P.O.S - Purexed

I’ve been waiting for just the right moment to share my love for P.O.S. with you, world… and I’m going to pretend that moment is now. (If not now, when, right?) P.O.S. is, as he spits in one of his other songs, “Presented by Doomtree / Sponsored by the Rhymesayers.” Often, other artists (such as Dessa, Cecil Otter, and Sims) signed to Doomtree, a label that P.O.S. helped spearhead, are featured in P.O.S.’s songs. Slug of Atmosphere, though not part of Doomtree, is signed by Rhymesayers, and so makes occasional appearances as well.

The featured song Purexed, however, is purely Stefon Alexander… P.O.S.’s birthname. Playing punk rock in high school, Alexander garnered the nickname Pissed Off Stef. (I’ll let you connect the dots.) The drums in Purexed are quintessentially heavy. And the lyrics themselves are no light affair.

Led along by bouncy violin and sparkling chimes, the lyrics gather speed in an ether left in the absence of scansion and meter. They grip us physically, like ”I’m trying not to slip, / Been trying not to lose footing, / Loose land keeps the pressure on my kicks, / But when I fall I tend to land like a ton of bricks, / Stand like a man made of concrete and sediment.” The lyrics are sufficiently gritty; they scream “Fuck it” because they don’t care about anything other than “Them words from love, / No hits, / I let the track stand, / Like how it was written is how it hit me.“ They actually challenge, “Let ‘em try to find the beauty in the bass-line,” and there, in that chorus, humming bass amalgamating with the drum rolling drone, we see it how P.O.S. spits it.

Making music’s not about keeping it neat. That’s just the exterior, and ”Fuck your skin, nobody needs it / There’s bones, muscles, and blood, / What’s realer than fat and tendons? / It’s raw, no soft tissue / To draw your eyes to it / So far flesh aint the truest at all / Let’s rip into it.” It’s not about making hits, so P.O.S. sings “We won’t sing with what will fade away / Yeah we do our own damn thing / We don’t blink at what tomorrow might bring at all.”

And from all this drum rolling and reality-checking, we come out feeling purged, sparkling clean: “Like hands steadily purexed, but never quite clean.”