The sudden arrival of a dozen untitled instrumental grooves in 2006 on the Misled Children label immediately sparked intense speculation across online forums about the identity of their supposed creator, Clutchy Hopkins. Each piece on The Life of Clutchy Hopkins carried only its duration as identification, prompting debate over whether the artist represented an elaborate hoax or a genuine veteran whose sound remained strikingly current.
According to the account supplied with the release, Hopkins was the offspring of a Motown recording engineer who spent his twenties immersed in study with Rinzai monks in Japan, followed by training in Raja yoga in India and percussion instruction in Nigeria, where he also engaged in gun-running and revolutionary activity. The narrative further claimed he participated in numerous anonymous sessions with jazz, funk, and avant-garde ensembles throughout the early 1970s into the late 1990s. Reels labeled simply C. Hopkins, accompanied by a handwritten autobiographical manuscript, were said to have surfaced at a Mojave Desert swap meet; Hopkins was then portrayed as either a street-performing beach drifter in Southern California or a solitary cave dweller in that same desert.
Such details proved hard to accept at face value, leading observers to propose that the music might actually stem from MF Doom, DJ Shadow, Cut Chemist, or even the Beastie Boys acting in disguise. Regardless of provenance, the recordings themselves formed an inventive blend of funk, hip-hop, jazz, and orchestral psychedelia, performed entirely by Hopkins on drums, bass, guitar, organ, flute, melodica, and assorted percussion, and maintained a remarkably contemporary edge that implied ready access to modern influences.
The persona persisted when Ubiquity Records issued Walking Backwards in 2008, pairing a CD of tracks with a DVD containing purported testimonials from individuals who claimed to have encountered Hopkins. In 2009 the same label released Music Is My Medicine, credited jointly to Hopkins and Lord Kenjamin. The sequence extended into 2010 with The Storyteller, delivered to Ubiquity on a damaged iPod that also contained a spoken-word recounting of the album’s creation rendered in ten languages.
