The Rap Year Book: The Most Important Rap Song from Every Year Since 1979, Discussed, Debated, and Deconstructed

by Serrano, Shea

  It’s all very smart. Smart is rarely corny.

  IS “SAME LOVE” DIFFICULT BECAUSE MACKLEMORE IS WHITE?

  No.

  IS “SAME LOVE” DIFFICULT BECAUSE MACKLEMORE IS WHITE AND IS RAPPING?

  That’s probably closer to the point, but still not completely accurate, and certainly not completely troublesome. Being a white rapper isn’t necessarily a thing, at least not like it maybe once was. White people rap. And Macklemore has always shown himself to be aware of the privileges afforded to him for being a white rapper. When he interviewed with New York’s Hot 97 in 2014 following the string of high-profile, racially charged murders that occurred, he spoke openly and intelligently about his position. “For me, as a white dude, as a white rapper, I’m like, ‘How do I participate in this conversation?’ How do I participate, how do I get involved on a level where I’m not co-opting the movement or I’m not making it about me, but also realizing the platform that I have and the reach that I have and doing it in an authentic, genuine way, because race is uncomfortable to talk about, and white people, we can just turn off the TV when we’re sick of talking about race.” He’s always nervous about messing up, like how a guy who’s caught the attention of a girl who’s too pretty for him behaves.

  IS “SAME LOVE” DIFFICULT BECAUSE MACKLEMORE IS WHITE AND IS RAPPING AND SEEMS TO IMPLY THAT RAP, A GENRE THAT WAS FOUNDED BY BLACKS AND IS STILL MOSTLY BLACK, IS MORE HOMOPHOBIC THAN ANY OTHER SECTION OF MUSIC, AND SO HERE HE IS, THE GREAT WHITE SAVIOR, ENLIGHTENING EVERYONE?

  No. I suppose a very cynical person could see it that way if he or she squinted enough. But Macklemore is a rapper, and has always identified himself as a rapper, and has only ever been careful when talking about, or even hinting at, anything that has to deal with race. Also, penalizing him for not being a thing would appear to be the exact opposite of the song, or of life, really.

  IS “SAME LOVE” DIFFICULT BECAUSE MACKLEMORE IS NOT GAY?

  This is a central criticism of “Same Love,” and the thought is: How can Macklemore be the voice of gay struggle if he is not gay? And the answer is simple: I don’t imagine he intended to become that, and he’s for sure never presented it that way in any interview or quote. He largely avoids even being shown in the video for the song, his only appearance coming as a cameo during a wedding scene.

  ♦

  When Macklemore performed “Same Love” at the Grammys, there was a break near the end of the performance where the music still played but the rapping had stopped. Queen Latifah walked out, and Madonna was there, too, and there was an aisle full of couples, gay and straight, whom Queen Latifah was marrying. It was kind of amazing to see, but it was also kind of silly to see, because who gets married at the Grammys, and who gets married by Queen Latifah, and where did Madonna even come from? Then the camera zoomed and panned across the faces of the couples who were being wed, and several of them had very big, very wet, very happy eyes, and it continued being amazing but stopped being silly.

  In hip-hop, at that point, about this issue, no one had ever had that effect before.

  REBUTTAL: “BANDZ A MAKE HER DANCE” JUICY J

  I believe in miracles. Not the kind with bippities, boppities, or boops; none of that fairy dust and garbanzo bean bullshit. Water isn’t walked on and doesn’t get turned into wine; there’s barely enough of it to fuel this dying marble. And it’s weird, because I like to think I have a pretty firm grasp on reality. It’s just that there’s certain things that simply . . . happen; that—no matter how you turn it—make no sense without cosmic interference. Maybe science can explain away the gift of life or the taste of Nutella, but there’s just no way a white lab coat can define how—for a time—the clouds parted and our national catchphrase became “You say no to ratchet pussy, Juicy J can’t.” Or how Juicy J, an over-the-hill thirty-seven-year-old rapper at the time, became the patron saint of frat basements across the country; how “twerking” entered the conversation of mothers and local news correspondents everywhere. How Lil Wayne finally put out a good verse. How 2 Chainz 2 Chainz’d it. Miracles on top of miracles. Mike Will made a miracle sandwich for all of us to eat.

