Track Of The Day 26/1 – Zebra Katz

Ima Read

School days, eh? Best days of your life.

Or not. Recently releasing an EP on Mad Decent, Zebra Kats – or should that be Zebra fucking Katz? – doesn’t seem to think so.

On the surface, ‘Ima Read’ is typical hip hop mysogony. Lyrics like ‘take that bitch to college’ seem to reflect some of rap’s more out-moded values, an attitude to women that is completely repellent.

Yet ‘Ima Read’ takes this disgust and turns it into something much more widespread. The track flips traditional attitudes to school on their head, presenting a world which is dark, violent and omnipresent.

Lashing out at systems of control, the voices of Zebra Katz and Njena Reddd Foxxx leer out of the speaker. At times almost hallucinatory, the nightmarish levels of violence are matched to almost completely sparse backing.

A bass drum thuds through the track – never fading, never faltering. Where artists such as Burial or Evian Christ use silence to indicate absence, to suggest something mournful, with Zebra Kats the effect is different.

Listening to ‘Ima Read’ you seem desperate to fill in the blanks, to work out exactly what is going on. Zebra Kats is teasing you, fucking with you sonically in a way that perfectly matches the rasping, bullying, playground stance of the lyrics.

Forget what it’s like to be a kid in school? Maybe it never left you.

Listen to it now… Grab it HERE.

‘Right click, Save As…’

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