In the Mutableye

Many, many years ago, I heard a song that would haunt me, a rap song that seemed unlike anything I had ever come across before. For the next twenty years, that song would occasionally burble up like a puzzle. The mystery of Darkleaf would nag at me every so often. Who were they? The pieces never seemed to quite fit.

The song, a single called Caution, featured Mumbles, Acey Alone’s famed producer, and Cut Chemist, the notorious DJ behind Jurassic 5. The lyrics had a kind of mystical exactitude that I had never come across before.

A few years later, I discovered a “debut album”, F… the People, but it seemed off somehow. And it would take another decade before I discovered that this supposed debut album came out a full fourteen years from when the group was originally formed in ‘88, that much of the material had been reworked from a couple mixtapes that were coveted for their “abstract rhymes over primal beatscapes, infused with references and allusions to the occult and black mysticism” [The Untold Story of Terry “Hymnal” Robinson, by Nate LeBlanc]. The group had originally focused around the trio of Hymnal, Jahli, and Longevity, and were part of the notorious hip hop scene at The Good Life Cafe in LA.