  But, hey, if you think Macklemore put out the most important song of the year, that’s fine. That’s on you and your god. Because science can’t explain that, either.

  —JEFF ROSENTHAL

  Same Love

  “When I was in the third grade, I thought that I was gay” (0:43)

  “The right-wing conservatives think it’s a decision” (1:08)

  “America the braves still fears what we don’t know” (1:20)

  “And ‘God loves all his children’ is somehow forgotten” (1:25)

  “If I was gay, I would think hip-hop hates me” (2:04)

  “‘Gay’ is synonymous with the lesser” (2:24)

  “It’s the same hate that’s caused wars from religion” (2:29)

  “It’s a human rights for everybody, there is no difference” (2:36)

  “If you preach hate at the service, those words aren’t anointed” (2:46)

  “Progress, march on” (3:38)

  “A world so hateful some would rather die than be who they are” (3:50)

  “About time that we raised up” (4:07)

  Powerful, Hopeful, Autobiographical, Insightful, Historical Reference, Introspective, Examining

  1. This one was super-dark. It ended with one of the boys shooting and killing his boyfriend before shooting and killing himself.

  2. By this point, Jay Z, Kanye, 50 Cent, Eminem, Nicki Minaj, and more, and more, and more had openly expressed positive viewpoints regarding homosexuality.

  3. FYI: Mos Def, Snoop, Tupac, and Biggie all have zero Grammys.

  4. Macklemore was raised in a liberal part of Seattle and is close to several gay family members. In fact, the uncles he mentions in the song—they’re the ones who are on the single’s cover art.

  WHAT THIS SONG IS ABOUT

  Big Sean talks about champagne (and some other things), Kendrick Lamar talks about how he’d like to murder everyone (and some other things), and nobody knows what TF Jay Electronica is ever talking about, so who knows.

  WHY IT’S IMPORTANT

  Because it was the best kind of cage-rattling, and because it turned Kendrick Lamar’s assumed, almost predetermined, stardom into an inarguable stardom.

  “It’s funny how one verse can fuck up the game.” —Jay Z, “Imaginary Player,” 1997

  “Control” is a song by Big Sean, except it’s not a song, and it doesn’t belong to Big Sean.

  It for sure arrived as a Big Sean song. He teased it on Twitter a few hours before Hall of Fame, the album he was promoting, became available for preorder. He said he was going to post it himself because it was a toss-away that he wasn’t able to include on the album due to sample-clearance issues.1 He said it was “straight rap” shit, that it was grimy, that it was seven minutes long, that “IT IS NOT no radio shit,” and he capitalized “IT IS NOT” just like that. He was energetic. But I don’t know that anyone else was really as excited about it as his caps-locked letters were.

  He’d already released three singles from the album and none of them was very interesting (or successful).2 There was “Guap,” which was about money, and he also talked about having sex with seventeen girls at once on it, and that seems excessive, but I guess that’s why they call him Big Sean and not Normal Sean. There was “Switch Up,” featuring Common, and that was probably the first time anyone had ever talked about R. Kelly and Charlie Brown in the same verse of a song. And there was “Beware,” featuring Lil Wayne and Jhené Aiko, and nobody had invented a time machine by then, which means it was 2013 Lil Wayne and not 2008 Lil Wayne, so you can imagine how well that went. Those songs, they were okay, but they were also very forgettable. And so again: I don’t know that anyone else was really as excited about “Control” as Big Sean himself seemed to be. But then he released it, and then people heard it, and then, all at once, it felt like it was all anybody could
talk about. And it had nothing to do with Big Sean.

  Let me be clear when I say this, because this is a thing that should be clear: “Control” is Big Sean’s song, but only in the strictest legal sense, in that it’s his because he technically owns it, in that it is his property. But it’s not really a Big Sean song.

