Jay-Z & Kanye West, “Living So Italian”
Theoretically, a Kanye and Jay-Z song produced by Lex Luger that sounds like the slo-mo bombing of a Gothic cathedral should be the greatest thing ever made. In practice, it was the first song I ever remember being disappointed by. “H*A*M” came out when I was a 13-year-old Kanye obsessive with every deluxe-edition CD and accompanying poster hanging on my wall. Too young to understand Jay-Z was having a wretched late-career crisis overlapping with a broader midlife crisis on Blueprint 3, but old enough to know it was weird that he made a song rapping about “going hard as a mutherfuker.” I watched the duo’s live VEVO performance a dozen times. They had no motives but to be rich and remind us how far we were from it ourselves, no core thematic or aesthetic values guiding them, no idea how to sound cool or modern on production that was equally impressive. Without their blacked-out shades, one imagines, we’d see the apathetic deadness of their stares, their souls slurped out by marathon recording sessions in the Mercer Hotel and whatever bag of goodies made those nights possible. Their skeletons hunched around wearing leather pants, flexing white girls like they were luxury accessories and flexing luxury accessories like they were Wal-Mart t-shirts. It was an embarrassment. Public Enemy frontman Chuck D and trusted sage No ID saw right through it, too, their own disappointment cutting so deep that the ig’nant luxury rap flex-fest of Watch The Throne 1.0 was scrapped for parts.
“Living So Italian” was a holdover from those early sessions and nearly made the final tracklist. Previewed for journalists in July 2011 with a mostly-finished version of Throne, the two biggest rap stars of the last decade move in devotion to Italian stereotypes over Andre Bocelli’s “Por Ti Volaré.” Rapping over an unchopped opera song is the kind of masturbatory move that only a peak Kanye West would have thought of, much less followed through on. It was so appalling Dante Alighieri would have died of laughter. Andrea refused to clear the sample, leaving “Living So Italian” in purgatory, spoken of in hushed keyboard strokes by Redditors and Kanye completionists. Some things are just better as ideas.
Omari Lyseight, Earl Sweatshirt, and Rockitneedspace, “Square”
British producer and DJ Omari Lyesight’s debut album Digital is a soupy, digitized board game of Six Degrees Of Surf Gang. The record label and genre-less NYC collective Surf Gang has over the years, concentrated down to a few core members linked by their love of keeping a lowkey presence and electronic textures, but still holds a gravitational pull on dozens of artists from across the globe. MIKE, 454, Jawnino, Lerado Khalil, and so on. Near the center of this pool of super friends is the Tan Cressida label, Earl Sweatshirt’s collective of California burnouts who alter the very nature of timing, flows, and pockets whenever they get on a song. “Square” is another one of their patented mind-rewiring, hookless wonders, with Earl and Rockitneedspace filling the space between flute solos and crooked bass blasts with sticky weed bars and sports references for only the supreme ball knowers.
Okgutta, “War”
Every time it looks like we’ve reached the sonic limitations of rage rap someone emerges from the deepest end of the Internet to prove otherwise. With “War” Pennsylvania rapper Okgutta has completely realigned every rage song that’s come before it. It’s so distorted, electronically limited, compressed, and cursed that it circles back around to near silence, mimicking the whizz of a mosquito, impossible to be properly reproduced out of modern speakers. This lovechild of he and Minneapolis rapper/producer Matt Proxy makes the Opium roster sound like Yo Gabba Gabba! sing-alongs, Osamason is recast as radio friendly popstar, 2Slimey as a safe face for daytime television.
The lyrics? Illegible. The flows? Probably fine from what I can gather. This isn’t music made for people who listen to music, it’s made for people who want to react to it; physically within sweltering mosh pits, angrily into the online void, and creatively unbound in their home studios. Yet I can’t stop playing it trying to understand its secrets.
Maine CG, “Alphabets”
The DMV rap scene is a hornet’s nest of violence, experimental industrial textures beating at their own pace, and rap collectives dumping music at chaotic speeds, trying to flood the market until they can claim hometown dominance. Maine CG (formerly known as Lil Plukk) uses “Alphabets” to bring a little levity to it all. There’s still gun talk and a mysterious woman carrying around a Call of Duty weapon in the video, but it’s hard to take it all seriously when Maine is running down the ABC’s of raining fire and brimstone on someone. Like a villainous Papoose, Maine flips the building blocks of early childhood education into something fun for the whole family; “L for loser got no hope/M for be that murda money/N-O can’t taking nothing from me.”
Nori & TS7, “The_1”
Another day, another young rapper compelling me to show respect to the UK for catching up to American rap music. North London’s Nori might make music set for boss battles and the final lap of DaytonaUSA, but his “video game grime” would be a natural fit in warehouse raves the world over. “The_1” falls in line with previous singles scuzzy dance rap records “shake_leg” and “hell0_hi”, all cognitive overloads that lead one to throwing their hands in the air and letting out a couple of “woooo”s and “oi”s like [insert good English soccer situation here] just happened.
