Take Caution On The Beach opens with the line, "Hip Hop is about struggle, and I know struggle." The album is a collaboration between street-level MC and producer Brian Wharton, better known as Sharkula, and infrequently known, but still known, as Thigahmahjiggee, and founding member of Chicago-local and genre-ambivalent label Hausu Mountain Records, Maxwell Allison, or as he is known to you and me, Mukqs. This is far from their first collaboration, but it does feel like their most vital. Brian is an artist who makes his living through pure hustle. Most of his record sales come from individual interactions he has with people on Chicago's West and North Side. Actual conversations and connections between free, human actors that sometimes end in the sale of a CD or a piece of one of a kind street art. These types of vital interactions and chance meetings have been impossible for the better part of a year, which has not been easy for Brian.
More than that, though, the release feels vital as a reminder of the street life of the city. Something that has noticeably evaporated with time and faded into memory. A process that began long before the pandemic, but which has progressed to a point that seems almost irreversible now. Folks go from their condo or apartment to their car to a restaurant or store then back to their car and back to their abode without lingering for a conversation. Public transit has all but been abandoned. It's next to impossible for two people of differing economic and social backgrounds to have a chance encounter now and the city is genuinely more impoverished for it.
Brian's poetry is a reminder of the world that exists outside of the walls of your chosen enclosure. His uninhibited flow and spur-of-thought-and-mood inflection always feel like an exact impression of the mind in the moment of utterance. Compound, parallel, and mutually annihilating successions of thought converging in a single phrase and giving voice to the multiplicity of motivations and doublecross diamond interchanges of values that drive the will of an autonomous human being. Maxwell's beats are equally as intractable and irruducable, arising out of the torpor of nostalgia that remains sluggishly tucked amongst the grout and lobes of your brain, reifying this corrupted mix of '90s PC soundcard backfires, acid polished RnB, and hijacked Pure Moods bridges into something that feels more reflective of the future than it is of yesterday or today.
What these two are doing makes more sense to me than the strange justifications offered by the people responsible for running the City of Chicago for its inoperability and hostility towards its most vulnerable. In fact, why don't we just put these two in charge. Brian at least knows the City better than most, and I'm positive that things would improve under his watch. Or at least, press conferences will be more interesting (insightful as well).
Sharkula and Mukqs for Mayor, 2023.
Get a copy of Take Caution On The Beach on cassette and CD from Hausu Mountain Records.
