Are Hooks Entitled to Interiority? Etc.

Couple of thoughts:

The other day I was listening through Ye's last album, preparing to write a post about how convuluted his idea of conscious rap is (which I'll get to in a bit) when a pattern emerged - Ye (and Common, all the Chi-Town backpack rappers, Souljaboy, Lil' Wayne, etc., etc., etc.) addressed the hook as though it had interiority, as though the song was an active duet. The particular one in mind is "Champion," where he flips the Steely Dan sample and answers ("Did you realize that you were a champion in their eyes? / Yes I did! / So I packed it up and brought it back for the kids...")

Hooks, middle eights, choruses, all function as the aural grab, the singable bit, or at least the cool bit that you don't really understand but sing in a high falsetto anyways (see "Peacebone," Animal Collective). However, addressing the hook, addressing an element of the song adds a kind of narcissistic mirroring to the proceedings, which makes perfect sense, given that all of the world's music loving population is aware of Kanye as "that guy who has hissy fits." It is kind of clever, but its also smug and in this situation, incredibly lazy.

Ye, via Steely Dan, has it declared that he is a champion. Now braggadacio is alive and well in rap, and if done well, is incredible, but the bar is raised that much higher. If you want to declare yourself the hottest thing alive, you've got to sound it, you've got to have the skills to shut people up. See Black Thought: "I'm like aquaman and brown hornet / I'm like Imhotep but don't flaunt it." As the Village Voice has already pointed out, Kanye is not really an MC, he's a rhythmic talker. His subject matter only includes himself, and is only referenced via immediate conventional means (Fresh, fly, shoes, Louis V, Chi-town, D's), and he has no rhythmic or melodic variation in most of his songs. He rap-talks. So this use of hook as interlocutor is smart on Kanye's part - he can have the hook declare him champion, and then rap about how he's lifting up Chicago's youth with his rhymes. This is essentially indicative of Graduation as a whole. It's an attempt at a true mc album, a rappers album to show off Kanye's rhymes, but unless you want to take eight hundred rhymes about LV and a "black kate moss" to the bank, then it's gone broke. When Lil' Wayne addresses a hook (here I'm looking at every song on Da Drought III), it's as a support - he takes the gist of the hook and raps about it. But this is a trend in rap, and an interesting one. As much as I think it's laziness on Kanye's part (like most of that album), I do think he's the only one who could get away with it. So we'll see. Nothing wrong with a conversation between rapper and hook - let's just get a bit more out of it.

One other thing, I had mentioned to both Alesia and Bendi wait I mean bic_razor and the ole bigscarygiraffe: Ye's fight to stop homophobia in rap lyrics is coupled with his ignorant misogyny. See "you could be my black Kate Moss tonight," "She'd do anything for a klondike / well I'd do anything for a blond dyke," "how the hell could you front on me / there's a thousand you's, there's only one of me." That's all from "Stronger." Ye wants to stop homophobia, but addresses the women on his album (in many places, not just Stronger) as dykes. Classy.

One last musical thought before I disappear into applications for the morning: In Rainbows has been the talk of the town, everybody's reviewed it (except for CMG, bless em), and it's "the heir to OK Computer" or "really peaceful." And I wonder if we're all listening to the same album. Everybody likes to divvy up RH albums: Kid A, Amesiac, HTTT are the "electronic," indulgent records, whereas Pablo Honey, The Bends, and OKC are the Brit-Pop, rock and roll records. And my god does that not make any sense at all. The prevalence of electronics on OKC is always ignored, bizarrely so, because on that record they have human voices (fitter happier, as well as exit music, karma police, and lucky - the weird, disembodied electric choir). You would not believe how much music in the current marketplace is synthesizered and not guitar, so the claims of "I don't like electronics" tell me that the person a. isn't listening and b. never really listened to Kid A or Amnesiac. (rant: at some point, some reviewer decided to use "glitchy bleeps and bloops" as a way to describe the beat elements in RH and Thom Yorke's albums. Least descriptive and most nothing phrase in musical criticism in the past couple years - Idioteque is certainly not bleepy or bloopy.) IR is not a rock record, nor is it an electronic record - I'm even disputing the claims of mellowness. It's sensual. Everything is tight and rounded, the bass is amped, even 15 Steps evolves from its initial banger-in-an-empty-stadium vibe to a just syrupy guitar line while Phil Selway freaks on the drums. It's something different. It's not the new OKC, and it won't be, no matter how many conspiracy theories you find in it (same number of letters in ok computer and in rainbows! OMFG).

So, word. Applications. Thanks for reading.