Black (Album) History Month

February marks the release of Danger Mouse’s notorious The Grey Album, a landmark release for sample-based music. The project (for the unfamiliar) took Jay-Z’s The Black Album a capellas, which HOV released to encourage remixes and mash up projects (to the point where it kind of got obnoxious), and Danger Mouse slapped them on top of his deconstruction of The Beatles’ The Beatles a.k.a. “The White Album”. Get it? Smudge black and white together...THAT’S HOW YOU MAKE GREY! Genius.

I could reread and regurgitate to you all the legal stuff surrounding the project, but just go to Wikipedia and read about it yourself, you lazy asshole. Here, I’ll even link to it for convenience. [Did you click it? You're literally the laziest person alive for clicking a link to a Wikipedia page instead of searching it yourself] February 24, the day I’m posting this, marks the anniversary of “Grey Tuesday”, which I will also let you read about on your own [go ahead and click. I won't judge you for it again].  None of that is what I’m here to write about. I’m here to talk about me. duh

+++

It was 2003, I was always hunting for as much music as I possibly could get my ears on. I was destroying hard drives by filling them with corrupt mp3s; buying five albums a week because I was attending Grant MacEwan, had four hour long breaks, and a&b sound was still across the street. One night, I was scouring the internet for Pharcyde rarities when I came across this feature called Medieval. The track was kind of disappointing; it was out of the era when SlimKid Tre and Fatlip were off doing their own things and Pharcyde features were disappointingly only Imani and Bootie Brown. The Pharcyde are a topic in themselves for another day.

Regardless of the unimpressive showing from my childhood heroes, there was still something about the other lyricist and the production that caught my attention. I decided to look into these Danger Mouse and Jemini the Gifted One fellows. Insert Ghetto Pop Life.

Jemini’s raw and streetwise lyrics contrasted Danger Mouse’s eerie and orchestral sound. Topically, Jem’s lyrics on this album are the cliches of gangsta rap (misogyny, bravado, I’m pretty sure he says, “faggot nigga” multiple times) delivered unapologetically because, as the man states about himself, “I’m just a brother who never compromised my integrity”. Across the album, however, he’s able to flip his intonation from frantic, street anthem steelo to pimp-cane brandishing smoothness all while staying in the cadential pocket of head bobbing proving he's up to par to say whatever the fuck he wants to. I think that was why Danger Mouse chose to work with him. The lyricism wasn’t overly complicated, giving the listener a familiar place to come into. It offset the complexity of Danger Mouse’s production, because by all means this was an album far more focused on giving the drummer some.

Ghetto Pop Life - Danger Mouse and Jemini the Gifted One

As much as Jemini’s lyrics tread on cliché, Danger Mouse turns cliché on its head. The baptist gospel choir sound has been used so often in rap music, but here Danger Mouse strays from that typical sound and adopts a more gothic vibe. The titular track, Ghetto Pop Life, is introduced with a church choir singing what we will come to learn as the hook. The choir brings me back to the ominous sounds of my Sundays being imposed with Christian guilt. The bright side? They’re singing, “I’ve got bullets in the clip. (so what you want?) I got a lyric I can spit. (so what you want?) I’m giving bitches good dick. (so what you want?)”. Yes! I might still go to church if the choir sang more rap songs.

Yoo-Hoo! - Danger Mouse and Jemini the Gifted One

Yoo-Hoo! isn’t the best example I could give for Jemini’s smoother flow. That honour would go to I’ma Doomee (Love Song) wherein Jem fully does him and harmonizes both his styles over the chorus. Yoo-Hoo!, however, is my other choice track off the album, so that’s the one I’m going to touch upon here.
Yoo-Hoo! is a track, as Jemini describes in the intro (after the hilarious blaxpoitation movie snippet), about dudes hating it when Jem walks into a club and gets noticed by all the women. Jem simply raps about how exceptional his game is. It’s all about the superiority of his attractiveness, laying down good dick and whatnot. Bravado isn’t typically my thing, but when a dude eloquently spits how other people “can’t speak sweet soliloquies like these,” I respect that.
I’ve listened to this song too many times while writing this post and I need to move on, so let me get to the point. Yoo-Hoo! is one of my favourite songs solely based on the use of the phrase “yoo hoo”. That is the least gangsta phrase possible! Hilarious. You write a smooth thugged out song about bitches and hoes hollering at you and base it around a cartoonishly cute phrase which I picture only girls in polka dot dresses saying, that will indeed be my jam.

