Darren E. Johnson

Anttex hails from a non-descript middle-class neighborhood in southeastern Queens and wears this association ironically but not without a little pride, taking great delight in satirizing his peculiar surroundings. His narration alternates between a meticulous account of the most mundane aspects of suburbia and a hilariously scandalous exposé of its surprisingly sinister underbelly. The suburb according to Anttex is a perverse outgrowth of the famous Queens ghettoes that birthed most of your favorite rappers. This is neither Rakim's transcendent birthplace nor Run DMC's beloved Hollis hometown, but a section where crime and depravity are more readily attributable to the complacence of material comfort than systemic inequality. Fittingly, Anttex's influences range from the highly technical and absurdly violent storytelling of Queensbridge revivalists like Tragedy or Poet to the self-deprecating, idiosyncratic class critique of De La Soul. His beats sound like deliberately sloppy send-ups