“The World Is Yours” is the first video from Porn’s debut mixtape, Amerikin Junkie (out Jan. 15). Junkie follows Porn’s critically acclaimed series of collaborations with hip-hop legends The Roots (an impressive body of work spanning the group’s last four records, from 2006’s Game Theory to last year’s powerful concept album Undun). The revolutionary emcee spins dark poetry in endless webs, ensnaring listeners in complex metaphors and running threads while his rhymes creep in for a kill you can’t help but look forward to.

Amerikin Junkie is not a typical debut for a hip-hop artist, but Greg Porn is not a typical hip-hop artist. Amerikin Junkie is a statement; a genre-bending creation that explores what it is to be hip-hop, to be American—to be Greg Porn.

The new mixtape was created at Philadelphia’s Mike Jerz Studio with Mike and Ali Bey [of BeatKhemist]. With these two gifted producers (and Porn’s cousin Damion Ward) taking turns at the helm, Amerikin Junkie is a seedy, street-wise affair—eclectic, shot through with world-class hooks yet slathered in the hyperreal grime Porn has come to crave. “It’s reality music,” he says. “Up in your face, lyrical—super lyrical—but easy to digest.”

Every verse of Amerikin Junkie is a cinematic rendering, a glimpse into Porn’s clandestine and often shocking world. Each track is a hedonistic platter of angst, offered up in the lifer emcee’s instantly identifiable tone and cadence, his delivery alternately nihilistic and affecting as he recounts pulpy Bukowski-esque tales of excess and debauchery, fingering the jagged grain of addiction—not necessarily to transcend it, but to embrace it as an essential part of the human experience.

Sex, drugs, love, pain, money, power, success, comfort—“Everybody’s addicted to something,” Porn says, meditating on the impulses behind Amerikin Junkie. “It’s human nature. That’s how capitalism works, it’s the underlying current that fuels life. But life has become so much about convenience and customer service; making people feel more comfortable and user-friendly—feeding people’s need to be coddled, to be pleased or pleasured or entertained. And some people get entertainment out of different things in life. That’s what I see. Addiction is what makes the world go-round.”

From its screaming-demon loops channeling Wu-Tang’s rawest bars (“Dot”) to its fresh-faced guest spots (Nikki Jean, Suzanne Christina, Patty Crash) Junkie is raw, real, cool. Its creator Greg Porn is no flash-in-the-club, he’s an artist—one with something fresh to say and a brain-bending way of unspooling it from his tongue. As a member of The Legendary Roots Crew and a longtime cohort of emcees Black Thought, Dice Raw, Truck North and STS in The Money Making Jam Boys, he’s got cred worldwide. He’s unashamed, unafraid. A master of his own reality, ready to spit lucid truth as fast as he experiences it. Greg Porn has realized his own place in hip-hop—he’s been on the inside too long, knows what he must do next and doesn’t care what bridges burn. And that makes him, quite possibly, the most dangerous man in the industry. – Steve Labate