Jack Toft’s new album is a collaboration with producer, Teenwolf, and it is eponymously titled
TEENWOLF AND JACK TOFT. The modest simplicity of this title carries through to the contents of the album and in its presentation. (See, for example, the cover, which appears to be a knit Bills pin that I might have purchased for my father at an elementary school Santa’s Workshop in 1993.) This focus on clarity and restraint is evident not only in the title of the album but the name of the website that hosts it:
raps.bandcamp.com. Unbelievably, it evidently hadn’t even occurred to anyone else to claim a Bandcamp url that encompasses an entire genre of music.
The tendency to break down language and culture and examine it at the most basic level has more or less become Jack Toft’s hallmark. Taking advantage of things that are so obvious and ubiquitous that nobody even pays attention to them anymore. Holding them up and scrutinizing them and repeating their names until you’re forced to look and forced to re-think and forced to admire or laugh or dismiss. The duo’s website sets forth their division of labor in clear and unmistakable terms: “TEENWOLF did all the production and JACK TOFT did all the raps.” This terse, declarative statement is a great example of the straightforward, pared-down-to-the bone treatment of language that Jack employs in his rapping. It’s also an homage to one of Jack’s distinctive weapons of choice in this respect: the verb “do.”
It’s a word that, literally, means that one person is “engaging” in something else, anything else, in pretty much any fashion imaginable. As a transitive verb, there are a number of relatively well-accepted usages. Merriam-Webster, for example,
lists 22, including “to perform,” “to cook,” and, of course, “to have sexual intercourse with.” But “do” is really capable of serving as shorthand for pretty much any verb. In the past, Jack has, of course, done “art” and “beers” and a plethora of other objects, people and concepts, but as he’s constantly reminding us, one can pretty much “do” anything. Making one of the most versatile words in the English language, somehow, still seem under-utilized, is just one of the ways that Jack Toft takes the expected and subjects it to re-examination.
On the Jay-Z sampling “The Anthem,” Jack takes a meta-look at the very notion of a rapper purposefully going out of their way to record an “anthem,” as if they were created by artists and not adopted by listeners. Jack frustratingly implores the audience to “get their friggin hands up,” then tries to convince them that he and Teenwolf are “real friggin endearing,” before self-consciously noticing that he’s rapping in the third person. The real Jack Toft “anthem” on the album might be “Jump Up and Down,” with a chorus written and sung by Teenwolf; it plays like an alternate reality pop hit where the listeners are encouraged to party and have fun while simultaneously being mocked for their exuberance.
Jack’s criticism of over-indulgence is more overt on songs like “People Magazine and Nacho Chips,” which starts out as an indictment of suburban ignorance and vapidness and segues into a takedown of urban desperation for authenticity. On “Coffee Shop in the Hospital Lobby” Jack further excoriates excess and consumerism, without ever having to explicitly state as much, as painting a picture of “morbidly obese people” outside of hospitals and “MacDonald’s in Wal-Marts” pretty much does the job on its own. The criticism on the album isn’t without a certain degree of self-awareness, however. On “Soapbox,” Jack riffs on what might be characterized as “drug-induced hippy philosophy” (mockingly pondering, “who built the mountains, yo, they’re really friggin old”) while at the same time taking a shot at himself for being on a “soapbox” in the first place.
The idea of self-criticism is further explored on “Free Gay Abortions,” something of a sequel to Jack’s earlier politically themed “Liberal Elite.” “Free Gay Abortions” begins and ends with a sample of a Malcom X quote: “I’m not a Democratic, I’m not a Republican, I don’t even consider myself an American.” The song’s tagline is then “2012, I hate myself, 2012, I hate everybody else,” seemingly recognizing that self-hate and hatred of others aren’t really mutually exclusive concepts. Obviously, the main idea here is to mock right-wing paranoia about rampant liberalism but there's also a more subtle recognition that the violent rhetoric that’s hurled across aisles indicates just as much about the speaker’s self-doubt as it does about how they feel about their target.
The rest of the album covers Jack’s favorite territory, irreverent humor about Buffalo culture, food, and sex. Especially interesting is how often Jack seems to combine references to food and sex in the same lines. There’s always been something inherently sexual about food (shape, color, texture, consumption), and given the raw impulses that lead people to desiring both, it makes sense that Jack often talks about food and sex like they’re one in the same. (See: “I Really Love You” and “Dick Emotions,” with a Teenwolf sung chorus and clever references to John Lennon’s “Jealous Guy” and Weezer’s “No One Else.”)
After sex, Jack’s second love might be Buffalo cultural references and the album is rife with than, running the gamut from nostalgic homages to self-deprecating send-ups. On “Dave Winfield” and “I’m Way Kookier” we get fairly celebratory citations to “circling the wagons like the Bills in the ‘90s,” “AmVets,” “Terry Pegula,” “Bills-Bisons-Sabres,” and “Terrapin Station.” It’s on “Beef On Weck” though where Jack has the awareness to recognize that one can be a name-dropping cheerleader (the Galleria, Genesee beer, the Mogilny era, Rick James, the Scajaquada, “big ups to Seymour Knox,” etc.) while still having the humility to emphatically sing: “Buffalo, just so you know, I am your frickin crotch, we’re the armpit of the east.”
It’s on “Watchin the News,” however, where irreverent Buffalo humor, food, sex, and ignorance all collide together into a Jack Toft masterpiece. Here, Teenwolf does a truly brilliant job of sampling the Channel 7, Eyewitness News’ absurdly dramatic “theme song” into a paranoid-sounding chase scene looking for a climax.
In "Watchin the News," Jack has decided to use watching the 11 o’clock news as an opportunity to woo a lady-friend, which is actually a pretty convenient pretext. It’s late, there’s a couch, and there’s background noise. The song starts off as if a potentially thoughtful narrator might be truly interested in “news and sports… friggin weather” before it becomes apparent that (spoiler alert) he’s only interested in taking off her shorts. Despite the news presumably remaining on in the background (likely delivering an onslaught of sensationalist negative attention-fodder), we hear nothing about it. Only that’s it on. Instead, the focus has turned to a variety of sexual Buffalo/food-euphemisms involving Loganberry, butter lambs, the Electric Tower, and Sponge Candy. It’s in the cross-section of all of these ideas where the Teenwolf/Jack Toft mission statement really comes into focus: we might alternately love and be disgusted by ourselves and our culture, but food and sex never let us down.
