Totenkopf

There are three music trilogies in the context of the music we produced during the pandemic. I’ve written about the first part of one trilogy: “Welcome to Black Bottom.” Like any good narrative, it serves as world-building and a way to establish a character introduction for the mixtape’s protagonist, Eric Bridges.

The other trilogy of music on the album belongs to a series called “Totenkopf,” German for “death’s head,” released under KAISO Entertainment as part of CYBERFUNK ’93. It’s one of the few tracks on the album where I made very little attempt to perform lyrics myself until the third entry in the trilogy. Most of the production, though directed and executive produced by myself, was actually outsourced to beat-making partners I commissioned for a modest fee.

Let’s start with the origins of the track. After learning about the Marvel UK comic-book character Death’s Head, I learned that in the backstory of this particular time-traveling mercenary, he had actually been introduced in the context of Transformers comics. I’m surprised the character was never specifically adapted for any of the films. And Totenkopf, of course, is simply the German for “Death’s Head”: the series title is the translation.

Fasika Addis and I imagined a world where a robotic mercenary’s personality would be quickly interchangeable with different skins, inspired by the different voices you can select for your Siri or Google Maps. In our version of the character, he’s a Rastafarian-themed bounty hunter, and his electronic “dreadlocks” earn him the nickname “Lokbot.”

Reskinning a mercenary like this, same character but an entirely new cultural surface, is the move Ryan Coogler made with Namor. The beats wear different skins across the trilogy to match: Part 1 channels the minimalist menace of Kendrick Lamar’s “HUMBLE.”, while Part 3 leans all the way into drill.

In the third part of the song, over a groove primarily produced by Ulysses Randolph III, you hear a few lyrics that reference all of this backstory. The lyrics go:

The “freelance peacekeeper” lyric is a direct reference to the Marvel Comics character. Technically, our character’s name is “Murdoch the Lokbot,” and we were treating the Transformers canon the same way that Alan Moore used Captain Atom as a foundation to build Dr. Manhattan.

As to the song itself, the sample driving it comes from “Space Cadet” by Bryce Detroit. The original is honestly still the better song, but Totenkopf is a good production in its own way, in the same way that 2007’s “Stronger” never reached or matched the highs of the Daft Punk original, “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger,” but still remains a hip-hop masterpiece in its own right.

Totenkopf is a nerdcore masterpiece, and it showcases some of the best nerdcore rappers alive on one posse cut: Bryce Detroit, Crazy8theGreat, Adam Purski, Highrowglyphfix, Rogue Cypher, rxbel_504, Ulysses Randolph III, and K Drip.

The song’s three divisions are fairly intentional, with the intro to track two truly originating from the outro of part one. New production that was commissioned to accompany part one ended up being too dissimilar, and ended up forming the basis for part two.

The rap lyrics from this particular artist are especially vulgar, violent, sexual, and unusually aggressive in comparison to the lyrics typically featured in nerdcore. All of this felt appropriate given the world-building exercise of constructing “Earth-313.”

At least five beat-makers, including myself, contributed to the mesh of “Totenkopf,” and the track was my stab at creating an “All Day”-scale, still-hip-hop epic. I’d like to executive produce more tracks like this in the future, curating my favorite rappers around a particular theme. I’d like to become hip-hop’s “George Nelson,” and these tracks are my musical stab at Herman Miller designs.

One missed opportunity might be that Adisa Ogbonna, who’s responsible for a lot of the other artwork commissioned for other songs, was not asked to create any art for this series. In some regard, I think the music speaks for itself, so the minimal iconography of the skull, arranged in different colors, was enough to complete the assemblage.

My favorite production, “Biscuit,” has a cover that’s simply a photograph taken by former Sony Music associate Sean Pontikos. Why? Because the music speaks for itself.

The same is true for Totenkopf, which remains a banger across all three parts. With headphones, the song is especially a treat for those paying attention to the synthesizer flourishes performed by Alex Aquilina.