8 Steps to Perfection
aggressive, cerebral, boastful, darkly comic
An early Company Flow posse-cut style showcase where Bigg Jus and El-P trade dense, allusive verses built almost entirely of boasts, threats, and pop-culture/historical collage. The song is less concerned with a story than with demonstrating verbal command — the title's geometric metaphor (an octagon formed from eight parts) frames rapping itself as a technical, almost architectural discipline.
technical mastery and craft violence as metaphor for skill cultural collage/allusion underground vs. mainstream rap graffiti and urban aesthetics abstraction and obscurity as value
Who's speaking
Two rappers speaking in first person directly to rivals and listeners; the 'you' is a generic weaker MC or threat, not a specific person. The voice is unreliable in a stylized way — hyperbolic threats and pop-culture identifications are rhetorical performance, not literal narrative.
What happens
There isn't a linear story; the song moves associatively through boast after boast, each verse escalating in imagery of violence, historical/cultural reference, and claims of lyrical superiority, before pausing on a repeated conceptual hook about perfection as a structural sum of parts, then handing off to a third verse that trails into another threat-laden opening.
How it's built
Two long, dense verses (Bigg Jus then El-P) with no clear chorus until a short hook stating the 'eight steps to perfection' concept, followed by a fragment of a third verse. The structure mimics a cipher or freestyle trade-off more than pop songcraft — verses are long, tightly rhymed, and packed with internal rhyme schemes rather than organized around a repeated emotional beat.
Section by section
Bigg Jus opening verse
“Rugged like Rwanda, don't wind up far”
The verse opens by yoking real historical atrocity to graffiti and street violence, a jarring juxtaposition typical of the verse's method: shock imagery deployed purely for rhythmic and connotative force rather than argument. Graffiti culture and urban survival become the verse's recurring backdrop, with the rapper positioning himself as both artist and threat.
Bigg Jus mid-verse
References to labor programs, work release, and shoplifting suggest a persona shaped by institutional constraint, though this is folded quickly back into wordplay rather than developed as biography. The density of the references — old films, boxing, sandwiches — creates a kind of associative flood that mimics improvisational freestyle logic.
El-P verse
“Teetering on the edge of outer space”
El-P's verse leans harder into science-fiction and cosmic imagery, casting the rapper as alien or robotic, detached and destructive. This works alongside grislier historical allusion (the grassy knoll reference) to suggest a persona operating outside normal human or moral scale — untouchable, observing rather than participating.
El-P mid-verse
A run of technical and mechanical imagery — pacemakers, tape mechanisms, needles — ties bodily and musical hardware together, reinforcing the record's underlying idea that rap skill is a kind of engineering. The verse also pivots to explicit contempt for commercial rap conventions, positioning the group's density as a deliberate rejection of accessibility.
Hook
“the sum of each part forms an octagon”
The chant briefly steps outside the boast mode to state a compositional theory: perfection is achieved not through a single flourish but through the accumulation of discrete technical elements. It reframes the preceding verbal chaos as a designed system rather than random density.
Bigg Jus closing fragment
The final lines return to menacing, second-person address, suggesting the cipher structure could continue indefinitely — the song ends mid-thought, consistent with its cipher/freestyle aesthetic rather than a resolved narrative arc.
Craft
- allusion
- Both rappers stack references to film, history, and pop culture (genocide, civil rights violence, sci-fi robots, TV westerns) to build a dense intertextual surface that rewards close listening and signals cultural literacy.
- simile
- Nearly every line uses 'like' constructions to compare rapping skill or violence to unrelated phenomena, creating a rapid-fire associative logic rather than sustained metaphor.
- boast/battle rap convention
- The entire piece works within the boast tradition, where hyperbolic self-praise and put-downs of unnamed rivals function as the primary mode of characterization.
- extended metaphor (geometric)
- The hook's image of eight steps summing into an octagon frames technical skill as something structural and precise, a rare moment of conceptual clarity amid the verses' scattershot references.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats this as a pure skills showcase in the underground/indie rap tradition of the late '90s: the historical and pop-culture references are less about meaning than about demonstrating range, memory, and rhythmic control, with the 'eight steps to perfection' hook functioning as the song's only explicit thesis — that technical rap ability is built from discrete, combinable parts, like a martial art or geometric figure. An alternative reading might look for coherence in the violent imagery as commentary on urban precarity and racialized violence (Rwanda, lynching, incarceration references recur), but the tonal register — comic, boastful, exaggerated — suggests these serve as rhetorical texture for a battle-rap performance rather than sustained social critique.
Context
Company Flow were foundational figures in the New York independent/underground hip hop scene of the mid-to-late 1990s, associated with dense, abstract lyricism and abrasive production that helped define what became known as backpack or indie rap, later crystallized through El-P's Definitive Jux label. This track fits that era's aesthetic: verbose, reference-heavy verses prioritizing technical virtuosity over song structure or narrative clarity. I don't have specific documented background on this particular song's recording history.
Listen for
- the shift in tone and imagery style between Bigg Jus's grittier, graffiti/street references and El-P's more sci-fi, mechanical imagery
- the internal rhyme density and how it accelerates or slows the flow within lines
- the brief hook's geometric metaphor as the song's only explicit statement of purpose
- how allusions (historical, cinematic, musical) are dropped rapidly without elaboration, rewarding repeated listening
- the abrupt, unresolved ending that mimics a live cipher rather than a composed song
About Company Flow
Company Flow was an American hip hop trio from Brooklyn, New York City, consisting of Bigg Jus, El-P and Mr. Len.
1992 - 2001 / United States
Full biography and catalogue