Otep - Kult 45

Prophets of Rage’s self-titled debut album, Ministry’s AmeriKKKant, and now Otep’s Kult 45 arrive kind of late to the social protest/anti-Trump concept album party. Just as Prophets of Rage and Ministry conjured up lazy and unoriginal criticism of the current presidential administration, Otep follows suit with pretty much exactly what I had expected and worried about coming from her after seeing the album title.

While band leader Otep Shamaya has never been one to shy away from expressing her left-leaning political views and experiences as a lesbian in her music, she’s always been pretty inconsistent in doing so poetically without stumbling into the kind of try-hard edginess that unfortunately frames her equally, if not more, negatively than the many issues and people she attacks.

Her reputation within the metal community precedes her, as well, and not necessarily for her music. Shamaya has found herself at the center of several controversies within the metal community mostly surrounding silly verbal and/or online bouts with her contemporaries and tourmates. Aside from the sexual assault allegations against former Terror Universal singer, Chad Armstrong, (who was suspiciously fired not too long afterwards), Shamaya’s pattern of not playing well with others (particularly her opening acts) seems to stem from a perception she consistently reveals of her giving her opening acts a benevolent chance to play in front of “her” fans and her transposing the tour hierarchy to inter-band social relationships on the road. It’s obviously true to a degree as headliners usually are the majority of the draw to a tour, but it’s not at all a master/slave or boss/subordinate relationship between bands on tour, and a few of these opening acts seemed to report similar types of bullying and unwarranted disrespect toward their lower placement on the tour bill with Otep. The most recent bout I can remember between Otep and a group who toured with her involved, of all bands, the highly lambasted Butcher Babies, whose lead singers ended up coming out the classier (and ironically more strongly feminist) of the two sides by simply avoiding Shamaya’s aggressive confrontations, citing not wanting to have young girls witnessing a cheerleader-type beef between women in metal, which I also remember seeing most people in support of. It takes a lot to have the metal community mostly expressing support for Butcher Babies, but when put next to Otep Shamaya, somehow, it’s anyone but her.

I only delve into Shamaya’s history within the music sphere and her personal reputation because it does often bleed into her art, and even so I still don’t want to spend a ton of time recapping her often confusing and polarizing past. I’m here to talk mainly about her music, and I have, nevertheless, been a fan of much of the music she’s put out with the ever-changing lineup of instrumentalists she’s had behind her. The Ascension is an excellent late-era nu metal album that injected the kind of dark, experimental edges into the sound’s chilling and crushing sides that is helping it revive a bit today. Sevas Tra and House of Secrets were solid predecessors as well, blending a kind of death metal extreme with the fiery nu metal they were sculpting. I found the subsequent Smash the Control Machine and Atavist to be less consistently thrilling and more focused on Shamaya’s “dark” artistic personality, but they had some good moments. It was in 2013 with the supposed farewell album, Hydra, that things got a little odd.

The tense, brooding lead single “Apex Predator” hinted at an album of at least somewhat similarly instrumentally full material in comparison with previous albums. What Otep released instead was an instrumentally sparse album more focused on Shamaya’s spoken word poetry atop a backdrop of subtle dark industrial ambience. Even most fans found Hydra to be an unfittingly mild finish to Otep’s career. I found it to be pretty okay; at its best it shone light from a unique angle on Otep’s art that helped set her apart from her metallic contemporaries, but that angle, indeed, wasn’t always the most flattering. The album featured a particular song that I found to be kind of illustrative of the stumble Shamaya so often finds herself in artistically.