I could go on and on about how amazing I feel this album is. I could write all about wondering why Jemini hasn’t done any other work since this. I don’t want to though. This album is frozen in time to me and you really should just listen to it yourself both for the amazing reimagining of what 808 drumbeats can do and to hear a rapper describe himself in the best way possible: “the textbook definition of ‘DAMN, he’s nice’”.

+

You know Danger Mouse even if you don’t think you do. Me saying that might make you think I’m...crazy for making the assumption, but I’m not crazy! At least in this instance.

Crazy - Gnarls Barkley

I know there are people out there that straight up believe CeeLo alone is Gnarls Barkley. If that’s you, you’re dumb...for so many reasons. Here's a short list of those reasons: Gnarls Barkley isn't a single person; CeeLo is already an artist with a moniker as it is; CeeLo's been around forever as both a solo artist and in groups like when he was the giant midget member of Goodie Mob. Anyway, Danger Mouse was the other half of this project. blahblahblah [write about distinctive opening bass notes]...etc. etc. [video so on point with Rorschach tests...because the song is called Crazy. hilarious] [maybe I put Rorschach in bold to accentuate how smart I am] blah blah…[make mention that I had two copies of this on vinyl and how one was an early pressing. just to show how cool I am] blah blah…Alright. This song was huge and big enough that I really don’t feel the need to elaborate.

+

So, we’re all familiarized with Danger Mouse now. Yeh? What Danger Mouse did with The Grey Album for me was familiarize me with The Beatles and “reintroduce” me to Jay-Z.

Like any proper mash up project, such as Girl Talk’s monstrous The Night Ripper, The Grey Album gave you insight and points of entry into things you otherwise wouldn’t delve into. I once tweeted a thank you to DJ Z-Trip, the uncontested godfather of mash ups. His sampling in his song Take Two Copies, an ode to independent artists begging people just to buy two copies of their singles, led me down the path of Jethro Tull due to his flip of The Teacher.  I was never really into The Beatles. Though I was familiar in the sense that my mom loved them and I knew their hits because like...pop culture, I honestly never paid much attention to their music. Post-Grey Album, I could understand the beauty of their riffs and melodies. 

I wasn’t a Jigga fan after junior high. I thoroughly loved In My Lifetime, which I only ever refer to as Vol. 1 because I can never actually remember what it’s called. Sunshine with that Babyface hook, twinkling beat and the freshest video was always high on my list of favourite rap songs (yes, I know the full title is (Always Be My) Sunshine, but who pays attention to things in parentheses? semicolon).  But once all the jigginess jumped off I was not having it. So, all the blueprints and volumes after the first didn’t spark my interest. Maybe, it was the retirement hype surrounding The Black Album, however, that brought me back onto the jock of Jay-Z. I didn’t actually buy the album though. I only ever listened to The Grey Album (I can hear some of your groans..."He totally just said, 'I never really listened to Jay-Z. I only listened to the bootleg mash up album versions of his music...' ugh sew hipster" Fuck you. Write your own blog!). Besides Change Clothes, I don’t think I had actually heard any of the original versions of this album until years later. I didn't even know Threat existed because for whatever reason it wasn’t reworked for The Grey Album and the lyrics of Lucifer played differently to me as DM cleverly turns the song into an interlude playing Jay’s vocals in reverse. 

+++

The Grey Album lives up to its name in that it is the epitome of a blur. It blurred the line of copyright usage. It deconstructed these timeless rhythms from arguably the biggest band of all time and laid those revived sounds underneath the vocals of arguably the biggest rapper at the height of his career. It blurred Jay-Z’s album into one conceptual work, taking shine away from the major singles like 99 Problems and Encore (which I’m quite happy about, because people always play the Linkin Park versions of these songs and I absolutely hate them. Like, I fucking HATE that version of Encore.) What The Grey Album did -- Seriously, fuck that version! Oh man, it’s in my head. I fucking hate Linkin Park!

