Skip to main content[FANTASY HIP-HOP] If Alexis Gideon isn't the first guy to make a hip-hop concept album based on Hungarian folklore, then he is almost certainly the first to make one that includes a cameo from a gin rummy-playing reptilian train robber. His six-song, 20-minute pocket opus, Video Musics—so named for the vaguely creepy animated clips that accompany each track—tells the story of the beginning, end and rebirth of the world, complete with a time-traveling princess, a mason who seals himself behind the walls of a castle, and a detour into outer space to meet Brimstone Blaine, the aforementioned card-shark lizard-man who rolls around in a "rocket cycle ship/laser beam heat strapped to the hip."
Obviously, this is one MC who doesn't give a shit about keeping it real.
"There is definitely some kind of search for utopia in the work," says Gideon, 28. "That was always part of the audio work, and the visual work, too—this sort of grasping at other worlds and other possibilities."
Indeed, even before incorporating his self-made videos into his live performances, Gideon's mantra may have been closer to "keep it surreal." His previous albums, Welcome Song and Flight of the Liophant, are Technicolor fever dreams, packed with odd sounds over which he raps in a sizzurpy baritone about fantastical animals and his sometime touring buddy, electro-dance maven Dan Deacon. But with Video Musics, which comes packaged with a DVD, the full scale of Gideon's twisted vision pops to life. A huge film buff, Gideon had imagined adding a visual element to his old group, Chicago-based freak-rap duo Princess, but it wasn't until he moved to Portland and began exploring the mythology of his Hungarian heritage that he found the perfect springboard for a project combining music with his love of Jan Svankmajer-esque animation.
"The creation myth starts with the world covered in waves," he says. "And immediately when I read that, I thought that would look so cool."
Although he finished it more than a year ago, the album is only now getting released, by Chicago's Sickroom Records. And Gideon's in the planning stages of Video Musics 2. The inspiration? The classic Chinese novel Journey to the West.
Alexis Gideon plays Wednesday, Aug. 26, at Fontanelle Gallery.
WWeek 2015