Underground hip-hop has plenty of polemics on labor and its ills, but conditions have only gotten stranger in the decades since Mr. Lif’s “I, Phantom” or Aesop Rock’s “Labor Days”. The widening abstraction of value and corporate transferral of risk has led to phenomena like the permanent freelancer, suspended in under-employment with no benefits and little leverage on the labor market. Permalancer is one of many oxymoronic buzzwords legitimized in the weird lurch of late capital, where the contradictions of each piece get resolved by giving workers the worst of both.

On Permalancer, Oakland rapper-producer Purpose Server details the brave new economy through shitty gigs (“Time Theft”), shitty cars (“Squeaky Brakes”), and the unblinking derangement necessary to believe you can actually beat the house (“Permalancer”). “Single Serving” frames the painful work of self-examination after a breakup as an expensive meal, featuring a lacerating verse from LA-based songwriter Rose Droll and a lamenting hook from Oakland emcee and singer James Wavey.

To reflect his working class upbringing in a rural Arizona rodeo town, Server’s productions are all chopped from country samples and interviews with Nashville stars. But instead of the winking irony of the Yeehaw Agenda meme circa-2018, the sonics evoke uniquely American vastness: psychedelic vistas, suburban resplendence (“Pool Supply”), and monster truck distortion. Permalancer synthesizes the best of both worlds with mixing by Stephen Steinbrink—whose production credits include country and folk-adjacent acts like Boy Scouts—and mastering by accomplished Bay Area producer and engineer Pat Mesiti-Miller, whose resume includes Homeboy Sandman and Mr. Lif himself. Closing track “Ambient Country” best embodies this alloyed approach, with pedal steel guitar from Nick Levine (Jodi, Pinegrove) providing high lonesome flourishes to the song’s grim boom-bap disenchantment: “Every job just hours logged / felt time exhale when the chord resolved.”