Man, yeah The Grey Album is brilliant, but I can’t even write anymore thinking about how much I hate those other versions of those songs.
Byeeee.

Falling falling falling

I haven't written nearly since I started this thing, so I'm just going to ramble and do this one as quickly as possible without thought or editing.
I mashed my keyboard in my iTunes search and this song came up.

+++

All Falls Down - Kanye West

Kanye's College Dropout is undeniably a masterpiece. Everyone misses old Kanye. There's a goofiness to it, but you can see the seedlings of genius. He wasn't the best at soul sampling, but he made it his signature. He was a little self conscious with his rapping, but it's what made him as cocky as he is today. 

+

I've been rinsing All Falls Down in my sets the last few months for whatever reason. It's a beautiful song. It's great because it's not a beat that drops at the beginning to make it recognizable. I come in looping that broken note Lauryn Hill vocal "ohhh wheeEeen it...ohhh wheeEeen it".

I've never understood sampling. Hearing that one snippet of a song to loop and fuck with and build an entire song around. For Ye to take this random Lauryn Hill MTV Unplugged jam at the dawn of her righteous turn against the music industry is fucking insane. Ok it's a little lazy in that it was already a hook. but still...I don't have the ear to build a song like that fursher.

+

[This shit is not going to have any sort of structure.]

I just caught a whiff of something. It reminded me of a girl (as does anything in my life). This sense memory made me realize I had her all wrong (as I always do with girls). What I smell is my own cologne. It's not even that I started wearing it when I started being around her, but I for sure thought it was her perfume and not my own scent. I mention this because it's a reminder of things all falling down. I dunno... things ain't going well and I need to reevaluate why I fuck things up.
"The prettiest people do the ugliest things." 

+

This song is all about self consciousness. Ye wonders why we do what we do to impress others. 

"The things we buy to cover up what's inside" is definitely something I relate to. I used to always say that I don't speak much and that I let my outfits speak for me. I kind of still live by that, but I care so much less about fucking fashion, but I don't feel like I have less to say. 

I don't know...I've embarrassed myself a lot as of late, I feel. So, I'm kind of at a point of, not necessarily self consciousness rather, reassessment. New year's resolution?

+

I will never get the imagery of this video out of my head. It was the first time, I felt, that Stacy Dash came back out with it. If it weren't for her vocalizing her political standpoints as of late, I would still be thrown by her. I don't know what it is about the way she's shot in this video (maybe the POV fetishism), but she's so fine in this video.
The shitty editing of Kanye looking at himself in the mirror always holds a place in my heart too. I can never get enough of the sound editing of him rapping in an airport bathroom too. This video is so dumb to analyze...The big topic of Ye's metal jaw surrounding this album brings about the stupid getting stopped at the metal detector and him needing to lie in the x-ray. wtf hilarious...

+

As I revisited this album recently I came to Family Business.  I wanted this to be the last track that I played on my last night of a residency I just left. It wasn't. I actually don't know what I finished with. Fuck...
All I wanted was to play this song and do the electric slide on top of the DJ table. I kind of got to do that at one point. I got told by a homie to pick things up because they were "lit". All I thought was fuck, these motherfuckers don't understand sentimentality. So, yeah I don't appreciate that homie right now.
In line, but off topic, check Chance's rework of this. 

I'm truly loving the respect new dudes are doing by paying homage to Ye's influence on them.

+++

K. I'm tired of writing. SOrry this is a strange stream of thoughts. I just felt I needed to push something out. I haven't written anything properly in fucking forever. I know this is harsh, but take what you can get, ya bish. 

-F

Lock and Key

Spank Rock - Cool S#@!

Let's crank this motherfucker up!

