♦
When Kanye produced five beats for Jay Z’s album The Blueprint, including “H to the IZZO,” which fire-started Kanye’s career, Jay was already a superstar, and so their relationship since has always carried a big brother–little brother tone.1 But by the time Watch the Throne came, the album they collaborated on in 2011, they were on (mostly) equal celebrity footing, albeit for different reasons, and for reasons that would influence the album (Jay = unflappable, sophisticated, affable; Kanye = flamboyant, emotional, impassioned).
A quick story about Kanye West from early in his career:
Kanye’s first major placement came when he sold a beat to Jermaine Dupri, who was somehow famous at the time. That led to a meeting with Michael Mauldin, an executive with Columbia Records. Now, this was before Kanye was Kanye, in that he wasn’t super-duper famous yet, but he was still very much Kanye, in that he was full of himself. Here’s Rhymefest, who cowrote Kanye’s “Jesus Walks,” talking to VH1 for the Driven documentary series in 2005: “He went in there acting like, ‘I’ma be better than Jermaine Dupri, I’ma sell more records than he would ever sell,’ and they wasn’t ready for that.” What Kanye didn’t know, and what he would come to find out, was that Mauldin was Jermaine Dupri’s father. Kanye has always been a bit of a loudmouth, it seems.
A quick story about Jay Z from early in his career:
Jay Z’s first album, Reasonable Doubt, a true and real classic project, has a song called “Regrets” on it. In the first line, Jay says, “I sold it all, from crack to opium,” only he pronounces it “oh-pee-um,” kind of slow and tilted, because he wanted it to rhyme perfectly with the lines that followed (“I don’t wanna see ’em . . . / With my peoples how to ‘G’ ’em / From a remote location in the BM”). He practiced saying “opium” over and over again for “at least an hour, maybe two”2 so he’d get it just right. Jay Z has always been a bit of a machine, it seems.
Without that juxtaposition, loudmouth and machine, this song could never have worked.
♦
“Niggas in Paris” is very fun. That’s why it was successful.3 It’s this exciting and impressive elegy about obsessive-compulsive materialism, and an A1 version of luxury rap,4 a term Kanye came up with on a song called “Otis,” which was also on Watch the Throne, which was a very luxuriant album. Its front two-thirds are fast-paced and brakeless, the production whipping around the curves without much care for consequences. And then the last third is this crunchy, dominating, copycat take on dubstep, a subgenre of electronic dance music that had gained popularity through 2011 but was still mostly a thing rap tended to avoid borrowing from. The whole thing just felt pricey and imposing and cool and exciting. When Jay and Kanye performed it during their Watch the Throne tour, even that was an exercise in overabundance. They’d play it three, four, five, eight, ten times. When they did the show in real-life Paris, they performed the song twelve times in a row, and that’s a thing that had never happened before.
But “Niggas in Paris” is also very smart. Without that it couldn’t be nearly as important.
There are two viewpoints expressed on “Niggas in Paris,” and they work together to form a single thesis statement. There’s Jay Z’s viewpoint, which, if you look at all of it at once, is about overpowering and overtaking all of rap, because that’s always what Jay Z has been about for the length of his career.
Example: He talks about being fined by the NBA5 (“I ball so hard motherfuckers wanna fine me”), and how inconsequential it was (“What’s fifty grand to a motherfucker like me? / Can you please remind me?”), and now seems like a good time to point out that Jay Z famously left the waitresses at the Watch the Throne release party a $50,000 tip on a $250,000 bill. He raps, “Psycho; I’m liable to go Michael / Take your pick / Jackson, Tyson, Jordan, Game Six,” and the implication is clear: “I am as important to rap as each of these Michaels were to their field,” and he is not lying. Every last bit of the verse is very confrontational, but in the most dismissive way achievable, and it’s a justifiable condescension because Jay Z is one of the eight most influential rappers of all.
And then there’s Kanye’s viewpoint, which, if you look at all of it at once, is about overthrowing rap, because that’s always what Kanye has been about for the length of his career, and one example would be the way he starts, “You are now watching the throne,” to say that they’re the tastemakers, but the most straightforward example of Kanye’s sway is his turning the word “cray” into an acceptable way to describe something.
