More an ode really, and a story.
Every year, from the day after Thanksgiving through Christmas day, I strive to listen to nothing but Christmas music. This serves a couple of purposes: it gets me in the mood for Christmas (and that's a mood in which I like to be) and it justifies to enormous collection of Christmas music I let stay on my hard drives and iPods throughout the rest of the year.
I love Christmas music so much. I can't wait, each and every year, to listen to every version of "The Wexford Carol" I can find; I can't wait to listen to the Veggie Tales Christmas albums. I can't wait to listen to Bach's Christmas work. I can't even wait to hear the Aspenglow, by John Denver.
But these past two years, I've had my share of inner-struggles to keep it up. In both instances, the challenge has been staged (quite unaware, I'm sure), by my favorite celebrity: namely, Kanye West. Last year, in mid-November, I recieved "My Beautiful, Dark, Twisted Fantasy." It was the best rap-album I'd ever heard, and the most artistically progressive album I've listened to since first playing Sgt. Peppers on repeat 500 times my senior year of High School.
I was able to push back the urges. As badly as I wanted to listen to the album, I successfully listened to nothing but Christmas music for the appointed time period.
This year, well, things are a bit different. I've already failed. Kanye was the culprit again, with a new album. This time round, he's joined by Jay-Z on "Watch the Throne." My christmas-listening pledge never stood a chance. I got the album a few days before the wedding (though I'd listened to it many times on Grooveshark beforehand) and listened as often as I could til our last day in New York (the day after Thanksgiving). I was doing so well listening to Christmas music. If I found myself wanting to pop Watch the Throne into my car CD player, I just switched to sports talk radio.
But I gave in, on the way to the LSAT last Saturday. Scratch that- I didn't give in at all. I made a CD with Watch the Throne and two appropriate pump-up tracks to intentionally listen to on the way to Oberlin. But the hull was breached. I've listened to non-Christmas music many times since (and not even exclusively Watch the Throne).
I don't think it's just Watch the Throne's brilliance that led me to do what I did. It is brilliant. It might be the pinnacle of hip hop. It might all be downhill for the rest of hip-hop history. It might be Led Zeppelin's last album, so to speak, if Hip-Hop is rock and roll. Kanye and Jay-Z aren't retiring (Jay-Z probably will a few more times, but that's neither here nor there) so I could be wrong, but if, in 20 years, nothing has been released that approaches "Watch the Throne" I won't be surprised.
Just five years ago, that last paragraph would have been veritably impossible for me to write. Before I went to China, I almost never listened to Hip Hop and I rarely enjoyed it when I did. I won't recount that whole story because I don't think I quite understand what happened yet.
I can, however, account for why, exactly, "Watch the Throne" was exactly what I wanted to listen to when I was going in for a day long test that will determine my life's trajectory. Something happens, something changes, for good or ill, inside the listener in the words rhymed to a beat in exemplary hip-hop. I can talk for days and days about how Kanye elevates Hip-hop to fine artistry from an aesthetic standpoint, but ultimately, there's something of a mental exchange that always happens when the words are flowing and it vibes with the listener's soul in a unique way. I've heard taking cocaine likened to making one feel invincible, like they can do anything. In a similar way, getting lost in a good verse of hip-hop does that very thing to a listener.
I've loved music for as long as I can remember. But I've never needed music the way I need the second verse of this song:
No, that's not on Watch the Throne. It is, however, perhaps the most exciting minute in the history of music. And it's one person. All of Hip-Hop, even Watch the throne, defined for it's greatness as a collab, is a series of interconnected personal projects. Every verse is a one man show- even if its a tradeoff that creates the whole. The beat, the best beats at least, are the created by one person and rapped over, by one person.
Art, great art, the greatest art, is often defined as the truest possible expression of one individuals interpretation of the world or their inner being (and often how they interact). That's why Proust is wonderful (albeit dense and challenging) and Hollywood Action movies are universally panned. Part of it is motive: why is it created. Part of it is execution: how is it created. Hip-Hop is a basic equation: personal beat plus personal verse= track. But the applications are endless.
As a post-modern aesthete, what could be better than an unadulterated expression of a human's inner self in response to the outer world expressed emotionally? It's the ultimate post-modern art-form really; there is little to no impersonal rap...not even this:
I won't talk much about the applications of Waka Flocka Flame and his ilk, but I do believe there's an important space for that type of work in the body of Hip-Hop. It's expressing a side of life for someone, and as such, it's valid, even if it's incomprehensible and abhorrent to people like my mom (and I imagine yours...even if I don't know you, I can probably bank on that, ninety times out of ninety-one)
Though I share little in common with Kanye or Jay-Z, for the past 5 years, nothing has thrilled me more than their shared tracks. Watch the Throne is an entire album of my favorite type of tracks since roughly 2007. It's existence was exhilarating and experiencing it, even at the expense of a long-held Christmasrule, has yet to get old.
As the name suggests, it's something of a celebration of the opulence both artists lives are known to hold. But it's introspective at times too; if anything, it's a critique akin to the Great Gatsby. Unlike that work, which often initiates High School children to great literature, Watch the Throne really isn't for the uninitiated. If you're not a fan of hip-hop, you're not going to suddenly get it from this album. If you're easily offended, you'll still be offended. But if you like any form of hip-hop at all, how can tracks like this not drive you to the point of joyous delirium?:
That's the first track on the album. It just builds and flows from there, and by the end, if you're not at least rethinking how you approach entertainment, then that just means you've got to listen again. Or at least, that's what it means for me.
But part of it is all irrational. For some reason, God made me so that I'd connect with tightly wound hip-hop no matter the content and for me it's a semi-spiritual experience. That can't happen to everyone, but at least for me, it's a sort of indulgence I must take, and, in doing so, transport my soul to a different place, even for a few moments. And when I emerge? I'm only more and more the person I'm meant to be.
-Zack
"I don't even know what that means; no one knows what it means, it's provocative, it gets the people going"
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