Spank Rock is one of my top five rappers. He spits uninhibited obscenity with unapologetic vulgarity, from coked out party nights to girls getting wet on the dance floor. Naeem Juwan is profound through the profane, and his lyrics push raunch to the degree of when I play him out, I get asked to turn the misogyny down.
It's creative vulgarity though. There's the beautiful concept EP collabo with Benny Blanco, Bangers & Cash. The EP centres around Miami Booty Bass sampling the likes of Uncle Luke and the 2 Live Crew. All five tracks were released as singles and I copped all but one that I for some reason slept on and now pine for.
There are no other artists that I know of that create a character solely for the purpose of a mix. Spank Rock took on this feat in the collab with DJ Hoff and created the fictional Italo-House superstar Mobroder. Fully conceptualized through music, sure, but the character is hilarious too.

+++

Spank Rock was one artist prevalent in the days when grimy basement clubs coexisted with the ultra-lounges, before the mediocrity of the everyone-is-welcome-to-this-establishment mentality started in this city. I almost miss those days. I feel far more comfortable in a situation of well dressed kids with judgmental glances and whispers of "who the fuck does this guy think he is?" than some who-the-fuck-let-you-into-a-public-space motherfucker with flip flops in the winter yelling, "LOOK AN ASIAN!". The former I can say, "Fuck all y'all," to or maybe even become friends with. The latter I'd get hate-crimed on.

Oh right...Sorry...music.

+

It was the time of destroying your eyes with neon walls and pressed pills. It was the burgeoning of a new era; retraining your ear to hear post-80s revival, pre-dubstep club music. At that time, Baltimore club music was my shit. 

The first song I heard labelled as B-more was DJ Rockaton's Your Bmore. I legit didn't know what The Outfield's Your Love was and thought Your Bmore was a completely original song. Whatever it was, I was on board. I picked up every old pop song B-more remix and played them in my I-still-don't-know-what-a-bpm-is sets (hey, I was only playing for drinks and didn't listen to Justin at all when he was trying to teach me!).

Spank Rock was technically B-more. He's a rapper from Baltimore rapping songs for the clubs and his album Yoyoyoyoyo was fire at this point. There was one night outside of the now closed Fluid Lounge when I was talking to this girl who was tentative about coming in. "What's going on tonight?"
"You should come check it. I'm playing with AllOut DJs."
"AllOut? So, I'm just going to hear Spank Rock song after Spank Rock song?"
I laughed and told her that that was an astute description, but it would be a good time. I walked back inside thinking, that bitch dumb.

The time came that I finally got to catch Spank Rock perform live. I'm sure I've told you this story before. If not it goes like this: he was touring for his album everything is boring and Everyone is a Fucking Liar. He was the opening act for Ke$ha, which made me respect her more for her choice of opening act. I guess the way that night worked was he ended up getting booked for three appearances. He played the concert; made a pit stop at Brixx; then was off to Union Hall. I caught him in the middle at Brixx, where he didn't even know he was supposed to be performing. I was already drunk going into the jam and so stoked to meet the dude—wait. I showed up by myself. How was I drunk already? hmmm...intriguing. Anyway—, I ran into Nick who was putting on the show and I drunkenly and excitedly said, "Man, when I meet him I'm gonna be like, 'yoyoyoyo'." There was no more to that sentence because I figured the joke had gotten across. I think Nick didn't get it and looked at me like this drunk motherfucker can't even finish his sentence.
I got to meet Naeem before the show. He was super nice. I snapped a pic with him.

Fucking Fanboy

This performance is legendarily infamous to me. He had no idea he was actually supposed to perform. He played like ten songs tops all from behind a pillar off to the side of the stage as opposed to actually on the stage. He requested a certain request to the audience with the promise of playing a song request. A girl brought him a drink to which he replied, "Bitch, I said a line of coke not a rum & coke!" Best.

I approached him after his set even further turnt than I was at the beginning of it. Bits of conversation here and there. He got caught up in a conversation, a moment when I took to jump into what I thought was an enclosed entryway and puke. Unfortunately, it was enclosed with glass walls where everyone could see and Spank yelled out, "I SAW THAT!" as he walked into the night laughing at me. 

+

Everything is Boring and Everyone is a Fucking Liar was so hard to find a physical copy of. There was no North American distribution for some reason when it first dropped, so I had to find it overseas and pay three times as much for a vinyl copy. I hate that shit.

