Jared Paul

Get My Ghost (2015)

Julie River

Just as punk rock/hip-hop hybrid band Prayers for Atheists were starting to gain national press, the band abruptly broke up. With the band’s guitarist, Alan Hague, wanting to work on other projects, the band’s frontman, spoken word artist and political activist Jared Paul, branched out into a solo career, rapping over a traditional hip-hop beat for the first time in his life. The result is a powerful, if uneven, debut in Get My Ghost. As Paul himself says in the opening track “Folks thought my first full length would be more political.” True, an artist who first rose to notoriety because of his wrongful arrest when protesting the 2008 Republican National Convention is someone you would expect to be a primarily political artist.

Politics is where Get My Ghost is strongest, though. While “Ready As I Ever Been” is a fun opening track that is bursting with positive energy, and the tribute to the hard working artist, “Five or Five Thousand,” comes off as a surprisingly humble pat on the back, some of the albums other non-political tracks falter. Red Sweatshirt,” drags on far too long and gives far too much unnecessary detail. The song does spend a lot of time building up sympathy for Paul, but then squanders that sympathy with the line The girl I got now is the best I’ve ever had./I can’t believe I’m even writing this.” I can’t believe he wrote it either, and the bizarre moment leaves one feeling like they’ve just dropped into the middle of a very awkward situation. “Only Living Boy,” a bromantic love anthem to Paul’s best friend, rapper Sage Francis, who put out Prayers for Atheists ‘first album on his own Strange Famous label, is certainly good spirited, but the song ultimately devolves into a cloying sentimentality that even a guest appearance from Our Lady Peace frontman Raine Maida can’t save.

It’s when Paul gets into the more political territory that the album really takes off. “$8 Smoothie” cleverly takes the seemingly small issue of an overpriced fruit smoothie and links it to the wider topic of food inequality. “Down With the Bank Kings” weaves an entire song around a very simple protest chant that’s shouted with such confident enthusiasm that you can actually be tricked into thinking that the refrain “Down with the banks…Those greedy banks” is somehow deeper than it really is. Radical left-wing rapper Sole, whose brand new record label Black Box Tapes released this album, lends a few lines of his caustic and understated flow to give the track the flourish it needs.

The album’s title track takes the basic flow of Sage Francis’s “Sea Lion” and breaks it down to rebuild it from scratch into a completely different song with a driving and powerful punch to it, beautifully punctuated by the guest appearance of spoken word artist Karen Finneyfrock. “No Quits Til,” the song on the album most dominated by guest stars with rappers Guante and Ceschi doing most of the heavy lifting, provides the albums most infectious hook, which is embarrassing to sing in public. “Movement First,” is a powerful closing track where Paul switches from rapping to singing over a piano, as he croons about the importance of activism, and ends up becoming a manifesto of Paul’s activism.

Jared Paul has always been an artist with one foot in punk and the other in hip-hop. When, for the first time in his career, he focuses on a more traditional hip-hop sound, the punk fury comes out in his political lyrics. While it may falter a bit in the middle, the album as a whole has all the spirit of a hardcore punk album, and it’s twice as furious.