See: Fatboi Sharif & Roper Williams – ‘Stigmata’: a dark, hallucinatory rap chemistry


Fatboi Sharif

CHEMISTRY students, listen up good. Here’s a new formula to examine. Take the wired, wild inventiveness of a Kool Keith; introduce it to the in-your-grill breaks innovation of MF DOOM; it’s gonna make a brilliantly unstable and fun isotope of leftfield hip-hop, right?

Indeed it does. As you’ll see for yourself below with the dizzying, sampledelic delirium of New Jersey’s Fatboi Sharif, who’s dropped “Stigmata” ahead of his debut album for POW Recordings. Travel through the fractured glass of treacly, slowed lyricism, eerie, cut-glass oratory and gospel choir below.

It’s a first dark serving from the hallucinatory world of Fatboi and his breaks general, producer Roper Williams, which is dropping on Gandhi Loves Children? 

We’e promised the album is a cautionary tale of the craziness that has ransacked society in recent years: “17 nuclear wormholes that terraform past, present, and future … built to flip your fright wig.” 

Fatboi ‘s been writing poems since the age of 8; was seduced by the power of the written word and its potency long before he encountered a mic for the first time.

He likes to draw from all kindsa places, with David Lynch, Kubrick, Wes Craven going into the aesthetic, lending a horror-hop cast akin to Company Flow; there’s also metal, Philly soul, crime novels, Afro-futurism.

Out back is the similarly hungry eclecticism of Roper Williams, who cut his teeth on everything from Public Enemy’s to Dylan and Outkast to Sly Stone. Processing the tragic death of someone close has also seen him channel that pain into creativity.

On its initial release the Dad Bod Rap Podcast called Gandhi Loves Children? “uniquely macabre”; now it’s back, deluxe, ready to aim. Fire.

Fatboi Sharif and Roper Williams’ Gandhi Loves Children? will be rereleased on July 1st; you can snatch your copy over at Bandcamp.

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