But the most important line in the song, the one fattest with historical inferences (and ramifications, too, really), is also the most startling:
After talking about having too many watches to keep up with, Jay Z, in a tone that suggests befuddlement, then awe, then hubris, glows, “I’m shocked, too / I’m supposed to be locked up, too / If you escaped what I escaped, you’d be in Paris getting fucked up, too,” and, truly, this kind of writing (and thinking) is a first-class example of how Jay has managed to stay relevant—but more than that: beloved—in rap since 1996’s Reasonable Doubt.
He does three separate things here.
1. With “I’m shocked, too,” he perpetuates the us-against-them, rich vs. poor arm of his mythos. In a 2011 GQ story, Alex Pappademas wrote, “No hip-hop artist who owes his credibility to the street has moved farther beyond it and into the rarefied air of twenty-first-century high society than Jay has,” and the way he’s done that without losing his credibility (the way, say, 50 Cent did) is he has always presented all of his winnings less as business ventures and more as the spoils of war conquerings. He lives in a different world than the regular non-wealthy humans do, but he is in that other world as an outsider looking to annihilate rather than assimilate;6 he’s a Trojan horse in black sunglasses and a Yankees cap. And he does it without undercutting his own accomplishments, and that’s just as necessary to the story.
Here’s David Samuels, writing about Jay Z for The Atlantic in an article titled “What Obama Can Learn from Jay-Z”: “[Jay Z’s] ability to stand before his audience without pretending to be any less skilled or less wealthy than he actually is, and to present his wealth and privilege as having been fully earned, while also identifying with the streets he grew up on, makes him the most important popular artist in America today.”
2. With “I’m supposed to be locked up, too,” he (once again) addresses the impropriety with which the American justice system incarcerates black males. In 2014, a report by the Brookings Institution’s Hamilton Project showed that black males born between 1975 and 1979 who dropped out of high school had a 70 percent chance of spending time in prison by their mid-thirties. Compare that with a 10 percent chance for white males who fall into the same set of circumstances. Jay Z does not have a high school degree. He has about half a billion dollars but no degree.
3. With “If you escaped what I escaped, you’d be in Paris getting fucked up, too,” he introduces the story of black Americans escaping to Paris for a more hospitable territory to rap. It’s no accident that this song is called “Niggas in Paris” and not “Niggas in Germany” or “Niggas in China.” There’s a long history of blacks migrating to Paris in search of a more accommodating (i.e., welcoming) living environment, from the post–World War I soldiers to black culture renaissance figures like Josephine Baker and Richard Wright and Nina Simone and James Baldwin. Andrew Hoberek, an English professor at the University of Missouri who lectures a class devoted to examining the careers of Kanye West and Jay Z, takes this a step further, explaining in an interview with Forbes.com in 2014 that they’ve ideologically aligned themselves with some of literature’s most imposing figures. “I think both artists are fully aware of this element of their work. Jay’s song ‘D.O.A. (Death of Auto-Tune),’ for instance, begins with Jay—who is no singer —performing an intentionally out-of-tune version of the band Steam’s 1969 song ‘Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye.’ To my ears this sounds a lot like the way modernist writers such as T.
S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf produced intentionally difficult poems and fiction to counter writing that they thought had become (like auto-tuned pop vocals) too smooth and pretty. And the video shows Jay performing the song with a small jazz band, harkening back to similar experiments by bebop musicians in the mid-twentieth century.” Jay and Kanye recorded “Niggas in Paris” in Paris. That wasn’t an accident, either.
♦
There was a reactionary pushback to the extravagance of Watch the Throne when it began rolling—this was all happening near the same time as the Occupy Wall Street7 stuff was going on, so it was very timely to call out the album’s opulence. But the criticism faded as it became more and more clear that it (the album, but also “Niggas in Paris”) possessed the same sort of social critique that more lauded rap songs before it contained, and that, if anything, it had its finger on the pulse of these same anti-capitalist ideologies. It was just being delivered from a place no rappers had ventured into before. It made smarter the artistry of this particular discussion and did it with a beat that you couldn’t get out of your head.