  And let me also be clear when I say this, because this is also a thing that should be clear: “Control” is a song, but only in the literal sense, in that it’s presented as a song, in that it has production and some verses and some bridges. But it’s not a song. What “Control” is, at least what it’s known for now and will be known as forever, is a verse. And that verse belongs to Kendrick Lamar.3

  ♦

  This is a short, personal anecdote, and I’ve (unsuccessfully) tried to avoid telling them for most of this book, because who really cares, but this one at least ties in to the chapter:

  In December 2012, I was at a Kendrick Lamar concert in Houston. This was after his album good kid, m.A.A.d city had been released but before it had gone platinum, so he was already climbing toward true stardom4 (good kid received near-unanimous praise, and sold a completely unexpected 262,000 copies its first week), but not 100 percent there yet. I was there for work, covering the show and also interviewing some people. I was backstage before the show started, trying to hurry up because being backstage at a concert is the worst place to be. And as I’m standing there, this kid, who couldn’t have been more than fourteen years old, came rushing past me. He jostled me just enough so that I noticed him, but not enough to where I’d be like, “Okay, looks like I’m fighting a teenager at a rap concert tonight.” But when he went past, I was watching, and he cruised right on up the stairs, stopped at the curtain, motioned at the DJ, took off his hoodie, grabbed a microphone, then ran out onstage. Turned out, it was Kendrick who’d rushed past. I’m only about five-foot-seven, and he was a good two feet shorter than me. I was happy about that.5 The music came on, the lights were flashing, the whole place went fucking yo-yo. He didn’t seem that tiny anymore. I was happy about that, too.

  By December 2013, Kendrick had ascended, and “Control” had helped shove him way up high. It had its own stats—Complex. com had it as their tenth-best song of the year, saying it would “go down in history as a milestone in hip-hop”; RollingStone.com had it as the third-best rap song of the year, and didn’t even bother to mention Big Sean or Jay Electronica; the XXL website had it as a top-five song of the year; Pitchfork.com had it on their list; the NME website had it on theirs; on and on—and it paired perfectly with Kendrick’s album, and the two together created this mysterious, smart, all-of-a-sudden devastating rapper.

  While being interviewed by GQ for their Rapper of the Year slot (which, FYI, came after MTV had picked him as the “Hottest MC in the Game,” because that’s the kind of year he was having), Kendrick was asked about having seen the ghost of Tupac, which he’d mentioned in a song. He said a fair amount about it, but eventually he explained the situation like this: “I remember being tired, tripping from the studio, lying down, and falling into a deep sleep and seeing a vision of Pac talking to me. Weirdest shit ever. I’m not huge on superstition and all that shit. That’s what made it so crazy. It can make you go nuts. Hearing somebody that you looked up to for years saying, ‘Don’t let the music die.’ Hearing it clear as day. Clear as day. Like he’s right there. Just a silhouette.”

  I can’t say for certain that this is true, but I also can’t say for certain that it’s not.

  ♦

  Kendrick’s verse on “Control” lasts just over three minutes. It’s 550-plus words, and they’re all packed together extra tight, braided together into the density of steel, or a black hole, or a black hole made of steel, if that’s even a thing.6

  Here is a very small example:

  “Bitch, I’ve been jumped before you put a gun on me / Bitch, I put one on yours, I’m Sean Connery / James Bonding with none of you niggas.”

  His tone here, as it is throughout the song, is aggressive. The phrase “James Bonding,” smart in itself, is a clever way to say he’s not interested in making any new friends. Earlier in the year, Drake, a more powerful figure but less of a tactician, made a similar announcement on DJ Khaled’s “No New Friends,” except he presented it as a straight line rather than a squiggle, singing, “No new friends, no new friends, no new friends no, no new.” It was nakedly enjoyable, as most Drake moments tend to be, but Kendrick’s execution of the idea was, to be sure, at a level higher, as his raps tend to be.7

  And we can unpack its levels even more: Consider that Kendrick prefaced the James Bonding line with “I’m Sean Connery,” who defined the James Bond character,8 and so he’s low-key aligning himself with greatness, and so that’s two levels higher than the forthrightness of what Drake did.

