#103, “Bolt Cutter,” Doomtree (2011)

150 Favorite Songs, #103, “Bolt Cutter,” Doomtree (2011)

A few years ago, I was having breakfast with Chuck D at his hotel in Austin*. We were talking about the current state of hip hop, a subject about which Chuck was rather unenthusiastic at the time. He saw it as disappointingly individually-focused, where everyone was encouraged to see themselves as a solo entrepreneur rather than as a member of a community building something bigger than themselves. It was a few years ago, and I don’t claim to make any representations of Chuck’s beliefs outside of where his head was at that lone morning (I was interviewing him during SXSW for a story for Fast Company, Chuck D doesn’t, like, call me to say “Dan, I’m in Austin, let’s get breakfast”), but I understood what he was talking about. It was sometime in the mid-‘10s, before even collectives like A$AP Mob or Pro Era were all that prominent, certainly before honest-to-gosh rap groups like Migos and Brockhampton were charting again.

I had met with the members of Doomtree, a DIY rap collective/record label/recording project from Minneapolis, a few days earlier. It was for a different story—part of the usual SXSW feeding frenzy during my freelance days—and so they were on my mind. I brought them up, said that one thing I appreciated about them was that they really pushed back against that mindset. I had asked the group if competition inspired them when they were putting out a group record, if hearing one member drop a great verse made the others want to try to surpass it, and I remember Sims, one of the group’s rappers, laughing. “No, dude,” he said. “We’re a band.” It would, he said, be like a drummer trying to outplay the bassist. The point is to work in concert.

Given where Chuck’s head had been that morning, I relayed that story to him. I think I mostly wanted to, like, cheer him up? I asked him if he knew Doomtree and he said “of course**,” and then told him what Sims had said. He seemed unimpressed.

“Did you say a brand?” he asked me.

“No,” I told him. “A band.” Then he nodded. That was, in Chuck’s estimation that morning, how it should be. It makes sense, coming from the founder of Public Enemy, a man who literally rapped the words “never see a brother like me go solo” in one of his most famous songs***. He wanted to see more of that energy. That was what was missing, for him.

Doomtree put out four albums and two EPs between 2007 and 2015, plus a single as recently as 2020. The collective has five rappers and two in-house producers, and there are also a whole bunch of individual records from its members, most of which still have a collaborative spirit and throughline. (They’ve been quiet since 2020, after allegations of abusive behavior from P.O.S., probably its most prominent member, came out that summer.) Dessa, the group’s nominal leader, put out her most recent album in 2023, and Lazerbeak, one of the producers, is still very active, but the group as a whole might be dormant now. I don’t really know.

It would be a shame if the entire group were finished, though, because what they made together was so exciting, the sort of thing very few artists make. There’ve been punk-influenced rap groups before, but Doomtree were just much better at it than most, finding almost the exact middle of the venn diagram between Fugazi and Wu Tang. (In 2011, two members put out a mashup album called “Wugazi”!)

“Bolt Cutter” is my favorite of the group’s songs. It begins with the drums, a roaring roll that comes out of nowhere and just fucking starts. A heavy, two-note bassline drops in as P.O.S. sing-raps the chorus: “my girl gave me a bolt cutter / and we love to break in / reclaim all the spaces they forgot they had taken,” he starts, and then things get more dynamic from there. Sims raps a nasally verse while futuristic sound effects swirl around him, and then everything drops out and we just get a minor-key piano riff before Dessa sings a quiet verse on the theme of the song—stealing new space for yourself in a materialistic world—which bleeds into a heavy, hook-centered verse from Mike Mictlan, another of the group’s rappers. There’s an interplay between the two that’s so dissonant its positively jarring, Mictlan’s first line almost stepping on Dessa’s last one, but in a way that feels so intentional that it’s thrilling, like the exuberance of breaking into and reclaiming these walled-off space is just too much to contain. “She wants to spend the night in graveyards,” he raps, and fuck, if I don’t want that, too.

There’s an anarchist spirit to “Bolt Cutter” that I find completely irresistible, this idea of using a tool to say “you don’t get to keep us out,” and then imagining what the world you’ve broken into can and should feel like. I have a little side-hustle writing novels for teenagers, and that’s the spirit I want to bring to it—a fuck-your-stuff view of the world that says that just because people put up fences before you got there, you don’t need to be constrained by them, there’s always a way around or through, and maybe what’s behind them is actually meant for you, too. When I’m working on the next one, I’ll play “Bolt Cutter” on repeat sometimes, to remind me of that.

I think that’s why I brought the group up with Chuck back in—Google tells me it was 2015. Because I still find it thrilling. I was a fan, basically, who wanted to talk about it with someone, and Chuck D was there and I thought he’d be interested. It’s not really my place to say what hip hop needs, or what it should be, or any of that, but I know that for me, personally? I want to hear a little more anarchism, a little more dynamism, a little more joy and collaboration and gleeful determination to break into the spaces the people who build fences want to keep you out of. I want to hear more songs about bolt cutters.

*Yes this is a tacky name-dropper of an intro, but can you really blame me for wanting to use this one?

**A couple months later, I went to see Doomtree play a club show in Austin with my friend Jessica, and we were hanging out in the bar with Sims before the show because he is a big Jessica Luther fan, as everyone should be, and I got to relay this anecdote to him. Getting to tell an independent rapper that Chuck D knows who they are and admires what they do is a very cool experience!

***He did, ultimately, put out four solo records, in addition to the fifteen (15) albums he’s done with Public Enemy, as well as a couple of rap-rock albums co-fronting the groups Confrontation Camp and Prophets of Rage.