On People Under the Stairs' "The Effects of Climate Change on Densely Populated Areas"

By The Chilltown Blues

The hip-hop duo People Under the Stairs is comprised of the late Michael “Double K” Turner and Christopher “Thes One” Portugal, whom capped off a decades-long discography with 2019’s “Sincerely, the P.”

Forming in the late ’90s, the duo’s name was inspired by their devotion to the craft — if they weren’t performing, they’d be going back to the basement where they worked on their music, was the thinking — and they honed their craft to the point of becoming one of those groups that some people’s favorite artists on a label would cite as being among their favorites.

Much of their music, lyrically and sound-wise, has a quality that makes a listener feel like they could float on it, and though it’s apparently been said they weren’t overtly “political” on a lot of their songs, whenever social issues were obvious, it added to all of their music by coloring in the map of a local landscape they often referenced. The lightness and deftness they produced never lingered on the heights they reached in the zone (which they were often) or the stardust around L.A. without reminders of the underbelly of Hollywood and neighborhoods plagued by the shadow of gang violence and drug addiction.

“The Effects of Climate Change on Densely Populated Areas,” track five on a 15-track album, is already uniquely journalistic in how self-explanatory its title is. There’s decades’ worth of songs and other works of art that paint a picture of how heat acerbates social problems. Few mention climate change specifically.

If anyone listens to a handful of their songs, it becomes clear Double K and Thes One both alternated between being the one whose lines maybe impressed a little more that time out. They were both multifaceted and always outdoing themselves in new ways. But for “The Effects of Climate Change …” we’re focusing on the first verse — which belongs to Thes One and is the highlight of the song’s journalistic quality. Thes describes a dense Los Angeles area that’s boiling:

For the third day in a row in Los Angeles, it feels like a hundred degrees at midnight. It’s hard to sleep, hard to relax at all. Thes raps about people going to the mall just to say cool, Black youth seeking out pools and having the cops called on them, and all of it builds to a literal boiling point where there’s no place for the heat to escape:

“Everybody's windows open there's not a moment of silence
Alcohol heatin' frustration that's increasing domestic violence
9-1-1 is overwhelmed, homie, guess you on your own
The hills are still on fire, I recommend you stay at home.”

In those four lines, Thes has encapsulated pollution a lot of people can’t escape from. The lack of something that is kind of sacred — silence — in this world where climate change is making it impossible to get help in an already burdened system, how the heat acerbates people already self-medicating, and how, if someone wanted to go to nature to escape the heat islands that makes, well, climate change has made the wildfire risk too high.

It’s hard to think he’s speaking about the upwardly mobile population of L.A. here. Climate change is like the late stage capitalism that has fed it — something leaving certain people high and (among) dry (tinder).

But, wait, there’s more: