Mox Narsky
All Else Fails
purevolume.com/moxnarsky
Michael Bednarsky was born in 1991, twelve or thirteen years after the rise of hip hop in the national consciousness, part of a generation who don’t know a world without hip hop. Mox Narsky’s fluency in the idiom reflects this history. The originators of hip hop were making it up as they went along. A guy like Mox Narsky—while he still has to do the hard work of writing and practicing his art— just has to breathe in and out to access the spirit of hip hop. It’s in the air.
He escapes the ‘Eminem curse’ by not af fecting an ‘urban’ accent or fabulating a hard life; he does live in Iowa, after all. At his best, his precise cadence and imagery really snap the listener to attention. On “TwTcH,” he rocks an up-tempo beat with a manic rhyme: “… if you see one of my seizers, leave, ‘cause it’s artistic procedure.” “27 Club Contender” is both disturbing and riveting, as he fantasizes about being one of the famous musicians who die at age 27. “I’m on a quest to try every drug in existence, so I can just lie on the rug with my wrists slit.”
All Else Fails is a good first effort, but Mox Narsky needs to come up with deeper beats. There’s nothing wrong with the ones he uses, but they don’t really pop out as exceptional. I’m also not down with the casual way he drops ‘bitch,’ ‘slut,’ and ‘faggot.’ They might just be the exposed id of the persona he projects, but they feel like uncomfortably real misogyny and homophobia. I don’t think he should censor himself, but I think he needs to go deeper to find his real art. But he’s young yet, so I think his further efforts will be worth watching.