The major difference between Everything is Boring... and Yoyoyoyoyo is the less prevalent production from Triple XXXchange. Their brief parting of ways, however, seems to have allowed Spank to get more explorative in his sound. The likes of heavyweights Boyz Noize and Mark Ronson allowed ...Everyone is a Fucking Liar to be more diverse in its range musically.

Cool S#@! was a standout on Disco 88's second album for me. It's a throwback to those days of exclusivity, yet a transition and natural evolution from those days as well.  Over a minimal beat produced by Triple XXXchange and Tyler Pope of !!!, the song opens with the debate of whether what you're doing is the best choice. Spank starts with the lyrics: Heard she had a little get together. Didn't wanna come like, whatever. I was at the cool shit doing cool shit.  And you know I do it better. Was it fun? Was it clever? I was at the cool shit doing cool shit.  What brought the song to my attention, mostly, was the best coke line ever written: My door has a lock. My lock has a key. My key's been gettin' down with my nose. My nose been gettin' down with my key.

+++

Frantic and vulgar while being thoughtful and creative. Spank Rock has concentrated the essence of a coke high into rap songs. He's made a beautiful art in transcending the typical bitches and hoes rap while keeping all the best parts of misogyny.

Chains

Chance the Rapper - Chain Smoker

It was the end of last November—cold, snowy—and I was in a place only a lifestyle of being up at five A.M. after playing gigs can lead you to. Chain Smoker was a jam that I would rinse during early mornings as I trudged my way to school. My destination was the campus, but I was still wondering where I was heading.

+++

Chance is my dude right now. I was first exposed to him by the homie Seanny. He'd bump Chance's Acid Rap mixtape in his car as I mindlessly sat in the passenger seat. I initially dismissed the collection. I was waiting until I heard some official release from the Rapper because whenever I hear the word mixtape, I immediately don't care. Besides the standout Cocoa Butter Kisses, I didn't really give it a...chance even though it's actually much closer to a proper album than it is your traditional mixtape.

Long after that exposure, I was reintroduced to him through the homegirl Sasha, who is editing this blog right now (let's see if she leaves this part in (I am definitely judging her (your) ego once this drops)). I gave Cocoa Butter Kisses a proper listen and started incorporating it into my sets. It was a perfect smoke-break song (it's longer than five minutes and he sings about “cigarettes on cigarettes”!), but so much more than simply that. I decided to seek out what else dude had to offer. 

I started getting tracks from all over the place. I grabbed Juice because this random lesbian would come to my Hip Hop nights and request it every time she came through. I found Favorite [sp] Song and figured it would hit with the Childish Gambino feature (that shit bangs with the kids) on that Mary J. Real Love (or possibly, the O.O.G., Betty Wright's  Clean Up Woman) sample. I dug Everybody's Something because of its sampling of Slum Village's Dilla-produced masterpiece Fall in Love. But it still took me a while to get into Acid Rap in its entirety.

+

Chance's style is so humble (the outro on Acid Rap is a phone call to thank his dad for the things he’s given him) and even as his prominence grows in the game (endorsed by Kanye as one of the best new artists), that humility does not seem to diminish. His timbre is inimitable and his lyricism has a cleverness that exceeds mere punchlines at the end of every stanza. His constant smoking and different perspective on the world make him relatable and intriguing to me. At the top of Chain Smoker, under the warm opening piano notes (which I dare you to wake up to and not feel like it’s going to be a good day), Chance mutters, "If this is my last shh—my last shit...Uhhh...It definitely be mad important” with an understanding of how fleeting his music career (or possibly even his life) is. That “Uhhh” in there isn’t some warm up unh to get on beat. It’s a tentative, self-questioning stutter. He always has a self-consciousness that offsets the bravado in his lyrics. While he brags of being “a good looking, motherfuckin, mother—shut yo’ mouth” (how does he say motherfucking, but not motherfucker?! So great) and feeling his own music in his car so deeply that he forgets to put it in park, he exclaims, “I hope you love all of my shit!” It’s far from the typical, “my shit’s the bombest”. He's still hoping for his audience's enjoyment.
Chain Smoker was a warm welcome into the world. It builds slowly enough and hits in an early morning way. It paired perfectly with the following:

++

I was shown Wonderful Everyday around this same time by my other homie named Sean, who was DJing one night and on some I-need-to-show-you-this shit. There's a beautiful harmony when an artist, whose album centres around drug-induced lucid dreams, covers a PBS children’s show’s theme song.

