For many years, people have believed that
Mike E. Clark was the sole driving musical force behind
Insane Clown Posse, partly due to ICP themselves claiming that without him, their music wouldn't sound good. I think that
Project: Deadman puts this rumor to rest. Clark alone did not make ICP sound the way they did. The idea ICP themselves presented made it seem like he wrote all their music, but if that was the case, why would the music on
Project: Deadman, Clark's collaboration with rapper
Prozak, the self-proclaimed "Hitchcock of Hip-Hop", sound nothing like ICP -- and not in a good way?
I've never taken to this album and revisiting it years after I first heard it hasn't helped either. If anything, the album's tepid rap-metal has aged worse than when the album first out and this sound was more current. In 2024, the fusion of Prozak's horrorcore rhymes and chugging electric guitar riffs sounds extremely dated. In comparison, I think that ICP's albums aged way better due to having much more of an organically ingrained hip-hop sound, which too clearly illustrates my point about Clark's role in ICP: Clark alone didn't make ICP sound good.
Kool Keith once expressed frustration that rappers are perceived as hiring people to write music for them and rapping over other people's music when Keith wrote all of his own music, played a lot of the instrumentation himself and programmed the beats. Even where rappers aren't performing any of their own instrumentation or programming the beats, they're contributing ideas as to how their music should sound. Comparing PDM to Insane Clown Posse, it becomes very obvious that Clark without ICP doesn't automatically create a new ICP, no matter how much Prozak as a lyricist seems desperately to be trying to position PDM as a spiritual successor to ICP. There's a lot of elements to the input of ICP's rappers in their collaboration with Clark that made ICP sound the way they sounded that just aren't here, owing to the fact that PDM's Prozak and ICP's
Violent J are clearly influenced by completely different music. Violent J was using
Gong and
Michael Jackson as influences on ICP's sound, while PDM's Prozak, would rather have just about every single track sound like very early 2000s rap-metal, which is one of the worst traits rappers exhibited when dabbling in rock -- as demonstrated by Strange Music label head
Tech N9ne, who guests unmemorably on "Access Denied", and in his own albums' rock efforts unfortunately chased the rap-metal dragon himself.
The other big problem, besides Prozak's preference for incredibly dated, dull rap-metal, is that Prozak himself just isn't that interesting as an emcee. The lyrics are nothing but horrorcore cliches, and there's nothing particularly noteworthy about this album's take on themes and concepts that are better explored by other artists --
Esham, ICP,
Gravediggaz,
Eminem,
Twiztid. I'm not exactly surprised that Project: Deadman didn't exactly set the charts on fire despite a Tech N9ne cosign. There's just other rappers doing this kind of stuff in a much more interesting way, so the combination of an uninspired sound and highly unoriginal lyrics made this one of the worst releases to come out on Strange Music.
