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?

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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!

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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.

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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]

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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...

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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.

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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.