Sunday, January 24, 2010

song of the decade

i should probably just go ahead and get this out of the way and i mean no autohomo but the best song of the decade was the song lollipop off the album the carter iii by just about any measure you could possibly endeavor to judge anything by on that kind of scale the song lollipop off the album the carter iii is a paean to art as such art untouched by forces outside of art but also fantastically subtly critical of those forces primarily through form and both timely and timeless in its delivery and content not just in the inane sense of talking about current events or micropolitical phenomena as well as universal themes but instead in the sense of building a circularity into the lyricism which codes those things which we would normally refer to as universal in terms of the immediate and vice versa which is itself again more than a sterile feat of form in its extension through its collusion with the other particularities of the song lollipop off the album the carter iii such as the employment of autotune in terms of that utopian excess and also the repetition which cannot help but strike one as also being excessive but without becoming machinic which is to say both of these as well as the other facts about the song lollipop off the album the carter iii enhance and fill out the other parts like for instance the lyrical felicities of lines like shawty said the nigga that she with aint shit shawty said the nigga that she with aint this shawty said the nigga that she with cant hit shawty ima hit it hit it like i cant miss and he cant do this and he cant do that shawty need a refund need to bring that nigga back by not only creating of them a productive which is to say artistic hole but also a critical totality a raising up out of them into the real political that is from the greek polis and the conceptual interaction of the city in how the enactment of not just the interpersonal but all the difficulties and aporias therein of all the radical intrapersonality that is constantly being fostered in response to and as a consequence of what might be called contemporary politics and the perfectness of encapsulating them in the form of rap music of commercially explosive rap music carrying multiple traditions and subsuming them into something neither or both which brings me to the question of context which is precisely presupposed by the category of best of the decade by which i mean the question of the best whatever of a whatever is never an objective determination of a thing but is instead a way of measuring a thing in relation to other often arbitrarily connected things in the case of year end lists this arbitrariness being encapsulated in the coincidences of the gregorian calendar and so on but so the point being that the song lollipop off the album the carter iii deserves to particularly be called the best song of the decade not just on its own merits but because as i have been trying to say just now that perhaps the most fascinating and beautiful thing about the song lollipop off the album the carter iii is precisely that it grasps and consumes all of its relevant contexts and by this i mean of course all contexts relevant to rap but also because of the highly singular place of rap and especially of one particular rap artist throughout the course of this decade its relevant contexts extend through the cultural and into just about everything in the world thus the fragmentary and distraught nature of all of my previous attempts to figure anything through it i mean one can hardly be expected to call a totalizing piece of art by its right name without first dealing with a host of fragments and synecdoches and all of that other crazy shit but enough apologetics slash vague embedded promises i hope in some small way the case has been made rigorously enough that we can all begin to understand why we esteem this song so highly

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