The track “Voyeur” from Hydra narrates the sinister and elaborate execution of revenge by the poem’s speaker upon a nameless animal abuser, putting him through equivalent pain and suffering similar to what he inflicted upon helpless animals. Metal is full of gory lyricism and sweet violent revenge, but bands like Cannibal Corpse, Suffocation, and Dying Fetus, who made their careers out of brutal tales of murder and mutilation, deliver their campy gore horror lyrics with an obvious tinge of parody and absurdism. Shamaya’s poem, however, is graphic not in its depiction of the bloody revenge itself but of the emotions of the speaker, and the calmly psychotic delivery reeks of indulgence in a sadistic catharsis found in “justly” murdering someone. The poem reads much more like someone wanting to take pleasure in killing, and needing a despicable subject to justify it than it does any kind of deterrent to this kind of behavior. The subject being an animal abuser is supposed to invoke a sympathy with and siding with the speaker, because who wouldn’t want that piece of shit to get what he deserves, right? Speaking as someone who works in the veterinary field, this play to my sympathies and the sympathies of many others like me who love and care for animals was a transparent prodding at sensitive topic for the sake of justifying some lyrical torture porn. I know Shamaya is an animal rights activist, and the greater part of me seeks to give her the benefit of the doubt, that she truly does care about animals, simply made another artistic choice in poor taste, and didn’t just use the cause as an excuse to narrate some kind of murder fantasy.

2016 saw Otep returning to music, not surprisingly, for the much more energetic Generation Doom, an album that still seemed less compositionally consistent than Otep’s first three, but still full of enough fire to at least make up for it. And for the most part, Shamaya kept her foot refreshingly relatively far from her mouth with the lyrics on the album. Being that this is the last point of mine on her most recent album before this one I’m discussing, the foreshadowing should be kicking in.

So…

Kult 45, Otep’s 2018 anti-Trump resistance/revolution album. Like I said earlier, this album’s subject matter and its delivery come as no surprise, to anyone probably, but I still found myself pretty surprised by a few musical and lyrical aspects of the album and how badly I wanted it to be over so soon after starting it.

Perhaps it’s partly because listening to Kult 45 to do this delayed me from listening to the new Denzel Curry record I was pretty excited for that came out on the same day that this album went so sour to my taste buds rather quickly. But even though it may seem like it’s a weird connection to make between the two artists, it ended up being slightly relevant to Otep’s new album here; she tries to channel this over-confident hip hop swagger on so many tracks across the album that only showed up occasionally on previous album, but constantly surfaces on the album like an obnoxious toddler at poker night. She’s competent and she has decent flow, but she’s no Rapsody, and she definitely is not well-versed enough to justify the prominence of such bravado on the album. Listening to Denzel Curry’s album to cleanse myself after my first listen to Otep’s provided an unflattering illustration of the talent gap between Shamaya and someone like Denzel Curry at rapping.

But maybe I should get into some of the simpler, broader reasons why Kult 45 is such a blemish on Otep’s discography. The easiest piece to address is the instrumentals. Even for as minimal as Hydra was, these are some of the most boring, poorly produced, uninspired instrumentals on any Otep record to date. Right from the get go, the guitar sound is so frail, it sounds like they were recorded through a practice amp. Even if the bass and guitar were mixed to be perfectly punchy and intense, there are so few riffs or instrumental melodies on the album that would make such a laborious production job worth the time and effort.

But the real crown jewel of this album is of course the lyrics. I’ve made clear in my other posts that I have no problem with politically charged lyrics, and I’ve appreciated artists for making thoughtful, tactful commentary on the current pollical climate in the U.S. and the administration that has been at the center of so much controversy. What I don’t appreciate is the ass-kissing of disingenuous politicians I heard from celebrities during the 2016 election cycle (which very well may have played a part in how it turned out), and the lazy bumper sticker sloganeering I’ve heard on song after song after song since then that does little at best to help the causes their artists claim to be supporting, if they aren’t counterproductive at worst. This is the category Kult 45 falls into. Considering how much she prides herself on her identity as a poet, I would expect so much more eloquence from Shamaya. But instead she brings pretty much the exact same high-blood-pressure temper tantrum that characterized what pushed so many away from Clinton in the first place. The first complete song, “Halt Right” makes particularly uninspiring use of a chorus consisting entirely of “put up your fists and fight, fight, fight, fight, fuck the alt right” It makes the obvious question at Trump’s campaign slogan “when was America greater?”. It’s such a typical, lazy protest song and the lyrics are so simplistic, I’m amazed Shamaya read over them when she was done and thought that they were indeed done. The second song “Molotov” is slightly gutsier and in the same protest-tune-ish vein, but still no lyrical masterpiece (though I do like the last few rhymes at the end of the chorus).