This track has a subtle feature from Wyclef. I always hated Clef’s improvisations post-The Carnival, like his weird, throaty “ehhyyy”s and whatnot. Somehow, Chance and co. make it tolerable. It’s like Chance perfected Wyclef’s steez.

I love a track that takes forever to build and this doesn’t bang until halfway through. One time I was playing this as we were adjusting the sound in Red Star, but had to cut it short, because there is absolutely no bass for two minutes. This flip on the Arthur theme song (I know they’re anthropomorphic and all, but let’s get real. Buster is Arthur’s black best friend, right?) was my first exposure to Chance’s clique The Social Experiment. Letting a track breathe is the beauty of the group. Their recent release, Surf, displays a ton of this, giving piano or trumpet solos just as much time as lyrical verses.

Sunday Candy is one of the standouts on Surf. I just watched the video and it made me like the song even more! While he raps, "you sound like 'why the gospel choir got so tired?'" the chorus is some guttural belting over steel drums and piano notes that would make anyone prance to. Some tap dance group did a fitting performance to this at one of the Latitude 53 patio parties. The dance was ok and cute, but I was more impressed by the song choice. 

Familiar, a song about the consistent commonality of girl personalities, is my other choice track. The hook declares, "Excuse me, but you look familiar." I may have accidentally been playing it one night as I introduced myself to this girl I recognize from around the way (she looked familiar, sure, but I just wanted to play the song).

+

If you go down The Social Experiment rabbit hole, you’ll find Kanye’s new prodigal Chicagoan, Vic Mensa. He’s featured on Cocoa Butter Kisses, which I didn’t realize until just now. Vic’s The InnaneTape is in the vain of Acid Rap, though his latest work adopts the intensity of G.O.O.D. Music (U Mad is my fucking jam of summer ’15. The video is bombz [that all black straight jacket?! sheeyt]. I actually prefer it over Ye’s All Day. ennnh… that’s not true. I think they’re on par with each other. Really I just mix the two of them together every time I play them). Vic has veered as much as Chance has held steady. It’ll be interesting to see how the two diverge. One of my choice tracks of the mix is Orange Soda, which I played on the night the NDP won ‘round these parts (geeeet iiiiit?). “To give you what you need…” I don't know where I'm going with this anymore. This is starting to read like I'm going through a rabbit hole.

+++

Chain Smoker and Wonderful Everyday got me to get my ass up in bad times. Looking at his body of work along with that of his cohorts, even in good times, is inspiring. 

The Firm of Song & Associates

I tend to fill my sets with jams for the people that are always around: my homies, the regulars I like, the staff. I could care less about the actual patrons of the bar. This might be why I feel like I'm not a name that draws in crowds. The whole reason I started DJing was to listen to music I wanted to hear while drinking. Playing jams for these specific people, though, brings about the issue of association. A song gets redefined from something I casually listen to into so-and-so's favourite song that I play out just for them.

+++

Sometimes I'll find a song when I'm trying to branch out of my comfort zone and before I develop a relationship with the song, I'll find out about other people's experiences with it. In my early days at Red Star, I decided to look into a bunch of classic rock and came across CCR's Long as I Can See the Light. This is a great end of the night jam especially when played to a nearly empty room with all the candles lit on all the wooden tables. Besides all of that, this is the jam I play for the homeboy, Rene, the bartender. He's told me some beautiful stories that he’s associated with this song. It's a song that reflects friendship and loss for him. This song is now ingrained in my head as the bald, bearded man behind the bar's song forever.

+

Girls...girls are typically the fucking worst thing to attach a song to and I do it far too often. I always look to the cutest girl in a room and try to figure out how to keep her dancing or bobbing her head. I once played Yacht's Psychic City and this girl I was styling looked over and danced her arms at me to the chorus all, "come on over over"-like. She was skinny and lanky, so her gestures were so specific to her steez. I played the song again like an hour later, because I had nothing more in that vain. She left, but this song will always remind me of a certain wave of arms and a come-hither stare.

