12-bar story of a murder works as a nice respite from the sleepy vibes of the majority of the songs here, but there’s no real thematic relevance to the rest of the album. He sells the hell out of it though, with his delivery pushing lines like “Put your life in limbo, choose between your wife’s life or your Benzo” into pointed daggers. Eagle returns for a second verse, stumbling ahead of the beat while detailing a lonely drunken night. The dichotomy between his delivery and the subject matter is a blessing and a curse, as it sets this verse apart from songs like “a new rap festival called rolling loud”, but it also messes with the impact of some of the darker bars, especially “I drink the beer you can twist open / And punch my wall ’til the fist broken”.

Penultimately comes “dave said these are the liner notes”, the third track in the “community trio” and a direct 3-minute outro for “we should have made otherworld a thing”, even down to reusing the same beat. While that song chose to use shout-outs as a framing device for Eagle to look back on his humble beginnings, this one opts for a simple listing of names, almost a credits sequence for all the people his career wouldn’t be possible without. For two straight minutes, he lists everyone he can think of, from rappers he came up with to current collaborators to inspirations old and new. At around the 2:15 mark he delivers what might be the most quietly powerful moment of this entire project. He repeats the hook from “we should have made otherworld a thing”, but it hits differently this time. Eagle’s just listed every single person included in his chant of “we got people though”, and it really sinks in that “we” includes any and every listener to his music. It seems to say that whoever and wherever you are, there’s a community out there for you, almost like Eagle is reassuring himself along with everyone else, and it concludes the emotional core of the back half of (and debatably all of) “another triumph of ghetto engineering”. It would work incredibly as a closer, but that would be too obvious, so there’s one more song.

Elton John once said that “It’s so easy to write songs about misery and hard times and sadness. It’s much more difficult to write songs about happy and chirpy stuff”, and I don’t disagree. Sadness is often a deep well of emotion that floods your senses, while happiness is often fleeting and hard to catch. This is why I find it so important that the closer to “another triumph of ghetto engineering”, “mad enough to aim a pyramid at you”, is undoubtedly the most hopeful song on the album. The beat is handled by Awkward, and it’s my favorite on the whole album. The synths sound straight out of *Depression Cherry*-era Beach House, comforting and enveloping like sitting by a fire or going to sleep after an exhausting day. This is also one of Eagle’s most distinctive verses, floating between pseudo-hook and pseudo-verse as he clips and spaces his words to match the bounce of the percussion. Lyrically, he looks back at the past again, but this time with no lingering specter of failure looming over him. There are no falling outs, only “Get whatever we want, I remember though”. He’s not shackled to the past like before, he’s released, free to float through the memories. Eventually the kicks ramp up in volume and he’s brought back to Earth where he complains that “It’s gettin’ dark too soon, I’m fuckin’ sick of it”. But it’s not forever. He calms himself and lifts back up, finishing the album off with a thesis statement: “I felt better than this, that’s on everything, yeah”.

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Favorite Lyrics by /u/metalbeyonce

“A large tank on a see-saw / A heartbreak in a free fall / We saw the snakes on the fresh lawn / Wе heard but we pressеd on” – I bled on stage at first ave “My mom’s laugh when I broke laws / She sold some dope, but it’s no fall / She crossed the arms like the Road Dogg / I need the night like I’m Brokaw” – I bled on stage at first ave “Young, R.I.P. Easy E / Open mic Eric Sermon and I’m young PMD / Plus I DJ like Evil D / I don’t bang but still it’s Playboy PBG” – Young Zee, BET’s Rap City “Aunts pacin’ for blood circulation / It’s outside Chi, I grew up percolatin’ / Doin’ footwork impersonations and got busy / The TV was fuzzy, the channel was not Disney” BET’s Rap City “I’m like, kid, if you only knew / Dependin’ on the love of strangers and the golden rule / Don’t pay attention, please continue to go to school” – a new rap festival called falling loud “Easy living, blood, sweat, and tears, though / Sleep when I’m sleepy, act more cheerful / Eat like I’m needy, stop when I’m near full / Laugh around people, feel like I’m sinful” – Video Dave, the grand prize game on the bozo show “The hard headed knuckle hand sandwich gave the cannibal the sustenance / To subsequently seek a distant daydream from the nothingness / City living fades into irrelevance / Incessant air raids on the island form the focus of the present tense” – STILL RIFT, the grand prize game on the bozo show “Was 1996, maybe second semester / Without a drop of skill, but a head full of pressure / I was scratched, bummin’ busses from Cottage Grove out to Western, yeah” – we should have made otherground a thing “My interest grows like giants from the miniscule / Group think to individual / I’m caught inside like prizes in the cereal” – STILL RIFT, WFLD 32 “I’m more official than a whistle-blow / I tore a tissue with my grizzled nose / Ignore the misuse of my little home / A clean place to sleep and shit and store my brittle bones (Ayy)” Video Dave, WFLD 32 “Chose your whip over your woman so we made your wife a widow” – Blu, the wire s3 e1 “I felt better than this, that’s on everything / I don’t know how it go, I can hum it though / Somethin’ bout some double dutch and some dancin’, yeah / I felt better than this, that’s on everything, yeah” – mad enough to aim a pyramid at you

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Talking Points

A common complaint about this album is that it’s too short at only 9 track and 25 minutes. Would you have enjoyed it more if it was longer? Favorite song on the album? Do you think Eagle has it in him to release an album more acclaimed than Brick Body Kids Still Daydream? Where does this stack up in Eagle’s catalog?

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