In 2003 the NYPD, acting on an anonymous tip, punched through the wall of an apartment in the Drew Hamilton Houses at Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard and 141st Street in Harlem. Through that hole, officers saw a mattress that had been shredded the way a dog might shred a newspaper and claw marks that reached all the way up to an eight-foot ceiling. The tiger they removed, a Siberian-Bengal mix named Ming, belonged to a construction worker named Antoine Yates. Ming grew as the story spread: 350 pounds, then 425, 450, 500. Yates had acquired the tiger from an exotic animal dealer in Minnesota by falsifying papers to suggest he had land to build a zoo in Sullivan County; he had just been hospitalized after it maimed him in an attack.
The fourth song on Shrines, the new album by Armand Hammer, ends with a clip of Yates’s brother being interviewed. “My brother wanted to build a zoo,” he says, maybe a little bit drunk, talking over the music in a club. “He wanted to build a utopia. Because when he looked around him all he seen was destruction in our neighborhood.” The interviewer does not follow up on the spiritual tip. Instead he asks a practical question: How much does it cost to feed a tiger?
Shrines is the third LP that Armand Hammer, the duo composed of New Yorkers Elucid and billy woods, have released in the last two and a half years––roughly the same amount of time that Yates kept Ming in his apartment. There are times it turns grim: see, for example, Elucid’s reference to the “prayers up but quickly fallen like sweat on the brow” in the face of a paramilitary police, or the way woods flips the Nas maxim from “Life’s A Bitch” into “that buck that lost the lotto could’ve bought a fucking bottle.” But on the whole Shrines is freer, lusher, brighter than anything the pair has done before, an album that strays into “streets where Siri noted coordinates and was too scared to speak” and sees what might grow from the soil.
woods is an extraordinary writer who populates his raps with characters he dangeles like a puppeteer, and with details that unnerve––like the expendable football players who are reduced to “donated brains” that “bob gently in solution,” or the “list of ill-fated quick licks” magneted to the fridge next to permission slips from a child’s school. His aunts tap cheap watches proudly as they tout the “Swiss movement.” His middle-aged men speak to shredded-knee prospects (“You got your whole life ahead of you son… nothing to be ashamed of”) in a way that makes clear they’re really consoling themselves. And his prosecutors consider lenience before stabbing a shiv in the accused’s neck.