+

I was hanging with this girl recently and it nearly destroyed all of my DJing ability (which isn't much, but whatever...). I usually don't expect anyone to come by my gigs when I invite them to come out; so, when this girl actually showed up, I was pretty caught off guard when she walked in. The night turned the fuck out. We got drunk and sloppy and the room got out of hand. I had the most fun playing that night. For a brief moment, music sounded sweeter and I was better at what I did.

Weeks later, things went sour and I was left wanting to rid myself of my entire music library. Everything reminded me of her. The song she walked in to; the song she kissed me for playing; the song she drunkenly sang in the cab back to her place, all of them integral parts of my sets and songs I'll need to play for a while still.

Post Malone - White Iverson

Post Malone's White Iverson was the first song I got into once the dust settled. It's an ignorant, new school jam filled with cliche, current slang that I can completely turn my brain off to. I was first told to check it out by the homie Mike, the porter at The Bower. I didn't listen to it immediately, but his description of a Riff Raff-steez jocker singing a PartyNextDoor rip-off kind of intrigued me for some reason. It wasn't until I was debating leaving this girl's place one morning when the homegirl Corin convinced me to actually give it a listen. I needed anything to clear my head. I left and loaded up this song.

+

"Post Malone", I like to think stands for "after her. Me Alone". White Iverson is a moody track that drops a nearly immeasurable amount of current slang (the chorus repeats how homie is "susin'" over this girl); there's a ton of bragging about how he's on the brink of blowing up; and though he's being lame over some girl, he still talks about having a bunch of hoes. Beyond the inanity of glamour-rap tropes, however, are very conceptualized basketball-themed rhymes fitting to the theme of the song, which I'm still convinced is a love song…

Hold up. I just realized that this song, if I'm correct, is about Love and Basketball, the favourite movie of the girl I was just talking about. Fuck. Maybe I need to stop playing this joint out...Well, I've already gotten into this post so I'll just finish talking about this song. Maybe I won't think of it as a love song after all.

Let’s start again. The song is about Post's hoop dreams. He "ain't rich yet," but he's on his way there. He's "with some white girls and they lovin' the coca" and cleverly drops, "like they O.T. [Genasis, rapper of the summer banger Coco]...Double OT". Not mind blowing wordplay but I definitely laughed. I could go on and on about every basketball reference in this (oddly no Mailman references for someone with post and malone in their name) like his allusion to The Answer's infamous Practice diatribe and I'd be saving you the time of giving this an in depth listen, but really, I'm already getting too deep into this relatively hollow track. I highly doubt Post Malone will have a career as lucrative as #3's and will be more akin to a rookie that blows his knee out in summer training camp.

+++

I holler at Corin pretty much every time I play this. It's a good reminder that there are good people surrounding me. It can be a pleasant thing to associate people, places, or moments to songs. It might simply be your best friend or a glance from a cute girl. It can also be terrible (like how Natalie Imgbruglia's Torn was the first song that came on MuchMusic when my first girlfriend dumped me). I don't know what the best way to attach songs to people or moments is, but it happens and it's going to constantly happen when you pay too much attention to music.

Just Like That

Keith Murray - The Most Beautifullest Thing in This World

Keith Murray's The Most Beautifullest Thing in This World has been a mainstay in my sets for years. I like beautiful things. I can appreciate ridiculous redundancies and blatant disrespect towards grammar. This battle-rap steez, Erick-Sermon-produced jam full of non-sequitur braggadocio has all of that. I couldn't tell you when in time and where in space I crossed paths with this song; it's just one of those classics that's inexplicably in my life. So, who (who?)(who?) really cares?

+++

Battle rap, at its peak, is an art of wit and cleverness, but there are many valleys where paths lead to streams of rhyming glamourized yo' mama jokes. It's entirely about ego and trying to diminish your opponent's self-confidence. Keith Murray attempts to claim the ultimate position. How can you do better than the most beautifullest? That's TWO superlatives! The extremity of being the top of the pile of the top of the pile is impossible to top!

