One of Chicago’s most accessibly bizarre musical collaborations of 2019 began at a Burger King in Evanston. A couple years ago Maxwell Allison, who makes experimental music as Mukqs and helps run the eclectic Hausu Mountain label, was walking past the fast-food joint when he spotted rapper Brian Wharton, better known as Sharkula, sitting inside.
Wharton has stayed underground for decades, and though he might like to be more popular, he’s definitely not willing to change his scattered, unconventional, sometimes off-the-beat flow, his anachronistic love for a grimy boom-bap sound redolent of 90s hip-hop, or his fascination with lyrics about bodily functions. He’s also in his mid-40s—hardly the age when most rappers break out. But Wharton’s loose-limbed, unpredictable rhymes have earned him fans in unexpected places: in the past couple years, he’s appeared on Hannibal Buress‘s Handsome Rambler podcast, recorded with legendary rap weirdo Kool Keith, and turned up repeatedly in Gabby Schulz’s graphic memoir, A Process of Drastically Reducing One’s Expectations.
Like many experimental musicians, Allison always seems to have 19 projects going at once: last year he not only released Exit Future Heart but also two outre-dance cassettes under the name Mukqs and the debut of Crazy Bread, his duo with guitar maestro Ryley Walker, titled Vocoder Divorce. As varied and strange as his output has been, though, it hasn’t had much overlap with hip-hop, which he describes as foundational to his perspective. “Hip-hop was some of the earliest shit I ever listened to,” he says. “I had an old MP3 player when I was growing up—it had ten songs on there, and they were all Snoop Dogg, Jurassic 5.” Allison swears by Three 6 Mafia in particular, and he rhapsodizes about contemporary rappers via Good Willsmith’s insightful and endearingly silly Twitter account. “That’s in my DNA,” he says. “But of course, it’s harder for me to relate to that world without someone like Brian to be there to do it, really—to rap. I don’t rap. I don’t do that, and I’m not trying to, because I don’t think I would add anything.”
The Prune City EP, which is already in stock at Galerie F in Logan Square, consists of seven tracks totaling about 33 minutes—its production only took Allison so long because he had other irons in the fire. “I always go with the ‘first thought, best thought’ kind of vibe,” he says. “Whatever I make up front, I don’t really edit it or fuck with it.”
“The beats were dope—that motivated me to come with some tight written verses and tight freestyles,” Wharton says. “What inspired me a lot was he took me so serious.”
“There’s no such thing as fumbling with you, dude,” Allison insists. “With you, everything is loose. If you fumble, it doesn’t matter.”
