The Mask Never Comes Off

I found out about this record the way everybody my age finds out about anything now, a clip on my phone. I was on a flight home Chicago and it took me four seconds too long to place the voice. It was Bane. Not doing a bit. Not a movie trailer. Rapping, over dusty drums, in that same wrecked-larynx growl from The Dark Knight Rises, reciting Shakespeare like it was a battle rhyme.

The voice belongs to Tom Hardy. He’s been doing this since he was fourteen or fifteen, by his own account, growing up in what he’s called a nice middle-class neighborhood that made rapping “a very hard sell.” He wasn’t good yet. Almost nobody is at fourteen. Years later, in 1999, he cut an actual demo tape, “Falling on Your Arse in 1999,” rapping under the name Tommy No. 1 while his friend Edward Tracy, going by Eddie Too Tall, built the beats. The habit stuck long after the neighborhood stopped laughing.

In 2021 he came back as Frankie Pulitzer, a fully masked alter ego who turned up on two tracks on Czarface’s Good Guys, Bad Guys EP, tied to the Venom. Let There Be Carnage soundtrack push, with zero explanation and zero confirmation. Czarface is Inspectah Deck, 7L, and Esoteric, comic-book beat-diggers who build songs out of dusty samples and old cassette hiss on purpose, and Pulitzer fit right into the bit because the whole Czarface project is one long bit about masked identity anyway. Hardy has never once said the name is him. He shows up in videos in a mask that covers his entire face and lets the internet do the math.

Now there’s a full record, Czarface Meets Frankie Pulitzer, fifteen tracks, and it’s not a novelty single stretched thin. Busta Rhymes and Method Man show up and don’t coast. Both flesh and blood representation of the throwback feel this record creates. Kendra Morris sings the hook on “Frankie.” El-P raps a verse on “Dragon Cannon,” and that’s the part that got me, because El-P is half of Run the Jewels, and you can hear exactly why he said yes. 7L is the one behind the boards for the whole record. I saw RTJ open for Rage Against the Machine in Raleigh a few years ago. It was incredible and one of the loudest shows I’ve ever been to. This is the same lineage. Handmade drums instead of a laptop preset. A low end that sounds like it was mixed on purpose to rattle a car trunk. Old-school on purpose. I know. In high school I stuffed cloth in every crevice of my 1991 Jeep Cherokee to hold down the rattles.

The Bane cameo everybody's clipping is real, by the way. He does the "now is the winter of our discontent" monologue from Richard III in the voice, on a track called "Grim-Visaged War." It should be embarrassing and it isn't. A movie star cosplaying as a mid-2000s underground rapper, committing to it hard.

I don't know if Hardy will ever confirm it's him. I don't think he needs to. The demo tape from 1999 already told on him. This one's just louder and longer.