Featured Story: CES Cru

CEStory

Kansas City’s most dexterous hip-hop duo wants to meet you on The Playground.

BY HUGH WELSH

Five years ago, CES Cru was tag-teaming bad guys. The cover to the hip-hop group’s debut album, Capture Enemy Soldiers, showed Ubiquitous (Mike Viglione) and Godemis (Donnie King) basking atop a mound of corpses.

On the cover of the duo’s follow-up, full-length album, The Playground, which launched Friday, the two MCs are engaged against each other in a laser-blaster hell storm in outer space.

If such a scenario seems silly, it’s meant to be.

“You’re supposed to ball on the playground, not fight,” says Viglione, who envisions society as a kind of playground where a twirl on the roundabout can turn lethal. “People act like everything is dog-eat-dog if you’re going to get to the top. It’s like everybody’s resorting to guns quicker.”

Both Viglione and King refer to their birth identities as their “government names,” an allusion to the firebrand philosophy of Malcolm X. Whereas King selected “Godemis” for its powerful intonation (and because “it’s a hell of a lot better than Tex, short for Technix,” he says of his former alias), Viglione chose “Ubiquitous” because it reflects his utmost desire: to be everywhere at once.

The name could also speak to the omnipresence of violence; Ubiquitous believes that violent thoughts and deeds stain the American conscience far more now than they did just half a decade ago. Playground is that testament.

“It’s definitely a concept,” Ubiquitous says. “We knew going in what it would be about.”