The joke behind Cavanaugh’s Time & Materials starts with: two guys walk into a bar; an artisanal rap persona, a liar and a novelist. Who’s who?
It ends in confusion, which does not bother Serengeti and Open Mike Eagle at all. See, after meeting at Southern Illinois University as undergrads, the two broke off into parabolas destined for a later intersection. It’s happened like a leap year; Serengeti guesting on Mike Eagle tracks like “Universe Man” and “Easter Surgery.” Yet even in those collaborative moments it felt fractured. As good as it was, Serengeti’s verse on “Universe Man” thwarted the critical groundwork laid by Open Mike. Such is Serengeti.
David Cohen officially created Serengeti with the release of Dirty Flamingo in 2002. The rap alias by nature is an extension or departure from the given identity and government name. In Cohen’s case, Serengeti is the smallest figurine inside the Russian doll of identities, the original dream in an Inception hijinx. Deeper within his psyche lives hopeless romantics, retired wrestlers, Menard’s employees, divorcees, fed-up au pairs, and a thickly-accented Chicagoan named Kenny Dennis. Serengeti imagines these crestfallen angels across albums, their apocryphal tribulations encapsulated in two-minute verses; his oeuvre, their case files. He is a conduit for the woebegone one might find in a Raymond Carver story.
By contrast, Open Mike Eagle is a crafted, distillation of the parts of a person deemed suitable for public consumption. What is known about him via albums like Dark Comedy and Rappers Will Die of Natural Causes is, strictly, what is allowed. With Open Mike Eagle handling producer-on-the-mic duties as a member of Cavanaugh, Time & Materials spreads the Eagle Man thin, leaving Serengeti to run amok.
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Time & Materials is grounded by Open Mike Eagle, in production and vocal contributions. Not exactly the Silent Bob to Geti’s Jay, but often it feels like Mike is only working part time at the condominium. Ah yes, right. Besides being the rap duo’s chosen name, Cavanaugh is an imaginary residency setting in the fictitious city of Detroit, Florida as a more distinct alternative to his cerebral mainframe. Cavanaugh is the condominium, the tenants consist of well-to-dos and Section 7s by mandate of the Detroit city council. Dave and Mike are maintenance men with 14 years experience. The ornate catalyst should ground Serengeti’s narratives, theoretically. And yet the residents are impossibly stacked like all of Serengeti’s characters. Could be the sad sack named Pinky (real name Darrell) given their collective despondency, but it’s imaginable that only the maintenance men witness the wiring uniting the rows of apartment doors.
For that, Cavanaugh is an intelligent conceit. In past albums Serengeti’s literary slant and the cache of characters prevail exclusively in his own psyche. Time & Materials defies normal conclusions; not a vanity project as it lacks ostentatiousness; conceptual but not in the traditional sense as comprehension requires announcement of the conceit. A record involving the mercurial Serengeti is never simply a collection of songs. The same can be said of Open Mike Eagle’s more calculated approach. When the abstract aligns with a cultural microscope, like on closer “Lemons” with its biting “in the suburbs drinking inner city booze,” it emanates that fresh paint smell. But, if the narrators are, in fact, two maintenance men in Florida, those revelatory moments end up mostly drowned in foggy notions about the state of things.
