Roc Marciano’s ‘656’ Is Another Minimalist Masterpiece

The easy thing to say is that Roc Marciano always makes the same album. It’s not entirely off the mark — Marci’s an auteur of spectacular focus, and over the past two decades, he’s honed a very specific vision without taking any major swings or stylistic detours. But hand-waving his world-building isn’t the stamp of a serious listener. There are plenty of prolific rappers who fit the bill, grinding a formula that worked in small doses into a churning blur of one-note records. By contrast, Marci’s catalog is that of a patient pointillist, full of similar-sounding albums with subtle tweaks and tics that deepen his project, shifting it closer and closer to the platonic ideal in his mind. He operates in two distinct but complementary modes: masterful producer working in service of the perfect loop, and sophisticated writer of ever-increasing density, rearranging the rhythm of the English language.

Marci can make you nod to the sparest elements; sure, some of his greatest beats have bare-knuckle drums that shift vertebrae, but for every poured-concrete banger like “Emeralds,” there’s a featherweight “Trenchcoat Wars,” which, despite its bone-deep groove, could dissolve in an instant. Much ink has been spilled about his enduring influence, with Marcberg setting the stage for the boom-bap revivals and drumless deconstructions we’ve seen over the last decade. His production is precise and unadorned, mindbending yet utilitarian. At the same time, Marci’s writing has only grown more complex over the years. There’s severe economy in his storytelling, but each verse is thick with vivid imagery, every rhyme scheme a complicated scaffolding of syllabic dexterity. Both of these characteristics are on concentrated display in his newest dispatch, 656. It’s another career best in a discography full of them, a masterpiece of minimalism and unsparing tension, and a reminder of how integral he is to the current rap landscape.

Despite being the chief architect of his noir-rap sound, a fully self-produced album is a rarity in Marci’s discography. Frequent collaborators like Animoss and the Alchemist are fellow travelers in his stripped-down psychedelia — and they make great work together — but hearing Marci rap strictly on his own beats really emphasizes the depth of his vision. He’s able to pinpoint the most menacing moments in a sample and stretch them into a mood-defining palette. The minor-key synth bounce of “Childish Things” already glides like sweaty-palms anxiety, but in the track’s last third, the sequence blows apart, slowing from eighth notes to quarter notes, each one more forbidding than the last. One of the voices stacking the soulful but unsettling harmonies of “Vanity” keeps wavering out of tune, its dissonance like gritted teeth and elevated blood pressure. “Yves St. Moron” is little more than a bassline, a sustained saxophone interval, and a percussive clip-clop, but the more it repeats, the more it feels like the second you realize you’re being followed. There are a few mixing tricks here and there, like the reverb that occasionally bathes “Hate Is Love,” morphing the vinyl crackle into a sheet of distortion, or the warbling filter that bends the end of “Good For You” like a funhouse mirror, but for the most part, the soundscapes are kept dry and uncomfortably close, daring you to flinch.

The balance Marci strikes on 656 between the austerity of the music and the intricacy of the lyrics is as impressive as ever. He doesn’t really alter the dripped-out mafioso character he’s developed (and arguably perfected) over the years, nor does he introduce any new themes here. But he does find ways to make the tried-and-true dazzling and dangerous. There are quotables for days, with lines like “If I ain’t top 10, the list was created by atheists” landing like a fist to the solar plexus. One of Marci’s greatest strengths has always been his command of poetic devices like assonance, and you can sense his delight when he lands on a particularly potent passage. Take this stretch from “Good For You”: 

I’ll break your heart / Sparks out in Vegas from a race car, scraping like a skate park / Might take your favorite aunt, make her my baby mom / Thank God she ain’t on my radar"

Marci’s obsession with the shape of words has only deepened as he’s progressed, and 656 has many such remarkable displays, usually signaled by a pause after introducing a new scheme. “Hit the indica,” he raps on “Trick Bag,” taking a moment before rushing into a barrage of “in” and “uh” sounds. “Flawless hit, it wasn’t beginner’s luck / I will send you up on the wings of love / Burn my fingers on the sun, fly your Caesar cut up to Kingdom Come,” he continues. 

You know the broad strokes of a Roc Marciano album. There’s beautifully choreographed violence, luxury goods splashed with blood, cash filtering through money counters, women without faces, and men without futures. It’s such a tightly-wound, highly-detailed, impenetrable world that when Harlem emcee Errol Holden, Marci’s latest protege, shows up to rap like he never closes his eyes, the mythos only feels stronger. Its diamond-cut edges are sharp enough to slice, the singular sonics deep enough to swallow you whole. Without Marci, there’d be a hole in the game you could drive a Porsche through. No one else does it like this.