by Joshua Lew McDermott
In 2012, my friend Huppi (a.k.a floorpuppy), herself a fixture of the obscure Logan, Utah, rap and poetry underground, showed me a music video for a song called “Find Heaven” by David Ramos. I was immediately intrigued by the track’s strange genre-bending production, the silver-tongued flow of the rapper, and the genius D.I.Y. aesthetic of the video. Most of all, however, I was drawn to Ramos’s confessional lyrics, the poignant complexity of which I’d never heard in rap.
I immediately went home to the gutted basement apartment I was living in at the time and ordered a copy of the song’s album, Sento La Tua Mancanza, which had been released that year by Fake Four Inc. (with no bed and a $20 weekly budget for groceries, deciding to buy an album at the time was no small decision). Formed in New Haven, Connecticut, in 2008, the label Fake Four Inc. was founded by Ramos and his perhaps better-known brother, the rapper Ceschi. Both brothers had come out of the musical collective Anonymous Inc.. Fake Four Inc. would go on to release albums by some of underground hip-hop’s (or “backpack rap” or “art rap” or whatever else you want to call it) mainstays, including the legendary Busdriver and the well-known Astronautalis.
The trippy video, I later founder out, was (impressively) produced by distorting cheap cell-phone video footage and was part of a thematically similar series of videos produced for the album.
Sento La Tua Mancanza quickly became a fixture for my small group of friends and for my 1994 hatchback Honda Civic’s CD player. The album (translated as “I Miss You”) is Ramos’s attempt to come to terms with his grandmother’s dementia diagnosis and subsequent death while also recounting the importance of her love throughout an otherwise broken and dysfunctional upbringing: not exactly the typical subject of a rap album.
And therein lies Sento’s genius. The album’s first track “Village Inn Diner” stands out as the clearest iteration of the album’s themes, where Ramos recounts moving to Connecticut to live with his grandmother, and the importance of her shared empathy as he experienced what might seem to outsiders like the trivial tragedies of adolescence, including the death of his first dog. With lines such as “in the eighth grade, when I was withering away from anorexic tendencies and only you could make me eat“ or “my pain was real to you, it wasn’t just a dog or a young man not epitomizing the typical man,” Ramos risks sentimentality, but, like the best punk rock records or timeless poetry, somehow succeeds via bold sincerity and a healthy dose of technical ability and creative rhyme schemes.
The album’s production is nothing short of inventive, ranging from psychedelic ambiance to xylophone percussion. The precision of Ramos’s enunciation and language would be fun to listen to in and of itself, but the strange and sometimes whimsical production combines with the unique flow and heavy lyrical themes to create an album greater than the sum of its parts.
Where the album perhaps rang most true for me and my group of fellow ex-Mormon dropouts, poor kids, and pariahs of Cache Valley, Utah, was its unflinching portrayal of Ramos’s troubled youth and broken home. True, Ramos is perhaps in familiar hip-hop territory here, but his style is so unabashedly unique and autobiographical that clichés are impossible.
The true heart of the album, however, is born of the fact that this is, first and foremost, an album of triumphal victory over the toxicity of childhood trauma. It’s an album of optimism. It’s a tribute to love, tenderness, and family, a tribute which shatters the norms of sterile masculinity so often integral to hip-hop music. The album wades through the gut-wrenching dread and pain of poverty, family disfunction, and abandonment, taking its biggest risks, perhaps, in “Hallow Days,” another stand out track. In the end, the album is a statement of the power and richness of hip-hop music uninhibited by the profit-motive or the male ego. It’s a testament to the possibilities of D.I.Y and artistic integrity.
The album is, when all is said and done, a goodbye love letter to a troubled young man’s ailing grandmother. And that’s every bit as painful and wonderful as it sounds.
Author contact: joshualewmcdermott@gmail.com