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

i fucked up

i was just listening to lollipop and i realized that i have been fucking up big time with this blog i mean i havent once mentioned the homie static major and he made that fucking song without him that song wouldnt be half as good as i was listening to it i finally got past trying to determine all the intricacies of the lyrics and the interaction with the beat and i started listening to the way static major sang and holy fucking shit man that guy was definitely one of the best i cant believe hes gone the pathos with which he sings elements of that song are just absolutely remarkable especially considering how it is on the surface just some generic club banger that can get the people moving but i mean honestly listen to the last bit of that song when he is singing as though through clenched teeth it really creates a wholly alternative feel to the song it sort of wraps everything within the song together and spits out a whole different monster seriously if you could hear the song without that singing at the end you would be surprised how different it sounds and it isnt like those awful twist endings that simply redirect the plot in an unexpected direction it is something much more deeply powerful that redirects the entire emotion of the piece without contradicting anything that has come before i think that people should really give more credit to static major i mean i dont think people in general consider that song enough or think highly enough of it based on my own listening experience but now i dont think that based just on the production and the lyricism but also on the remarkably artistic and brilliant work of the late static major

accusations of ghostwriting

considering the fact that contemporary hip hop is built around certain ideas that stand as the way by which to judge the art form which are maintained by anyone with more than a passing interest in the genre inspired by the sudden burst in acceptability of rap in clubs and on television and mainstream radio there are certain things that can be brought to bear on a rapper that would be at worse entirely inconsequential in the rest of pop culture but which could be both the popular and critical death of a rapper and perhaps the most terrifying of these is the allegation of ghostwriting not only because these allegations need not be substantiated for the rumor to gain credence nor is it simply the fact that these accusations will stick around long after the rapper has become a popular legend or a critical darling and will always undermine even the most ardent of fan one thinks of the allegations of the ghost production that happened on nearly all eric b and rakim albums in analogy but the most terrifying thing about people believing that you are being ghostwritten for is that it an implicit criticism of the one thing that hip hop has had as its central tenet since the days of grandmaster flash and the furious five and which allows certain historians to trace its roots back to great orators like malcolm x and martin luther king jr that of above all else maintaining a reality which is exactly coherent with the reality which is prevalent among people on earth and since hip hop is a poetic form in which the narrator and the author are conflated if the narrator/author is revealed by way of ghostwriting to simply be the narrator then this central tenet is revealed to be indelibly blasphemed against making the rapper the equivalent of a christian who feels neither love nor fear but only malice toward his god and the fanbase which the rapper relies upon to carry forth his name after he is gone which is as i see it the true goal of all artists

lollipop

i know a lot of people love this song but there are a number of people with good reasoning skills who hate my new song lollipop and i would like to address this to them i truly believe this is one of the few times in life when the saying all naysayers be damned is a proper course of action to take because there is nothing in this song worthy of your hatred aside from the self assured elitist hatred of populist artistry i am not trying to call all of my detractors elitist but i would make it known that these people are unable to be reasoned with and that this causes me no qualms but as for the others who have a distaste for my song i would say that the most prevalent are those who may be offended by it which is to say those of us who have been conditioned to respond to any mention of fellatio with the idea that it inherently denotes some sort of sexist power dynamic which i very much disagree with in that this power dynamic is certainly easily arguable but nevertheless exists purely in metaphor i dont know about you but there have been plenty of times where i was getting head and it produced in me no desire to subjugate women or even a disdain for the woman in particular who performed the act the truth of the matter is that fellatio has a very distinct and confused place within our culture and that it is one of the sticky points which must be interrogated through roundabout means namely art and that is what i am trying to do albeit in such a way as to not preclude the average listener from both listening to and enjoying my music i have some of the undisputed best producers in the world behind me and have won numerous awards for my lyricism it seems to me that at this point in my career i might be able to create a work that plays with conventional understandings of broad cultural metaphors and not immediately decried as sexist lollipop is not exactly the culmination of art or anything but neither is it some thoughtless bit of anti feminist misogyny and i would just appreciate the openmindedness of my audience and hope that those who would level such heinous charges would not do them so lightly as to just name them as being true without proper analysis of the situation and the particularity and not just some broad generalization about the state of music or culture or rap or whatever next time i post i will aim my sights at another of these groups of haters thank you for reading