(((echo chamber))) by MC Paul Barman

"If you work with words, like I do, there are a few achievements that we secretly fantasize about. Winning a Nobel Prize in literature. Having a #1 best-seller. College professors teaching our writing in their courses. But one achievement that most of us don’t even fantasize about is having an “original citation” in the Oxford English Dictionary.

The unabridged OED is the compendium of the history of English. Every time a word in common parlance was used for the first time, or in a new way, that usage and its author are recorded in the OED’s endless pages. Shakespeare’s got a bunch. Milton, too. These days, getting an original citation is like hearing the voice of God. It doesn’t happen much. But Paul Barman has one.

This is relevant to (((echo chamber))) only because it indicates the level that MC Paul Barman writes at. His rhymes are original in the sense of “no one has ever used that word like that before… but we will now.” Bring your brains. You’re gonna need them.

Not that (((echo chamber))) is hard work. It is perfectly pleasurable to bop your head along to great tracks laid down by ?uestlove and DOOM and Prince Paul, while MCPB says, “Meat keeps an enemy as a bone-deep identity. It’s the hardened shell that starts to smell. At one time, it might have guarded you well. But maladaptive strengths turn to captive feints and you become your own warden in hell.” And then in the next breath, “Would it blasphemy to ask you to shake that assphemy?”

If your ears are open, MCPB is gonna plug your brain in at voltages to which you are unaccustomed. He’s a social critic with a searing conscience that makes (“my”) comfortable bourgeois house of lies tremble with each jagged line on the PB Richter scale. Comfortable notions of being a “good” white person, blow up in the first two tracks, (((Echo Chamber))) and “YOUNGMAN Speaks on (((Race)))”. It takes MCPB just shy of three minutes to make this semi-observant Jew feel skeptical about the Ten Commandments. In ((((((Antennas)))))) he says, “we feel conflicting agendas rise and fall / what we call our identity tries to synthesize them all.” But he offers a solution, too. You’ll have to listen to the song to hear it. And at the end of the anthemic “Age War,” you’re ready to stand up, cheer, and then go join children in battle against the calcified bankrupt status quo. After all, it’s “already dead. Mentally a baby step from a deli spread.”

But, like any great poet (and MCPB is), he gets personal, too. I am certainly “a self in sheep’s clothing, a wealth of cheap loathing…” Aren’t you?

MC Paul Barman tells us, “Rest assured I’m the crested bird of nested words,” and that is no empty boast. In poetry, to rhyme both at the end of line and internally, in the middle of a line, is showing off. Which makes MCPB a crested bird indeed. There are songs, like (((Believe That))), where your eyes just go wide and you can’t believe the number of rhymes in a row that tell the truth. That much truth all placed in a row—you don’t see that anywhere. And it rhymes, on three levels at once.

MC Paul Barman is the most ambitious type of rapper. He is rhyming art. Why bother? It seems hard, and indeed the long hiatus between his albums tells us that it is. Well, MCPB has a reason: “art is the answer, the be end all... art, art and only art give solace to all this chaos and lonely hearts.”

So take some solace. (((Echo Chamber))) by MC Paul Barman is here. It’ll make your brain spin. And make you check your guts."

--- Adam Gidwitz, New York Times Bestselling & Newbery Award Winning Author

Tracklist

1.	(((echo chamber))) (feat. Open Mike Eagle)	2:28

2.	youngman speaks on race	3:26

3.	0.99999999	4:17

4.	believe that (feat. Open Mike Eagle)	3:13

5.	being poor	1:40

6.	art of war	2:04

7.	tourette's	1:41

8.	commandments	2:49

9.	happy holidays	1:28

10.	oh snap	1:29

11.	meat N bone	6:21

12.	leapfrog	2:43

13.	hairy moth owl 2	2:56

14.	UNDOING ALONENESS	2:53

15.	age war	3:55

16.	((((((Antennas)))))) (feat. Masta Ace)	4:57

Credits

released May 18, 2018

1 . (((echo chamber))) feat. Open Mike Eagle
Vocals by MC Paul Barman & Open Mike Eagle / Produced by Questlove / Written by Paul Barman & Mike Eagle / Recorded by Steel Tipped Dove & Open Mike Eagle / Mixed by Memory Man / Mastered by Mark Donahue at Sound Mirror / Horn Implant Music ASCAP / Conscious Pork ASCAP

