Necro

by Jason Birchmeier Brooklyn-based hardcore rapper Necro raised the bar for perversity in the late '90s and early 2000s with his music and films. Influenced by drugs, gore, pornography, and violence, Necro set out to incorporate these themes into his rapping. He effectively did so on his debut full-length, I Need Drugs (2000). The album featured drug songs (the title track, which is an interpolation of LL Cool J's "I Need Love"), gore songs ("Your Fucking Head Split"), porn songs ("Get on Your Knees"), and violent songs ("The Most Sadistic"). Moreover, Necro directed a video for "I Need Drugs" that featured people shooting up heroin and smoking crack while he rapped, and he also included lots of bizarre photos in the album's booklet. Necro began his own label, Psycho + Logical Records, and created a website, necrohiphop, to market his music and movies. Following his debut album, Necro released a series of albums compiling random recordings of his from the '90s (mostly radio-aired freestyle performances and home demos) and followed up I Need Drugs with Gory Days (2001), a similarly exploitative effort. His films -- 187 Reasons Y (1997), The Devil Made Me Do It (1998) -- are just as perverse, if not more, modeled after old-school gore films as well as snuff and porn. Unsurprisingly, Necro aligned himself with various pornographers and began marketing their goods on his website as well, extending his brand name as far as he could.