Keith McDougallDark Rap Mix, Part One
March 14th 2008 01:57
Ages ago, my friend Bianca asked me to burn her a hip-hop compilation, and the other day I finally got around to it. She's a massive Nick Cave fan, and knows very little about rap. Deciding what songs would make a good introduction took some thought. I could have just chosen the best of the best, my absolute favourite rap songs. I could have chosen the ones that seem to be the most accessible, or the ones that are the most rock and roll. But instead, in accordance with my friend's sensibilities, I decided to go with a theme: the darkest rap songs that I could fit into eighty minutes. Dark, Gothic hip-hop, or horrorcore, with lyrics about insanity, death and the supernatural, constituted a whole subgenre in the mid-nineties, but I'm no expert on it, and I wanted to mix things up a bit, so I included all kinds of dark hip-hop, and a bit of grime too.
Track one is Dizzee Rascal's 'I Luv U'. Writing about this track seems about as interesting as writing about 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' - it was the first big grime song, it's by grime's most well-known artist, many thousands of words have been written about it, and I've listened to it a million times. But it needs to be on this compilation because if you want to convince people who are into extreme, fucked up music that grime isn't just a bunch of brats shouting over badly produced beats, that's it's possibly even radical stuff, then this is the track to play them.
And of course, this track really is the bomb. And it's kind of sad to say, since it implies that grime didn't live up to its promise and just went downhill, but: I think this track goes so much further than any other grime song, or even any rap song, in so many ways. Dizzee produced this track before grime was called grime, in the context of the UK garage scene, which may give you some idea of how radical it was. It was a very deliberate to attempt to do something ahead of its time, or dare I say it avant-garde, as you can gather from the last verse: "Dem boy not ready yet, trend they could never set, This is the next step, I ride the 2-step, niggaz better get set." Its blunt, distorted booming and crashing could hardly be further from garage's slick, slinky lattice of staccato beats. But it sounds nothing like hip-hop either: instead of a kick and a snare you've got these giant clod-hopping bass BOINGs, piercing CRASHes, and noises that sound like a dragon wheezing. And they don't stick to any regular boom-bap rhythm.
Could this even be called a beat at all? It doesn't keep time, or make you want to dance. Instead, its function is expressive. It sounds like Dizzee venting his rage by smashing things to bits with a club.
'I Luv U' fits in with the "dark rap" theme not because it's funereal, nor because it sounds like something spooky's about to happen, but because it sounds like a horror scene of full-on carnage. The beats set us up for something really fucked-up and traumatic, but the lyrics aren't about violence per se. They're angry and mysogynistic, but this isn't your usual series of threats, boasts and put-downs. It's not a coherent story either, but if I was really wanky I might argue that it's some sort of fractured Modernist narrative.
In a move that diverges from the typical rap lyrical strategy, which is of course to focus on me/myself/I, Dizzee actually plays at least three different characters here, as far as I can tell, plus adds a couple of female roles. First he's a guy sniggering at a friend's misfortune: the dude he's addressing is being hassled by a fifteen-year old girl who he may have knocked up: "It's over, you better start buying the toys." The narrator has no sympathy because it's his friend's fault for saying "three magic words: I love you."
In the chorus, Dizzee becomes the voice of the friend, complaining that the bitch won't leave him alone. Then a female character complains of a similar situation with an obsessive, stalking male. Halfway through the chorus, perspectives shift again: now Dizzee and the girl are what appears to be a jealous, squabbling couple, accusing each other of cheating. After grilling each other, both of them just give up and admit to it, shrugging and saying "oh well".
Let's skip the next verse, which is pretty hard to decipher. Verse three has Dizzee threatening to steal your woman. This is not an unusual thing for a rapper to do, but instead of bragging and laughing maliciously at the cuckold, he sounds vicious: "I like your girl! So you'd better look after your girl! Or I might take your girl! And make your girl my girl!" Instead of trying to disown women as he does in the rest of the song, Dizzee actually wants a girl of his own here, and wants her so bad that he flies into a jealous rage, utterly at odds with the effortless womanising of your typical "player". Or perhaps he is playing another character here - is he giving voice to the terrifying evil that every boyfriend fears?
In the next stanza he's back to mysogyny, mixed with class resentment, using puns and rhymes to undermine the respectability of an educated woman, going from "college" to "knowledge", to "brains" to "head", etc.
So overall, this song gives us a multi-faceted panorama of fucked-up relationships, from a very male perspective of course. The nightmare that warrants the terrifying accompaniment is the nightmare of so-called love. The song's hook - a girl saying "I Luv U!", cutesy and mechanical as though it comes from a child's toy - mocks the robotic artificiality of claims of love and devotion. The voice sounds utterly oblivious to the destruction it has caused, to the seething rage of the beats that swarm around it.
In light of the "emo" tracks on Boy in da Corner in which Dizzee reveals his sensitive side, and especially in light of its twee remix, 'I Luv U' can't be taken at face value. I don't want to apologise for mysogyny or anything, but Dizzee isn't just some arrogant woman-hater. Clearly he's been hurt. Rather than taking out his frustration on a particular girl, he sees the bigger picture, and I don't mean women in general. It's the whole painful world of love, sex, relationships, jealousy and breakups that have driven him mad. In 'Round We Go', he calls this world "one big cycle", and gives us all the confusing details of an incestuous social group, eg "the ex girlfriend, of the old school friend, who is the close friend, of this best friend, sits with best friend, who by now has slept with Blue". It's so convoluted that it makes me want to draw a diagram. In this song, friendships enter the picture too. For the eighteen-year-old Dizzee, all relationships were fucked. The world was a bleak place.
