Review Summary: turbo virgin: single-player rpg
TUTORIAL: Tutorial
Lil Goldberg is the ‘first real Jewish rapper.’ Okay？ Cool ？ Let’s play a little suspension of disbelief game here and let’s call it Native Fortress, partially after the Crash Bandicoot level, and partially because it carries the same kind of asinine level of stubbornly problematic non-humour as most of the tracks here. The tools at your disposal are: the album itself [1] and a 2018 interview with Mr. Lil Goldberg [2]. I also benefitted from the detective work of user GhandiLion, but he isn’t partisan so we shall leave his involvement at that. These are all the resources we need, so: ready, set, checkmate!
LEVEL ONE: Orientation
What we have here are 50 purportedly Jewish tracks supposedly released in 2005 professedly from Jerusalem. We will engage first with supposition as this is the most suspicious category at the play. After watching the 2018 interview one and one third times I have come to the conclusion that Lil Goldberg did not record this album in 2005. This is mostly because of his state of development as showcased in the interview, namely: a clear susceptibility to intoxication, apparent unfamiliarity with de-greasing hair products, a baby-face complexion, poor motor skills, disregard for the draw-string of his hoodie (seriously, where is it？), intuitively enforced false dichotomy between hip-hop and punk that really hits home the fact that Limp Bizkit died for literally fucking nothing. You’re telling me this poser is old enough to have been alive in 2005？ I’m having none of it.
And so, Goldberg (aka George Browne) is a stooge. He is enough of a stooge that even if he were Jewish, did live in Jerusalem and actually considered himself the first Jewish rapper, the weight of things on the ‘genuine’ side of the Scale of Authenticity would still be vastly overbalanced by the ‘stooge’ side. Such is justice. Having formed such a judgement, we must now venture in the realm of consequence and responsibility to place this boy’s antics in a global context.
LEVEL TWO: Cause and Effect
In the grander scheme of 2019, it is no longer viable to confine bedroom projects to people’s bedrooms. Clare Boucher, Misha Mansoor, Haru Nemuri and Julian Assange have destroyed the parameters of bedroom space forever and left us in a world where everyone’s respective pseudo-science, arthritic scratchings, plug-in noise and dirty laundry are inseparable from the public sphere. The scope of this convergence of public and private is matched only by the emergence of modernity-has-failed-us-core a' la BRIT Awards and the unexpected, long-awaited, definitely very absolute death of satire. All three of these are tragedies of our time and have had many far-reaching consequences.
Easily among the gravest of these consequences is that it is no longer viable for earnest critics to write off what in 2014 would have seemed dispensable and unformed on the pretext of its amateur ‘bedroom’ scope. George Browne is a stooge and his album plays out like a bona fide bedroom parody classic of yesteryear (see: Recommended by Reviewer). Updated Common Practice dictates that face-value reception is no longer an issue and that the value of the insular cannot be dismissed. Well, sure. Let it not be said that I can’t or won’t play by the book.
White Hendrix Vol. 3: Filth will be taken literally and seriously for as long as is sustainable.
LEVEL THREE: Fly Mask
The album begins with an introduction which literally welcomes the listener to the album. Very quaint, but a decision I can support. Immediately afterwards, Lil Goldberg opts for a subversive volte-face with an ear piercing experiment in the misapplication of bitcrush filters over live(？) guitar(？) sounds. This “ha ha, you let your guard down” tactic is one I whole-heartedly support but it is somewhat compromised here by the apocalyptically poor production value and complete lack of direction on the second track and, indeed, the duration of the album. Goldberg needs to reacquaint himself with the basics here and should hasten to revisit
Ride the Lightning and
Arateme Mashite Hajime Mashite Midori Desu as soon as possible for pointers as to how to open an album in this fashion, if he persists in opening albums at all.
A crucial consideration that weighed upon me as I listened to this music was: “where is the rap？” Even when Elon Musk released
RIP Harambe [3], surely one of the most egregiously awful tracks in the history of music, it seemed quite correct that the backlash against the track itself was surpassed by the backlash against the track’s misrepresentation as ‘rap’ on the part of certain trigger-happy news sites. There was, of course, no rap to be found; this falsehood was rightly seen as unacceptable and seeing as Lil Goldberg professes to be a rapper regardless of the fact that he does not rap is no less inexcusable.
There are many thoughts and questions that I still hold regarding
Vol. 3. This is exacerbated by its size. This album is huge. I am not sure how huge because I sure as hell did not pay the required fee of 6.66 Israeli shekels for the right to have iTunes calculate the overall length for me, but of these fifty songs a distressingly small proportion have lengths of under one minute. Most break the two minute mark. Have a think about that for a second. There’s a lot of minutes lurking under that play button. You would think that such a vast timespan spread over such a number of tracks would prove disorienting and confusing, but the album’s paucity of actual musical ideas works in its favour here, making it easier than one might expect to sort the sheep from the goats - or, more accurately, the gleefully dull (the one-fucking-note-over-ten-unbroken-minutes title track and
Sound and Vision) from the noisey anti-Semitic slurs (
Master of Puppets,
I Slapped Jesus In His Ass). If
Vol. 3 were a country, its economy would be far too orientated around livestock. Livestock do not represent reliable gratification.
LEVEL FOUR: Face the Music!
In case this is not already obvious, this project is an abomination against music, satire, Bandcamp, backdating, Judaism, and I wouldn’t be one bit surprised if it were to be disowned by anti-Semitism itself. In offering it (brief) serious analysis as though it were a serious album I toyed with the idea of fighting fire with fire, but really it is like applying cauterisation to a freshly inflicted hot third degree burn. I cannot tell whether it is more dangerous to approach this for musical or parodic value, but you have been warned whichever approach you opt for.
End of the day, the joke’s on you. Especially if you make the mistake I did and listened to all ten minutes the title track on the off-chance that something happened towards the end.
[1] https://lilgoldberg.bandcamp.com
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch？v=oMMI6VgJu30
[3] https://soundcloud.com/user-209448905
