Album Premiere: SpaceGhostPurrp, ‘Mysterious Phonk: Chronicles of SpaceGhostPurrp’
SpaceGhostPurrp prefers to think of Mysterious Phonk: Chronicles of SpaceGhostPurrp – out on June 12th, but availalbe to stream exclusively on RollingStone.com below – as more of a thank you to his fans than a full-fledged debut LP. It’s a sort of touched-up scrapbook of the Miami producer-rapper’s whirlwind past two years, marked by the release of his 2011 BlackLand 66.6 mixtape, his latest God of Black EP and hisproduction work for breakout MCs like A$AP Rocky and Wiz Khalifa. On the strength of those projects, the 21-year-old inked a deal with indie label 4AD to re-record some of his previously-released songs and package them with new material.
“It was like repairing an old car,” Purrp, born Muney Jordan, tells Rolling Stone of revisiting tracks like “The Black God,” “Grind on Me” and “Get Yah Head Bust.” “Just upgrading it, adding more stuff to it and making it a little more up to date.” His previous releases, including his 2012 debut NASA The Mixtape, were homemade, recorded on his laptop and completely unmixed. “It was like a whole new world,” he says of the Mysterious Phonk sessions, which took place in February and March. “I used to work at home, but having an engineer to do it for me was a little bit easier.”
Purrp’s moniker is a fitting introduction to his zonked-out flow and hazy, foreboding production. On “Bringing Tha Phonk,” one of the album’s new cuts, he repeats the lines, “I’ma keep bringin’ the phonk/ N***a, I’ma keep bringin’ the phonk/ And you n***as can’t stop me,” over and over again, sounding almost Zen-like.
One of Purrp’s first tastes of media hype came in the form of a 2011 L.A. Weekly profile that touted his talents and compared him to another young rapper and producer, Odd Future’s Tyler, the Creator. “After that happened, people be hitting me up and a lot of people started listening to my music,” he recalls. On the comparisons to Tyler, he says, “They just comparing us ’cause we young and we doing our own thing. We just different from typical rappers. We coming out how we wanna come out.”
Unlike Tyler and A$AP Rocky, who proudly run with outsize and outspoken crews, Purrp’s tight-knit Raider Clan prefers to stay out of the spotlight. “We try to stay away from all the B.S. that’s going on, and we don’t wanna be like nobody else,” he says. “We just wanna do what we wanna do, and that’s it.”
As for his future plans, Purrp is guarded on specifics. “I’ve got a lot of fresh stuff coming up,” he says. “I’m gonna keep it coming. You don’t get too many shots.”