Track one is Dizzee Rascal's 'I Luv U'. Writing about this track seems about as interesting as writing about 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' - it was the first big grime song, it's by grime's most well-known artist, many thousands of words have been written about it, and I've listened to it a million times. But it needs to be on this compilation because if you want to convince people who are into extreme, fucked up music that grime isn't just a bunch of brats shouting over badly produced beats, that's it's possibly even radical stuff, then this is the track to play them.
And of course, this track really is the bomb. And it's kind of sad to say, since it implies that grime didn't live up to its promise and just went downhill, but: I think this track goes so much further than any other grime song, or even any rap song, in so many ways. Dizzee produced this track before grime was called grime, in the context of the UK garage scene, which may give you some idea of how radical it was. It was a very deliberate to attempt to do something ahead of its time, or dare I say it avant-garde, as you can gather from the last verse: "Dem boy not ready yet, trend they could never set, This is the next step, I ride the 2-step, niggaz better get set." Its blunt, distorted booming and crashing could hardly be further from garage's slick, slinky lattice of staccato beats. But it sounds nothing like hip-hop either: instead of a kick and a snare you've got these giant clod-hopping bass BOINGs, piercing CRASHes, and noises that sound like a dragon wheezing. And they don't stick to any regular boom-bap rhythm.
Could this even be called a beat at all? It doesn't keep time, or make you want to dance. Instead, its function is expressive. It sounds like Dizzee venting his rage by smashing things to bits with a club.
'I Luv U' fits in with the "dark rap" theme not because it's funereal, nor because it sounds like something spooky's about to happen, but because it sounds like a horror scene of full-on carnage. The beats set us up for something really fucked-up and traumatic, but the lyrics aren't about violence per se. They're angry and mysogynistic, but this isn't your usual series of threats, boasts and put-downs. It's not a coherent story either, but if I was really wanky I might argue that it's some sort of fractured Modernist narrative.
In a move that diverges from the typical rap lyrical strategy, which is of course to focus on me/myself/I, Dizzee actually plays at least three different characters here, as far as I can tell, plus adds a couple of female roles. First he's a guy sniggering at a friend's misfortune: the dude he's addressing is being hassled by a fifteen-year old girl who he may have knocked up: "It's over, you better start buying the toys." The narrator has no sympathy because it's his friend's fault for saying "three magic words: I love you."
In the chorus, Dizzee becomes the voice of the friend, complaining that the bitch won't leave him alone. Then a female character complains of a similar situation with an obsessive, stalking male. Halfway through the chorus, perspectives shift again: now Dizzee and the girl are what appears to be a jealous, squabbling couple, accusing each other of cheating. After grilling each other, both of them just give up and admit to it, shrugging and saying "oh well".
Let's skip the next verse, which is pretty hard to decipher. Verse three has Dizzee threatening to steal your woman. This is not an unusual thing for a rapper to do, but instead of bragging and laughing maliciously at the cuckold, he sounds vicious: "I like your girl! So you'd better look after your girl! Or I might take your girl! And make your girl my girl!" Instead of trying to disown women as he does in the rest of the song, Dizzee actually wants a girl of his own here, and wants her so bad that he flies into a jealous rage, utterly at odds with the effortless womanising of your typical "player". Or perhaps he is playing another character here - is he giving voice to the terrifying evil that every boyfriend fears?
In the next stanza he's back to mysogyny, mixed with class resentment, using puns and rhymes to undermine the respectability of an educated woman, going from "college" to "knowledge", to "brains" to "head", etc.
So overall, this song gives us a multi-faceted panorama of fucked-up relationships, from a very male perspective of course. The nightmare that warrants the terrifying accompaniment is the nightmare of so-called love. The song's hook - a girl saying "I Luv U!", cutesy and mechanical as though it comes from a child's toy - mocks the robotic artificiality of claims of love and devotion. The voice sounds utterly oblivious to the destruction it has caused, to the seething rage of the beats that swarm around it.
In light of the "emo" tracks on Boy in da Corner in which Dizzee reveals his sensitive side, and especially in light of its twee remix, 'I Luv U' can't be taken at face value. I don't want to apologise for mysogyny or anything, but Dizzee isn't just some arrogant woman-hater. Clearly he's been hurt. Rather than taking out his frustration on a particular girl, he sees the bigger picture, and I don't mean women in general. It's the whole painful world of love, sex, relationships, jealousy and breakups that have driven him mad. In 'Round We Go', he calls this world "one big cycle", and gives us all the confusing details of an incestuous social group, eg "the ex girlfriend, of the old school friend, who is the close friend, of this best friend, sits with best friend, who by now has slept with Blue". It's so convoluted that it makes me want to draw a diagram. In this song, friendships enter the picture too. For the eighteen-year-old Dizzee, all relationships were fucked. The world was a bleak place.
| 87 |
| Vote |
Shared on
Subscribe to this blog
Comment by Anonymous
Andrew
ps: I was the anonymous commentator on your previous posting, too.
Comment by Angus