{"id":278332,"date":"2025-10-05T00:23:26","date_gmt":"2025-10-05T00:23:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/278332\/"},"modified":"2025-10-05T00:23:26","modified_gmt":"2025-10-05T00:23:26","slug":"twiztid-the-darkness-rapreviews","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/278332\/","title":{"rendered":"Twiztid :: The Darkness \u2013 RapReviews"},"content":{"rendered":"

To date we\u2019ve only talked about Twiztid tangentially. I reviewed a Jamie Madrox<\/a> solo album, and both he and Paul Monoxide have had cameos on other albums<\/a> I covered, but \u201cThe Darkness<\/a>\u201d is our first review of the two together under their own name. Why this particular release? Well they\u2019ve got almost two dozen full length albums, so if I\u2019m being honest with you, I picked up an imaginary dart and threw it blindfolded. It happened to land here. If you\u2019re one of the members of this group though it would be just as likely to land in someone\u2019s skull. Okay \u2014 that would have to be a big heavy lawn dart, but you get the point. \u201cThe Darkness<\/a>\u201d they revel in is being purposefully macabre.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

By their own admission Monoxide and Madrox are \u201cA Little Fucked Up.\u201d Thanks to the Jake One<\/a> production this song was an instant win, and given this album is currently in the latter half of their catalogue, there\u2019s no doubt Twiztid fans saw it the same way. Whether we admit it or not a lot of what gets said on rap songs is a comic exaggeration of reality for the sake of entertainment. Twiztid is more honest about that than most \u2014 they put on the clown paint and become Pennywise<\/a> personified. At the start the group may have drawn inspiration from their label mates (and label owners) ICP<\/a>, but \u201cBoogieman\u201d proves them perfectly capable of carrying that torch on their own.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Actually to hear Violent J tell it \u201cinspiration\u201d isn\u2019t the right word. In an interview with Bootleg Kev<\/a> he insists that ICP created Twiztid out of whole cloth. \u201cFuck \u2019em. I ain\u2019t never been betrayed harder, in my life. It was a fucking physical pain the way those muh\u2019fuckers betrayed me. I made them. I gave them the name. They didn\u2019t have paint on \u2014 they were two other rappers. We signed them, put the paint on, created them. They got insane talent\u2026 but, we created that.\u201d This is where I\u2019m going to throw my hands up and admit I\u2019m not that intimately acquainted with Juggalo politics. Do ICP fans hate Twiztid as vehemently as Mr. Bruce does? Is the opposite true? No clue. I do know they\u2019re successful enough to film music videos like \u201cF.T.S.\u201d that look better than some Blumhouse horror films.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

As a reviewer I can say I find no reason for them to be on opposite sides other than for the sake of drama to stir up record sales. If you came up with ICP, you came up with Twiztid, and there are so many mutual artists between them you\u2019d have to start choosing sides at random. Do you feel like Blaze Ya Dead Homie \u201cbetrayed\u201d the Insane Clown Posse too? He left Psychopathic Records. He releases music on Malik Ninja Entertainment. He appears on \u201cA Place in the Woods.\u201d Are all of them betrayers or were they simply making business decisions to focus on themselves and grow their own brands? Joseph Bruce sounds bitter \u2014 and maybe he has a right to be \u2014 but all the fans care about is the music.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

As for that music, \u201cThe Darkness<\/a>\u201d is a bit much. The extended version, the one I listened to and linked to in this review, is nearly an hour long. The irony of a song on this album being called \u201cOn and On\u201d isn\u2019t lost on me. Stalwart producer Seven<\/a> makes tracks like that one sing, but it comes back to the performances of Monoxide and Madrox at the end of the day. The latter has an incredibly gritty voice, and Monoxide unintentionally betrays that he\u2019s not super diverse with his topics on songs like \u201cBack to Hell.\u201d Calling himself \u201cstagnant\u201d is one of the biggest self-owns I can imagine.<\/p>\n

\u201cI grew up on the madness, murder and sadness
So it\u2019s really no wonder what my life is
Come and get me, call me tragic
Stuck and I\u2019m stagnant like metal on a magnet\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Listen \u2014 this is not the worst album I\u2019ve listened to. It\u2019s not even in the bottom 100. The production is solid throughout, there are a few genuinely dope tracks, and Twiztid plays the roles they were born to perform to their fullest. Whatever Violent J says about creating them doesn\u2019t take away the fact that Monoxide and Madrox grew into those roles to the point they outgrew their original home. I think if you were already a fan of the group going in \u201cThe Darkness<\/a>\u201d would be perfectly acceptable. If you were a newcomer or not a fan of horrorcore going in I think it would be a tough sell. They don\u2019t reinvent the wheel here, they just keep rolling.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"To date we\u2019ve only talked about Twiztid tangentially. I reviewed a Jamie Madrox solo album, and both he…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":278333,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[171,975,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-278332","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-music","10":"tag-united-states","11":"tag-unitedstates","12":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115318712317597993","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/278332","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=278332"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/278332\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/278333"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=278332"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=278332"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=278332"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}