Cut of the Day: Vocab,

By Casey Jarman

Man, break-ups can be tough. From the sound of it, Portland MC Vocab is taking his real, real hard.

"You won't get no tears from me," he raps. "No, not even a drop/ If I saw your dead body on the side of the road/ I'd drive off and just leave you to rot."

Yikes. I'm going over my mental Rolodex to think of people I might not even call the cops about, were I to find their carcass on the side of the road. Turns out they're all people I have never met. Maybe Pol Pot. If I saw Pol Pot's body on the side of the road I'd be like "well, that's good." But then he died over a decade ago, so I'm guessing he'd be pretty unrecognizable by this point.

I digress. This Dupre' Bushnell-produced jam remind me of the Game's "Hate It or Love It," though the piano rolls here are markedly more minimal and Vocab tackles them in a slower, angrier take on things. He's just that mad: He wants this lady to hear every last bit of bitterness; Even the part about the car and the driving off.

None of this, save for the instinct to get out of a broken relationship, seems particularly healthy or productive. So I'm glad Vocab put it in a song before he snapped in real life. His forthcoming record, The Man in My Town, should drop in time for Christmas. Perhaps when the holiday spirit moves him, he will move that rotting corpse after all.

WWeek 2015

Casey Jarman

Casey Jarman

Casey Jarman is a freelance editor and writer based in East Portland, Oregon. He has served as Music Editor at Willamette Week and Managing Editor at The Believer magazine, where he remains a contributing editor. He is currently working on his first book. It's about death.

Willamette Week’s reporting has concrete impacts that change laws, force action from civic leaders, and drive compromised politicians from public office.

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