Really, “Niggas in Paris” echoed the fundamental premise of W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk.8 It was just the new version of that. That’s what it was about. That’s the whole point of “Niggas in Paris.” I guess that viewpoint was kind of surprising. But it shouldn’t have been.
REBUTTAL: “OTIS” JAY Z AND KANYE WEST
It’s rare that something that’s hyped actually lives up to it. So, in 2011, when the first leak off of Jay Z and Kanye’s collaborative Watch the Throne album was “H.A.M.,” Yeezy fans lost their shit at hearing the two dovetail their verses over a recycled, lackluster Lex Luger beat. Months later came “Otis,” with the Otis Redding “Try a Little Tenderness” sampling that loops underneath their verses reminding everyone that fans expected the actual sample itself to trade off verse for verse (a humblebrag of how much time they spent crafting this album). “Otis” had a close-to-perfect Kanye chop of the beat, pairing it with soulful screams to those classic Memphis horns, organ, and drums. But perhaps what’s most important to its legacy is that, for three minutes, Jay and Ye just stunt—it’s just bar after bar of luxury, which led to its winning Best Rap Performance at the 2012 Grammys. —LAUREN NOSTRO
1. This is a far less clever observation than it appears to be, if it even appears to be that. Kanye literally had a song called “Big Brother” on his Graduation album.
2. This is a quote from a story Reggie Ossé (Combat Jack), who was an entertainment lawyer and worked with Jay Z at the time, told Complex.com in 2010.
3. It won a Grammy for Best Rap Song and a Grammy for Best Rap Performance, went 4x platinum, and made it onto Billboard’s Hot Digital Songs chart before it was even released, if you can even believe that.
4. Rapping about very expensive things, basically.
5. Jay Z visited the Kentucky Wildcats locker room after they’d won a place in the Final Four in the 2011 NCAA basketball tournament. He was a minority owner of the Nets at the time, and that sort of thing is prohibited by the NBA, so the Nets fined him $50K.
6. I can’t say for certain that these are his true intentions—there certainly are moments where it feels like he only wants to belong with the top 1 percent—but that’s how he tells that story, and he tells it more convincingly than anyone ever has.
7. Occupy Wall Street was an anti-consumerist movement that was meant to act as a rally against “social and economic inequality worldwide.” Best I could tell, it was mostly just a bunch of people holding poorly made signage.
8. “After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”
WHAT THIS SONG IS ABOUT
Gay and lesbian rights, mostly as they relate to marriage.
WHY IT’S IMPORTANT
It was the first rap song about gay and lesbian marriage to make it into the Top 40.
This is an easy pick to make, but it’s also a difficult pick to make. And to that point, it should be explicitly stated that the “difficulty” part of that statement has zero percent to do with the song’s general premise, which is civic egalitarianism, which should never, ever be a problem. There is a lot to unpack here.
Let’s go “easy” first:
WHY IS “SAME LOVE” AN EASY SONG TO PICK AS THE MOST IMPORTANT SONG OF 2012?
Because of what it is. “Same Love” wasn’t the first rap song advocating for gays. There’s an entire subgenre made up of queer rappers that began gaining popularity outside of itself near 2010 (homo-hop), and well before that there was sissy bounce, which is an offshoot of New Orleans’s bounce music, which was regionally popularized in the early ’90s, and it’s not explicitly a gay rap subgenre but it’s certainly gay friendly.
“Same Love” isn’t even the first song by a straight guy advocating for gay rights. Murs, a decidedly less popular rapper, released a song in 2011 called “Animal Style” that was about a turbulent high school relationship between two guys.1
But what “Same Love” is is the first rap song about gay rights to receive significant radio airplay, or any kind of radio airplay, really. It was the fourth single from Mackle-more & Ryan Lewis’s The Heist, and it piggybacked off (a) the gigantic success of “Thrift Shop,” which had turned Macklemore into a star, (b) the momentum the gay rights movement had gained when President Obama officially endorsed same-sex marriage in May 2012, (c) the emotional response elicited by R&B singer Frank Ocean in July 2012 when he wrote in a letter posted on his Tumblr how he’d fallen in love with a man once, and (d) what appeared to be a noticeable shift in the tolerance of homosexuality in rap, and I mean this literally2 and metaphorically, with artists like Lil Wayne and Drake and Andre 3000 blurring the edges of what masculinity in the genre meant.