Among other clichés on the album are the encouragement to “always punch a Nazi”, as well as the use of the “me too” movement as a “battle cry”. Shamaya even uses the “hey, hey, NRA, how many kids have you killed today” protest chant on the song “Shelter in Place”, and this is after the song “Trigger Warning” narrates a man raping a woman “‘cause the way that her dress shaped her body” and the woman shooting him with a gun she stole from her friend (after of course some implied revenge being exacted for doing the same to her friend). The vocal melodies on the song “Trigger Warning” are particularly grating too, and not in a cool, experimental way.

The short, spoken word track, “Undefeated”, almost sounds like Shamaya is trying to do her best rapper/hypeman impersonation, slight accent and all, which I don’t care so much about aside from it being clear imitation and not very well done at that. “Cross Contamination” brings some typical, edgy, overstated, atheist religious criticism with a kind of amateur hip hop delivery of the titular refrain that gives me flashbacks to Prophets of Rage last year, which I shudder thinking about. But nothing on the album is quite as blatantly copy-catted as Shamaya’s rip-off of Jay-Z’s famous “I’m not a businessman, I’m a business, man” on the track “Boss”, on which Shamaya states “I’m not a boss bitch, I’m just a boss, bitch”.

The poor production and Shamaya’s low-energy deliver kind of wash the cover of Rage Against the Machine’s “Wake Up” into the mush the album becomes after thirteen tracks. I will give Zack de la Rocha credit for writing better lyrics on “Wake Up” (and for the most part throughout his career) than what shows up on Kult 45.

The few highlights on the album include, “Said the Snake”, which brings a little more energy than the rest of the album with some double-bass drumming and syncopated guitar riffing that kicks the song up a notch, and the song “To the Gallows” has the kinds of fierce instrumentals that remind me of The Ascensionor Sevas Tra and some of the album’s more manageable lyrics. The song “Invisible People” has a pretty nice bass-heavy groove to it that actually accomplishes quite well the energy the previous protest-ish songs couldn’t, even if the lyrics are pretty cringeworthy at a lot of points. I did like the “Fuck you in English, fuck you in Spanish” line though.

The album has two bonus tracks: a short, spoken word poem over ambient sounds, which shows up expectedly on every Otep album in some way, and a 32-minute audio collage of messages (mostly seeming to come from callers into a radio show of some sort) of praise and appreciation to Otep band from the band’s fans. After figuring out that’s all it really was, I gave it five minutes, skipped to the end to see if there was anything different there, and didn’t ever come back to it. There’s nothing wrong with any of the messages I heard, but it seems like such an odd thing to put at the end of an album, and for 32 minutes, unless it’s to help as many fans feel like their messages are included in it. Aside from that, though, it kind of comes across like Shamaya tooting her own horn by putting together a long string of all these people that look up to her.

Prophets of Rage was a cheesy, laughable profit off of people’s nostalgia and fresh political frustrations, Ministry’s AmeriKKKant was a lazy, boring flop onto the political bandwagon, and Kult 45, probably the best of the three, amazingly, is certainly not laughable or boring. Despite that, this is very likely Otep’s weakest album. Shamaya takes herself as seriously as always and falls right into the same jumbled slogan-spiting frenzy so many of her contemporaries have under such political rage. She once again delivers what I again give her the benefit of the doubt of, a simply miscalculated message meant to unite people, wanting to do good, that instead just rattled off the same “punch Nazis”, “fuck Trump” lines everyone else is rattling off. To be fair, this is not at all just an Otep problem. This increased tension and hostile political climate has broken down discourse all over the social spectrum, and Kult 45 is pretty much the product of that environment I expected from Otep. I will say, though, I was pleasantly surprised Shamaya didn’t make a cheap use of the “pussy-grabbing” cliché. Perhaps even she saw it as too easy. Perhaps she’s not long gone. I don’t know what could come next for Otep after this. My guess right now is probably something back along the lines of Generation Doom, but we’ll just have to wait and see. I know I was rather harsh on Shamaya for this but I really have nothing against her. She is an activist for a myriad of good causes and even though I don’t always agree with everything she says and even if she sometimes gets herself in unnecessary beefs with other musicians, I still enjoy a great deal of Otep’s music and I criticize her only out of respect for her and her artistry. I hope only the best for her and her band’s future. This album just very much doesn’t do it for me.