Previous Industries
Service Merchandise
MERGE
Still Rift prefaces “Showbiz,” the first track on Service Merchandise, with a windup: “Yeah, I’mma start practically immediately.” Then, with a lurch, a loop shambles in that’s so warped you might think the wax was salvaged by urban explorers from a fountain in a dead mall. In a well-worn riff on “The Humpty Dance,” the trio of Rift, Open Mike Eagle, and Video Dave introduce themselves and the concept: their debut record as Previous Industries is themed around the undead trademarks of defunct retail chains. The three rappers first teased the concept on Eagle’s 2022 record component system with the auto reverse (see “Circuit City”). Here, they expand the idea into a full-length meditation on middle age, memory, and the parallel histories of commercial hip-hop and brick-and-mortar business. It’s reanimation gone so wrong it’s right; ’90s nostalgia gone off to the point of fizzy fermentation.
Service Merchandise makes up for a lack of melodic hooks with verse after verse of peak rap performances full of insight, humor, and sophisticated wordplay. Maybe it’s the established rapport (even though it’s their first LP as a trio, they go way back), or maybe it’s sheer accumulated experience. In any case, it’s all coiled-spring tightness as this silver cipher passes stanzas back and forth like exquisite corpse drawings over breakroom tables. The retail concept proves to be a rich jumping-off point for internal rhymes and layered meanings—as on “Roebuck,” where Eagle pitches indie rap as a niche enterprise: “We’re running a sale on shag carpet / Sliding scale for financial hardships / Odd shit, you want something broad, then go to Target.” Independent of the concept, Still Rift pulls off one of the album’s cleverest bars on “Pliers”: “My vices love it when I grip them, and I know because they hold me back.”
The overarching themes work like those lines: always tied up in triple entendre. On “Babbages,” Eagle lovingly recites the procedure for loading up a new Sega cartridge, but this record isn’t about the cozy flashbacks any more than component system was. Take “Roebuck,” where Video Dave twists the classic rags-to-riches hip-hop fantasy by invoking a hardscrabble upbringing spent flipping through a catalog, dreaming of everything he could order someday. By now, the catalog in question has been out of print for years; like many of the record’s touchstones, it’s a symbol of an aspirational middle class comfort that’s since gone the way of mixtapes and mail order. Eagle quips that “indie rappers deserve government subsidies” on “Montgomery Ward.” That’s a good idea—however it rates as a business plan, Service Merchandise makes for a hell of a grant proposal.