“Same Love” was perfectly timed and gorgeously executed. It had weight and consequence.
IS “SAME LOVE” DIFFICULT BECAUSE MACKLEMORE IS CORNY?
No. If Macklemore is corny, it’s a by-product of being overly sincere or eager, and that’s a by-product of being perpetually concerned he might be intruding on rap. He has a song called “White Privilege,” where he talks about that exact thing, saying things like, “Hip-hop started off on a block I’ve never been to / To counteract a struggle I’ve never even been through.” Enough of that can be annoying, I suppose, but with Macklemore it’s always more tone-deaf than malicious.
The easiest example: His post-Grammys debacle. After he’d won four awards on seven nominations in 2014,3 he felt it necessary to apologize. One of the awards he’d received was for Best Rap Album. Kendrick Lamar was the popular choice for that award, and with good reason: His album good kid, m.A.A.d. city was a triumph, and a truly enjoyable piece of art. The Heist was fun enough, but it stood only waist-high to GKMC. Still, it won, and so the day after the show Macklemore sent Kendrick a text apologizing, saying Kendrick had deserved to win that award, that he felt weird about having “robbed” him of it. And that was an okay thing to do. A better thing to do would’ve been nothing, but sending the text wasn’t terrible. But then Macklemore took a screenshot of the text and posted it to his Instagram. That was not an okay thing to do. That was terrible. That was corny. It was mawkish, and (probably) self-serving, and felt a lot like a grasp at absolution, even if it wasn’t meant to. But “Same Love” doesn’t have that same hue. There is no hedge in it.
“
Same Love” isn’t an adoption of values or culture; it’s a reflective, anecdotal song based on his own ideas and experiences.4
IS “SAME LOVE” DIFFICULT BECAUSE IT’S A CORNY SONG?
A little bit. This is a criticism that gets tossed at a fair number of Macklemore songs, and sometimes it’s accurate to describe a small amount of his music that way, and there are a handful of threadbare aphorisms that push “Same Love” in that direction (“Live on! Be yourself!”; “No law’s gonna change us / We have to change us”; “No freedom ’til we’re equal / Damn right I support it”). But it’s not all the way corny. It’s also thoughtful and it’s also well intentioned, and it’s slicker than it would appear to have you believe, too. Especially, to paraphrase a conceit from a paper written by Dr. R. J. Snell, the relationship between images and lyrics in the video, which traces the life from birth to death of a gay male born into an unwelcoming home:
When Macklemore talks about how “right-wing conservatives” think being gay is a decision, he raps, “And you can be cured with some treatment and religion,” and we’re shown video clips of children exiting a Catholic church in the ’60s, and the implication is that gay by choice and not design is an outdated and impractical idea. He reinforces his position with the line “Man-made rewiring of a predisposition,” and we’re shown clips of a Bible and a cross. When he raps the phrase “Playing God,” we see the video’s protagonist sitting with his mother in a church pew. The first time we see him crying is the first time we hear Mary Lambert singing, “And I can’t change, even if I tried.” We see him and his mom arguing after that as Lambert completes her thought, singing she couldn’t change “even if I wanted to.” And when she sings the couplet for a second time, we see the protagonist texting a boy and then meeting up with him and appearing very happy. The line “A culture founded from oppression” is paired with clips from the civil rights movement. “Gender to skin color” is matched with a little black girl holding a WE BELIEVE IN THE SUPREME COURT sign. When Macklemore talks about people who’ve had their rights stolen, we see a clip of Martin Luther King Jr. speaking, and then right after that he says, “I might not be the same, but that’s not important,” and we see a gay rights parade.
The Rap Year Book: The Most Important Rap Song from Every Year Since 1979, Discussed, Debated, and Deconstructed Page 26