There are two legitimate stances that one can take in the face of a world that is cruel, stupid, and absurd: the Lachrymose and the Laughing. C.J. Pizarro's Snow Crabs is a risible, boisterous, and endlessly inventive avant hip-pop album that shamelessly adopts the latter.
Pizarro's exuberance and creativity boil over into bizarre lyrics, lavishly haunting production, picaresque style-hopping, gorgeous melodicism, goofy characterization -- even the madman burbling of acapella orgasm. Despite its brevity, Snow Crabs somehow manages to bring everything from teen angst to world hunger to spiders to roadkill to futons within its erratic ambit, channeling the truck-driving ghosts of such distinguished personnel as Tom Waits, Eminem, Kleenex Girl Wonder, Soul Junk, Brak, Beck, and dozens of other uncategorizable auteurs who aren't even fetuses yet.
At one point in "Alpacas R Us," Angelseed, Pizarro's Waitsian alter ego, growls -- among other things (for e.g. "'This jersey is too small' is an unpopular saying among highschool gymnasts; that's a fucking fact" and "Buy a futon!," inter alia) -- that he has a lot to learn from positive hip hop. The truth is closer to the reverse: not just hip hop artists, but musicians of every stripe and genre who take themselves too seriously, have a lot to learn from C.J. Pizarro. That's a fucking fact.
![[item image]](http://ia301543.us.archive.org/2/items/ia002/snow_crabs_cover.jpg?cnt=0 "[item image]")
![[help]](/images/question.gif "[help]")
![[Attribution-NoDerivs-NonCommercial]](http://creativecommons.org/images/public/somerights.gif "[Attribution-NoDerivs-NonCommercial]")
