Uptown internet kingpin DVS has trouble staying in the rap lane. He’s such a gregarious, prolific, and hilarious dude that his Twitter and various internet writings have gained hurricane force, knocking the wind out of readers with their voracious, eclectic humor. But let’s not forget that rap was born at least half literary, the street-corner poetry of New York’s angry young geniuses — and Dimitri Stathas is one such on tape as well as on paper. After last year’s appetizer course — the feature-heavy Mutant League mixtape — DVS is releasing his debut mixtape DVTV, a pay-per-view channel peek into his depraved, campy rap persona.

To me, genius is when someone risks utter failure, namely by doing things in a way that no one else is. That’s what DVTV is: a weird, twisted labyrinth of mostly-unknown producers and newspaper columns’ loads of words somehow slammed and massaged into blink-and-you’ll-miss-it rap verses that no one else could’ve possibly made. “DVNY” lays out his thesis most clearly, a polaroid of Manhattan’s crude, tawdry underbelly that seethes with gospel-and-guitar tension, oblivious to the the verses hammered over it. Who else would append a Looney Tunes-screwed sample of “Yesterday” as an outro for “Tomorrow Is Here,” a boast track that spends half its time eviscerating the crimes of our country? Who else could cram the defunct Das Racist trio, It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia, and the best line from Swingers into an after-hours strip club beat?

Nobody else because there’s no one like him, and that’s the most valuable currency we have in the age of internet knockoffs and YouTube-coddled sensations. This is one of those tapes that continues to unfold in different, increasingly absurd directions the longer you listen to it, like a Choose Your Own Adventure novel written by Richard Brautigan. Stream it below and order it here because this man needs your money — seriously, he does.

(via Vice)