An interesting song has come to my attention recently, On a Tuesday by I Love Makonnen. The song offers great insight into much of the movements in hip-hop music of the past five years. It composites the talk-like rapping/singing, which 2 Chainz and Big Sean have taken to extremes, with the melodic, seemingly superficial phrasings that run through much of todays hip hop.
Makonnen raps mostly in falsetto with his voice being altered so that when within a certain range of a pitch his voice is pulled and held to that pitch, excluding any minor fluctuations (essentially a minimal auto-tuning). Makonnen traverses mostly the upper registers of these strata, so that when he dips down into lower pitches there is often a sudden jolt as he passes multiple thresholds.
These abrupt descents in pitch are interesting when examined along side the words that carry them. A good example is the recurring line, “I don’t think that I should dance, I just think I should have another drink”, with Makonnen’s voice dipping to a low pitch on “drink”. Lyrically, when the character chooses the drink over dancing the there is no apparent contrition, but the low pitch to which Makonnen’s voice falls when singing “drink” evinces ambivalence.
This celebration of the partying, drugging, sexually uninhibited life style while also admitting to it’s troubling motivations is something Drake has brought to the forefront of his music by rapping and singing openly about such dilemmas. Alongside (or taking after) Drake, many rappers have begun to express their “feelings”, as Drake would put it, Mac Miller and Kid Cudi being good examples. But conflicting emotion has always been within Hip Hop music and culture, a movement that was initially a channel for the frustrations of the economically and racially disenfranchised youth of The Bronx, NYC. The use of spray paint, record tables and pavement to produce art of dazzling effect did not mean to hide the oppressive conditions in which those people lived; the colors, sounds, movements and dress were only fully understood within the context of their author’s social marginalization.
Today, with the establishment of Hip Hop as one of the premier forms of commercial entertainment, those that rap do not necessarily come from an impoverished background. Along with the pains of racial and economic injustice, rappers are also delving into to issues that come about only when the pressure of economic insecurity has been lifted. While hip-hop maintains its initial identity as providing a pathway for those in ghettos to escape a life of literal or spiritual impoverishment, it now offers such liberation to those of any class or race from any limiting circumstance. The dangers of drug dealing appear alongside the dangers of duplicitous women. The descriptions of poor neighborhoods come hand in hand with that of extravagant nightclubs. Rappers boast about the once so secretive pleasantries of rich culture much like they reveal the violence of inner city living. And just as critics once reprimanded rappers for their romanticism of such violence they now warn of the egotistical effects that rapping about money and its luxuries will have on today’s youth.
Of course, just as their glorified depiction of violence was only a Trojan horse for exposing the horrors of impoverished living, so too we find the emptiness of luxurious living hidden in lines such as,
“Got the club going up on a Tuesday, got your girl in the cut and she choosy”.
andulkaphoto
romaincrisis
origamiaround
yousharknotpass
snowghoul
2087
izzy806
