For fans of Premrock, McKinley Dixon, MF Doom, old school jazz rap, and end user license agreements as the epitome of metamodern horror, To Live and Die in E.U.L.A. by Rhys Langston examines the absurd complexity of our digital prisons through free-association lyricism that skates effortlessly on laid-back beats. From direct callouts to the surveillance state to more subtle references to pop culture and everyday life, everything here points back to relations of power, helping us realize exactly how deep these scars can dig. As we are denied the privilege of being ruled by a straightforward government with clearly defined titles and obviously assignable blame, we instead find power being wielded all around us by an increasingly dispersed set of private actors, all accountable to no one but those checkbox agreements. The resulting world turns cold, paranoid, and cutthroat, a quiet descent into insanity to which we need our attention turned by voices of reason like Rhys Langston.
