The introspective Los Angeles rapper builds a self-contained world with his magnetic monotone and intricate, evocative raps.
Is Liquid Swords a concept album? It probably isn’t, but part of the mystique of GZA’s defining statement is it feels like it could be one. From the meticulously structured verses to the skits and extensive dialogue excerpts from Shogun Assassin, the entire record works in the service of a dense mythology that’s all the more alluring because it never coalesces into a clean narrative. It’s a masterpiece not of storytelling, but of world building.
Chester Watson’s A Japanese Horror Movie is that kind of album, too. The Los Angeles rapper is part of a long lineage of monotone spitters who pride themselves more on their pen than their presence, combining the rap-as-chess intricacy of GZA (whose samurai fascination he also shares) with the absurdist splatter of MF Doom and the philosophical free-associations of R.A.P. Ferreira. Watson credits Earl Sweatshirt for making him start rapping as a teen, and on his earliest releases there was no mistaking that debt, but the two artists’ visions have diverged as they’ve entered their twenties. Where Earl's introspective raps have continued to retreat ever inward, Watson uses his to build something more fantastical and conceptual.
He raps like a dorm kid who sees messages on dollar bills. On opener “Life Wrote Itself,” he tells of wisdom handed down from gods and aliens and conveyed by shamans and pyramids, and that’s just a warm up for the tracks that follow about spirit worlds, inter-dimensional travel, and reincarnation. “Got a lotta grim tales leaking from my stem cells,” he grumbles on “Yokai,” “Catching up on folklore, lying on the cold floor/My only regret in life is that I don’t know more.” While Watson isn’t above stacking syllables just because they sound great together, he also knows when to simplify his rhymes for added punch, which he often does when his bars turn to his frayed mental state. “Remember Biggie telling me something dark in a dream/I get no answer when I’m singing my prayers, they must be outta key,” he intones over the dank, creaky beat of “Fog,” part of a stark final stretch that closes out the record.
Like Liquid Swords, A Japanese Horror Movie evades a linear reading, and yet it teases the possibility that with enough effort you might unlock a unifying theory that brings an entire story into focus. In spoken stretches between verses, Watson dialogues with celestial voices who inform him of his past lives and grand destiny, like NPCs guiding the hero of a video game. It's an effective, low-commitment framing device, creating an illusion of exposition while leaving Watson’s songs free to chase whatever whims they’d like. Their injections about Atlantis or the ins and outs of astral projection may not pay off narratively, yet they create a sense of momentum anyway.
Watson’s lane may be narrow, but it’s crowded; there will never be a shortage of rappers with big vocabularies and blasé deliveries rhyming over bare beats. Yet few have translated that style into a statement album that’s quite as substantial as entertaining as A Japanese Horror Movie, a record that’s committed to the fantasy it builds yet tactful enough not to give away too much about it. As a lyricist, Watson understands the importance of specificity. But as a creator, he knows it’s the open ends that keep you coming back.
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