Another sleepless night in Manhattan. Cars screech, honk, crash, and gargle their way through the oversized avenues. Just out of earshot, the subway bumps and screams, carrying out its miserable, insomniac fate. Two men get into a fight right outside your bedroom window, a scuffle that ends as quickly as it began but nonetheless does not help with your inability to sleep. No matter where you go, who you are, or what you’re doing, New York always has that latent hum, the buzz of other people’s activity that has its special way of fucking with you. They’ve always told you that this city was built for a special kind of person, but now you’re wondering if it was built with anyone in mind at all.
In history textbooks, the 2020s will be remembered as the era when America’s long slide into social and institutional distrust reached a freefall. More and more, Americans of all political persuasions realize that a government of the people, by the people, for the people was always a sick fiction. Fear of the other has spiraled into calamity, as people distance themselves from communities and tune in to national media machines. Such social conditions have hit America’s most urban, communal, and congested city with particular severity, changing the social landscape of New York in a myriad of fascinating ways.
Through dense use of sampling and constant employment of filthy background noise, King Vision Ultra’s SHOOK WORLD documents life in post-pandemic New York City. Gentrifiers wade their way through the streets with noses upturned, fearing a supposed crime wave that many of them have never seen direct evidence of. Longtime residents consider finally moving, but leaving behind their one-of-a-kind hometown brings a cocktail of difficult emotions. King Vision Ultra captures this situation beautifully through spoken testament and off-kilter production that brings the segments of rapping out onto the cacophony of a New York streetscape. A heartfelt time capsule for future generations to learn from, SHOOK WORLD reads as one part love letter, two parts cry for help from someone who deeply loves the city that never sleeps.