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

the state of hip hop

for this second post i would like to talk about the relation of elitism to my fanbase i exist in a very strange place in the hip hop community it seems that there is no consensus to any criticism about me the members of the general public who hate songs by me who havent heard anything except lollipop and fireman and shit like that seem to be under the impression that i am just another rapper just some guy who sounds like every other ringtone rapper to them and who doesnt deserve all the praise given to him by the press whereas the hip hop heads who diss me tend to also complain about the praise i get and use this to somehow undermine my own strengths so i think that the weird thing about these two camps is that neither of them hate me so much as they hate my praise that comes from the greater majority of people and especially the people we call experts on the subject or professionals i guess either way the critical public and the critical elite agree with each other in that i am the greatest lyricist alive and yet there is a sizable subgroup within both of these groups that hate me for the very reason that the rest of their group is behind me in my artistic endeavour i think this is bullshit and can only wonder why it is that these supposed anti conformists even exist there is no reason to rebel for the sake of rebellion just because james dean was attractive and mythologized as a great actor doesnt mean that rebellion sans justification is a proper course of action from anyone that is like saying that objectivism is a feasible philosophy its nonsense as though solipsism was something other than something you ought to consider briefly to contextualize critical thinking speaking of which in nas new album he says break free of the matrix when he is spouting platitudes of empowerment and i must say that this is precisely what i was getting at with the james dean reference nas is unwittingly using the tools of a culture that he is trying to rebel against and in doing so is only revalidating it just like these haters who are attempting to denigrate my rap career and my latest album criticizing me for doing too many drugs while they spout off about how the best rappers of all time were biggie and pac like they were fucking sober or talking about how krsone is the best lyricist because even though they havent heard him they have heard that line being repeated hip hop is an art form and one that has yet to stagnate just because you prefer to accept talking points proffered by hip hop pundits doesnt mean your opinion will be considered relavent by anyone with any knowledge of the subject i am going to keep perfecting and moving forward the art form and maybe twenty years from now when someone better than me finally comes along your kids will be repeating the line that ive been promoting all along