+

Keith Murray deftly articulates his wide range of synonyms for being the best and does it in every pocket you could possibly be in on this beat. It takes a rare breed of MC to rhyme multisyllabic words within the same sentence and then change your rhyme scheme midway through the next. That's, straight up, accomplished in the first two lines of the song! Throughout the rest of the track, Murray seamlessly flows through staccato, hard consonants and machine gun flips, and closes each verse with an exaggerated, dramatic delivery comparable to a cliché slam poem.

+

It's an accessible song and I'm sure it was radio-friendly at the time, but this is a jam for the heads. You're welcomed into the song with a warm scratch (one so comfortable you could call it back rub rather that a scratch), but then you're thrown right into an overwhelming amount of understated pop culture references as Murray makes the assumption that his listener knows what's up. He goes about embalming your crew with a certain je ne sais quoi; a little of his brand of "you know how I do." He spits the most subtlest (...) reference to New Edition ever written in rap. And then we find ourselves at another accessible/inaccessible juncture: the warmest place in my heart: nerdom.

I loved Hip Hop before I even got into the nerdisms of comic books and genre TV and I had already loved this song before really even analyzing the lyrics. So, there was a day when the stars aligned and the universe decided to destroy my brain. "You're through," says Murray (and rightfully so), "I'm Interplanetarian like Doctor Who." This is the deepest cut of nerdery possible. Doctor Who in '94 was not quite the cultural phenomenon it is now. Initially, I simply gave him props for repping the Doctor. But THIS motherfucker Murray had the balls to explore how much further his ship would take him. I thought Interplanetarian was a completely made up word from Keith. Nah. He just dropped the name...of a Doctor Who villain...who was defeated by the Doctor...through the use...of an ancient language. That is out of this world. That is beautifullestness.

[Let's pause here as I go have a cigarette]

+

I actually have no idea what this song is supposed to be about. There doesn't seem to be any sort of running theme other than him talking about himself, which is totally fine. A battle rapper always needs to let you know who he is. So like any true scientist, Murray starts defining his subject by saying what it's not, "Not Quincy but I'm Back on the Block..."  His lyrics that followed built a working definition of who he is which leads to him eventually dropping what he's more than. Science...

It's a very strange feeling when a rapper makes you feel ignorant about rap by rapping about a rapper. While saying what he is more than, Keith showed me how dumb I was with his boastful claiming of, "I come sweeter than Jeru, and damage an amateur." I would see Jeru the Damaja on MuchMusic with his high­-rising, pillbox hats or some other headwear similar to turbans and thought he was some foreign rapper that happened to get some airplay. You never knew back then with Much, they played some random ass shit. I'd read "Jeru" and stop there, thinking the pronunciation of the latter part of his pseudonym was an exotic [duh­-MAH-­zhuh]. I left it as something I didn't understand and changed the channel. I later found out that he was just an underground Brooklyn rapper on some Primo beats calling himself the Damager. I should've realized that it was just a typical Hip Hop standard of flipping the phonetics. I should probably listen to more Jeru...

+

I always wanted this to be a love song. Between the title and Erick Sermon's use of the same Isley Brothers sample that's used in Big Poppa, it would make sense to be a love song. I'm alright though because there's always Prince's The Most Beautiful Girl in the World to fill the space of a love song with a similar title (find this song yourself because Prince songs are hard to find free links to).

Even though it didn't turn out to be a love song, I still hope for the day that I get to appropriately nickname a girl "just like that". I've yet to meet someone fittingly worthy of the title most beautifullest. I tried it once, but unsuitably. I didn't actually think this girl was that beautiful. I was just caught up because I'd see her at Hip Hop shows and her name turned out to be Justine. It was all right there! I also never actually met her and I still have no idea who she is. I'm just a creep that listens to too much rap music.

+++

Keith Murray's The Most Beautifullest Thing in This World is a classic cut that'll be taking up space in my collection for a long time. He flexes his skills and says a lot of words, but really it's simply a dude orbiting around a single topic: himself. Though Keith Murray wouldn't fall in most people's list of top ten rappers, this jam would at least fall into my top ten most beautifullest songs.