Why? "Rubber Traits EP" (Anticon)
By Trey Perkins
Thursday. Mar 02, 2:40 AM
Elephant Eyelash's shining star gets its own EP.

First off, I’d like to thank Yoni Wolf for deciding to really push the track “Rubber Traits.” When I reviewed the full-length Elephant Eyelash, I felt “Rubber Traits” achieved anthem status. Now that it’s been awarded its own EP – complete with a video – I feel validated in my preference. While I’m not new to the song, the video adds another level to its meaning. I mean, honestly, how would a video artist interpret a track that has lyrics like “unfold an origami death mask / and cut my DNA with rubber traits?” The answer: make a video that halfway resembles an epilepsy-inducing Japanese game show crammed with as many dogs as possible. That’s all that can be said about the video, without giving too much away.

Aside from the video, Why? includes three new offerings that are worth listening to in their own right: “Dumb Hummer,” “Pick Fights,” and “Deceived.” “Dumb Hummer” could’ve been on Elephant Eyelash, as it complements the pop/psyche/hip-hop amalgamation Wolf and company capture on “Rubber Traits.” Lyrically, Wolf maintains his consistent flow and satiric tone found on the LP. “Dumb Hummer” targets different types of social cliques, with Wolf making a distinction between the crowd that he’d prefer to associate with and the ones he obviously wouldn’t. At the song’s conclusion, he states: “If you wear fist-hand clothes and get your hair cut by someone you don’t know, I’m below you.” Juxtaposing this line with what he says in the song’s second verse (“but if you can dance like I do / with no grid or Arthur something numbered footprints / if you can walk right out the bike gate of the McCarter Bart like popling leaves and don’t look back or feel bad”), one begins to draw a conclusion about Wolf’s social circle. It seems he craves originality: people with their own style and no pretense, hence they dance in ways that are unplanned and improvised. But he’s got a slave’s mentality here: the people who get their haircut by someone they don’t know are somehow above Wolf. See, this is why Wolf is an intelligent lyricist: he’s ambiguous. Is it better to dance outside the grid and ignore that which is pre-planned, packaged, commodified, and cheap? Or is it better to wear first-hand clothes and let someone else determine one’s style? Seems to me, the hipsters Why? attracts would prefer to be originals instead of cut from the same American Apparel cloth. Within these words, which are shrouded by metaphor, apostrophe, and other literary techniques, Wolf has said so much to the astute listener without really saying it out right.

Just when you thought that Why? tries to distance himself from the hip-hop category, “Pick Fights” and “Decieved” round out the EP with minute-long spoken word journeys, beats, and stripped down instrumentals. It’s definitely a good expansion for anyone who enjoyed Elephant Eyelash.
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Trey Perkins

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