  And his opening bit, the thing about having a gun pulled on him, that’s a metaphor, so now we’re three levels higher. But it’s also a reference to the story of early Hollywood gangster Johnny Stompanato busting onto a movie set in 1957 and pulling a gun on Sean Connery because he thought Connery was sleeping with his girlfriend, and that puts us four levels higher. (That’s Sean Connery = Kendrick, Johnny Stomp = hating ass rappers, the gun = hate, and the girlfriend = rap.)

  Connery responded by grabbing Stompanato by the hand + gun, torquing it back until Stomp let go, then coldcocking him, and that’s the implied extension of the metaphor. We’re at five levels higher than normal.

  So the three lines from the song quoted above are twenty-seven words in length, and the two paragraphs it took to explain them took 355 words. That’s how his whole verse on “Control” is compressed. And, really, that’s impressive enough, but it was what followed the James Bonding that was so apocalyptic.

  Kendrick uncorked all of his fury, and he presented it with zero camouflage, calling out the names of just short of a dozen of the most talked about new rappers. There’s a whole chunk of destruction, but here’s the heart of it:

  I’m usually homeboys with the same niggas I’m rhymin’ with But this is hip-hop, and them niggas should know what time it is

  And that goes for Jermaine Cole, Big K.R.I.T., Wale

  Pusha T, Meek Mill, A$AP Rocky, Drake

  Big Sean, Jay Electron’,9 Tyler, Mac Miller

  I got love for you all but I’m tryna murder you niggas

  Tryna make sure your core fans never heard of you niggas

  They don’t wanna hear not one more noun or verb from you niggas10

  Almost instantly, it absorbed all of rap. Everyone knew it was a moment. 50 Cent had done something similar with “How to Rob,” but that was more than two years before he’d released his album and become a champion. Kendrick did it AFTER, and so there was no misconstruing the message he was sending. To state it plainly: Fuck you, dudes.

  Saying names is a thing top-tier guys just don’t do. War takes time. It’s supposed to build. Jay Z and Nas danced around each other for six years before Jay finally fired a direct shot at Nas’s forehead, saying his name in a song (see this page). Kendrick had no interest in that. He found the crowd of rappers who were waiting, all standing around chatting and glad-handing each other, then fired a bazooka gun into it.

  REBUTTAL: “NEW SLAVES” KANYE WEST

  “Control” is a pretty good song. But it’s not a particularly great song. It does, however, have some very great bars, the greatest of which are from Kendrick Lamar and about being greater than other rappers. It got Twitter-hyped for like seventy-two hours or whatever, which is well and good, but the most important song of 2013 is clearly, easily, “New Slaves” from Kanye West. Unlike “Control,” people still actually play “New Slaves”—in the club, in their car, in their headphones. Unlike “Control,” “New Slaves” is talking about real, actual issues—racism, the prison-industrial complex, income inequality, the media. Kendrick is talking about rap music. Kanye is talking about American history. And at the end of the day, only one of these two songs still has pe
ople moshing on the dance floor. Isn’t that what it’s all about?

  —GREG HOWARD

  Alternate Realities

  What if a different song was the most important song of 2013?

  Chance the Rapper, “Chain Smoker” → More people start wearing overalls → NASA announces its rover Curiosity found life on Mars → Chance becomes first person to record a song with an alien

  Kanye West, “Black Skinhead” → It becomes the political anthem he intended → Kanye announces his plans to run for president in 2016 → Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly sounds way different

  Migos, feat. Drake, “Versace (Remix)” → Prince William and Kate Middleton name their baby “Versace, Versace” → Gianni Versace is resurrected → Quavo prevents those tornadoes from hitting Oklahoma

  1. It samples two songs (Jay Z’s “Where I’m From” and Quilapayún and Sergio Ortega’s “El Pueblo Unido Jamás Será Vencido”) and interpolates a third (Terrace Martin’s “Get Bizy”), but he’s never said which one was the problem.

  2. As it were, Hall of Fame does not belong in the Rap Hall of Fame.

  3. The only people who seem to feel otherwise are Big Sean and Jay Electronica.