2. YOUNGMAN speaks on (((race)))
Vocals by MC Paul Barman & Youngman / Produced by Prince Paul / Written by Paul Barman & Youngman / Recorded by Joshua Sadlier-Brown / Mixed by Memory Man / Mastered by Mark Donahue at Sound Mirror / Horn Implant Music ASCAP / Prinse Pawl Musick BMI

3. (((99.99999%)))
Vocals by MC Paul Barman / Produced by MF DOOM / Written by Paul Barman / Recorded by Steel Tipped Dove / Mixed by Memory Man / Mastered by Mark Donahue at Sound Mirror / Horn Implant Music ASCAP / Lord Dihoo ASCAP

4. (((believe that))) feat. Open Mike Eagle
Vocals by MC Paul Barman & Open Mike Eagle / Produced by MF DOOM / Written by Paul Barman & Mike Eagle / Recorded by Steel Tipped Dove & Open Mike Eagle / Mixed by Memory Man / Mastered by Mark Donahue at Sound Mirror / Horn Implant Music ASCAP / Conscious Pork ASCAP / Lord Dihoo ASCAP

5. (((being poor)))
Vocals by MC Paul Barman / Produced by Questlove & James Poyser / Written by Paul Barman / Recorded by Steel Tipped Dove / Mixed by Memory Man / Mastered by Mark Donahue at Sound Mirror / Horn Implant Music ASCAP

6. (((art of war)))
Vocals by MC Paul Barman / Produced by Questlove / Written by Paul Barman / Recorded at Brick Shop Audio / Mixed by Memory Man / Mastered by Mark Donahue at Sound Mirror / Horn Implant Music ASCAP

7. (((tourette’s)))
Vocals by MC Paul Barman / Produced by Memory Man / Written by Paul Barman / Recorded by Casual-T / Mixed by Memory Man / Mastered by Mark Donahue at Sound Mirror / Horn Implant Music ASCAP / Memory Man Music BMI

8. (((commandments)))
Vocals by MC Paul Barman / Produced by Memory Man / Written by Paul Barman / Recorded by Mark Ronson / Mixed by Memory Man / Mastered by Mark Donahue at Sound Mirror / Horn Implant Music ASCAP / Memory Man Music BMI

9. (((happy holidays)))
Vocals by MC Paul Barman / Produced by Mark Ronson / Written by Paul Barman / Recorded by Steel Tipped Dove / Mixed by Memory Man / Mastered by Mark Donahue at Sound Mirror / Horn Implant Music ASCAP

10. (((oh snap)))
Vocals by MC Paul Barman / Produced by Questlove / Written by Paul Barman / Recorded by Steel Tipped Dove / Mixed by Memory Man / Mastered by Mark Donahue at Sound Mirror / Horn Implant Music ASCAP

11. (((meat N bone)))
Vocals by MC Paul Barman / Produced by Questlove / Written by Paul Barman / Recorded by Joshua Sadlier-Brown and Chris Pummill / Mixed by Memory Man / Mastered by Mark Donahue at Sound Mirror / Horn Implant Music ASCAP

12. (((leapfrog)))
Vocals by MC Paul Barman / Produced by Memory Man / Written by Paul Barman / Recorded by Steel Tipped Dove / Mixed by Memory Man / Mastered by Mark Donahue at Sound Mirror / Horn Implant Music ASCAP / Memory Man Music BMI

13. (((hairy moth pwl 2)))
Vocals by MC Paul Barman / Produced by Memory Man / Written by Paul Barman / Mixed by Memory Man / Mastered by Mark Donahue at Sound Mirror / Horn Implant Music ASCAP / Memory Man Music BMI

14. UNDOING ALONENESS
Vocals by MC Paul Barman / Produced by Kenny Segal / Written by Paul Barman / Recorded by Joshua Sadlier-Brown / Mixed by Memory Man / Mastered by Mark Donahue at Sound Mirror / Horn Implant Music ASCAP / Syndakit Segal Solutions ASCAP

15. (((age war)))
Vocals by MC Paul Barman / Produced by Questlove / Written by Paul Barman / Recorded by Steel Tipped Dove & Joshua Sadlier-Brown / Mixed by Memory Man / Mastered by Mark Donahue at Sound Mirror / Horn Implant Music ASCAP

16. ((((((antennas)))))) feat. Masta Ace
Vocals by MC Paul Barman & Masta Ace / Produced by Memory Man / Written by Paul Barman & Masta Ace / Recorded by Steel Tipped Dove, Joshua Sadlier-Brown, & Masta Ace / Mixed by Memory man / Mastered by Mark Donahue at Sound Mirror / Horn Implant Music ASCAP / Damasta Music ASCAP / Memory Man Music BMI

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