getting high on my own supply - 13. some rap songs
- "t.s.a" (oct 2007)
- "tell me when to go" (oct 2007)
the first CD i bought with my own money was the soundtrack to the 1999 remake of godzilla, which i liked multiple songs from (jamiroquai, rage, the wallflowers cover of "heroes" with e-bow lead guitar) but which i bought for "come with me," the puff daddy song built on a sample of led zeppelin's "kashmir". as a devoted daily total request live viewer and you know just human being living in america, i had of course listened to and enjoyed other rap songs, but "come with me" is the first memory i have of being genuinely obsessed with one. i was addicted to how powerful it made me feel, like a rollercoaster of testosterone, words surfing the waves of the riff. i would listen to that one track on a loop (i don't even think i had my own CD player at the time, so i was listening to it on soft foam headphones wired into our family computer), trying to fill myself with its energy.
for most of the rest of high school, i went fully into a classic rock rabbit hole (with limited exceptions for the "the band" garage rock revivalists of the early aughts) and ignored hip hop, but my freshman year of college, a mind-expanding time for anyone but definitely for me, saw the release of danger mouse's the gray album, which combined acapellas from jay-z's the black album with loops and chops of beatles songs (something that was only fully possible because of the recent release of the beatles rock band video game, the isolated instrumental tracks which were required for the game to work having leaked). you couldn't have designed a better hip hop entry point for the 18 year old version of me and i listened to those remixes over and over, first for the beats that defamiliarized these songs i knew so well and the magic of how their fragments were put together into something new, but then also increasingly for the words, how funny and clever and aphoristic jay-z was, the effortless charm and virtuosity of his flows, a love which then led to listening to the originals on the black album and moving on to the blueprint (and kanye/just blaze chipmunk soul, a sound that will forever shine in my synapses) and beyond. this was also the semester that kanye's "all falls down" (which as a lover of lauryn hill's mtv unplugged i was already predisposed toward) / the college dropout blew up and those songs were just undeniably good and catchy. in the latter half of college, MP3 blogs and data CDRs fueling a neo-backpack era, i was most obsessed with a tribe called quest and digable planets and the roots.
one of the songs that i recorded around this time in our chronology but won't be playing for you in full here is "let's do the gang bang", which was based around the idea that cole porter was kind of the playful linguistic vanguard of his time in the way that rappers were with language in the present day so what if i made an old timey sounding jazz song (i had gotten a plugin that made recordings sound like wax) that was kind of "you're the top" vibes but the topic was gang bangs hahahahaha. i thought this was so clever and hilarious! it was ironic, of course, i did not "support" gang bangs, that was what made it "funny", and yet like so much of the ironic isms of this era the irony has no meaningful target or purpose—it's just empty, a "joke" that normalizes and reifies instead of critiquing. other songs i won't play for you: covers of some of my favorite jay-z songs ("girls, girls, girls" and "hola hovito") where i rap the n word (a word i would never have said, but thought there was absolutely no problem with rapping, what else were you supposed to do?) and recite a panoply of racist and misogynistic stereotypes (i thought because they were affectionate (in the chorus he's saying he loves girls!) that meant they couldn't be offensive) and a halloween song punning on the notion of "spook" being a racist term for black people and a nickname for undercover CIA agents to talk about me as a white rapper and how i related to hip hop (the least interesting and most problematic (yet also most common!) topic for any white rapper).
i'm embarrassed by all of these, as any decent person in 2024 would be (i thought i was a decent person in 2007, but it is hard to square that with the traces that remain). my first rap god puff daddy is now of course a living breathing moral stain and in a similar vein i don't listen to kanye anymore, even though he's probably the most important musician of my adult life and a massive influence on my own work, because i can't enjoy his songs the same way now knowing the rabid anti-semitism and fascist ideology that live in his mind. obviously if you are this far in this post, i claim no purity ring or moral high ground: these are lines i've drawn for myself in my feelings and i think they're different for everybody (i highly recommend the book monsters: a fan's dilemma by claire dederer, for a fuller exploration of this phenomenon).
this week was the release date of tyler's chromakopia, which i've listened to straight through a couple of times and is amazing—rich, textured, weird, playful, epic. earl sweatshirt is my favorite rapper alive but i didn't get as deep into early odd future or tyler as i think i otherwise might have because at the time (what felt like mostly) tyler's tendency toward aggressive transgressions and slurs repelled my white liberal sensibilities. i haven't gone back and listened to the old stuff much (though today i did return to the song where i first heard earl, "molliwopped", and it still hits, a fun-size candy bar of ego dope) to find out whether i'd feel the same way or not (like it matters, maybe that music just isn't for me), but i love the albums he's made in recent years: he's still messy and complicated and wants to push buttons, but he's also a sophisticated and mature artist.
i was not a sophisticated and mature artist in 2007 but there are two rap songs that i recorded around this time that i still feel fond enough of to let you hear. one is an original called "t.s.a" and is a profane [extremely just blaze voice] public service announcement (t.s.a. stands for titties service announcement) about breast cancer awareness and how i was happy to examine any and all breasts for safety (i had touched 0 breasts at this time in my life, though a friend who liked flashing people when drunk enough had flashed me once), built around a post-"hustlin'" octave down vocal hook (my voice cracks on the verses like i am a teenager, but also one of my favorite lyrics in my oeuvre is "your titties is objects, they're the apples of my eye / but behind 'em is your heart and that's the whole pie"). the other is a cover of "tell me when to go" by e-40, a song my friends and i were obsessed with in college when it came out. for a variety of reasons, i'm glad that i didn't try to do the song straight but instead rock it softer, crisply whispering in your ears back and forth across the stereo field, the chorus rising over fields of piano and brass and cheap synthesized brass, my ghost riding the whip.
