Hip Hop Hump Days #7: The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy – Hypocrisy is the Greatest Luxury (1992)

Listening back to ‘Hypocrisy is the Great Luxury’, it strikes me that this record is something of a paradox: it sounded way ahead of its time in 1992 and yet it’s almost impossible to imagine it being released in any other year.

For those unfamiliar with the Disposable Heroes, they were a Bay Area duo comprising frontman Michael Franti and multi-instrumentalist Rono Tse, both of whom had served as members of The Beatnigs, an “avant-garde industrial jazz poets collective” (which sounds terrific, frankly).

To call it conscious hip hop doesn’t even scratch the surface. Sure, themes such as politics, money and social injustice are present and correct, but when the album’s opening line is “In the 1970s, the OPEC nations began to dominate the world’s oil economy”, you know it isn’t aimed at people who think the height of hip hop sophistication is bouncing down the street in a lowrider whilst wearing giant gold dollar signs round your neck.

From a strictly musical perspective, you could describe it as industrial hip hop – and indeed, the duo probably found greater acceptance in alternative rock circles (they had opened for the likes of Nirvana and Rage Against The Machine) than in the West Coast hip hop community, which was more focused on the warmer G-Funk sound being pushed by the likes of Dr Dre.

Franti’s upfront, confrontational-yet-calm vocal style often placed greater emphasis on getting the message across than it did on rhythm or flow – and he had plenty to say. Subjects covered across the album’s 13 tracks included anger at African-Americans ‘selling out’ to The Man (‘Famous and Dandy [Like Amos ‘N’ Andy]’), media bias and the subsequent dumbing down of society (‘Television, The Drug of the Nation’), racial equality (‘Socio-Genetic Experiment’) and – at a time when it was unthinkable for a hip hop artist to speak out against it – homophobia (‘Language of Violence’).

This isn’t an easy listen by any stretch of the imagination – in fact, Franti’s brutal yet intelligent lyrics (helpfully reproduced in the sleeve notes) probably played no small part in alienating any potential mainstream hip hop audience they may have had. Not that Franti and Tse would have cared anyway – they weren’t there to fit any formula, as evidenced by the inclusion of a cover of Dead Kennedys’ ‘California Uber Alles’ (albeit with slightly amended lyrics).

‘Hypocrisy is the Greatest Luxury’ was the duo’s only proper album. Following a spoken-word collaboration with beat author William S Burroughs (‘Spare Ass Annie and Other Tales’) in 1993, they decided to follow their own individual paths, with Franti going on to form the more accessible but no less socially aware Spearhead. 

But 23 years on, this album still stands up as an astonishingly raw snapshot of the USA in the early 90s, as seen through the eyes of a man who has woken up from the American Dream to find the Star-Spangled Banner soaked in blood and oil.