The Anatomy Of A Rap Song
Special thanks to Ryu-san for his creative contributions to this post and a general willingness to poke fun at any-and-everyone.
Although I can’t claim to enjoy it today with a straight face, in my younger junior-high days I was quite the aficionado of golden age hip-hop and gangsta rap. To understand my youth is to find both ridicule and decadent civility in uttering the phrase “geyyeahh.”
Hip-hop musically defined a part of my life that was post-adult-contemporary (yes, adult contemporary: I blame my parents and, of course, the eighties). By the early nineties, rap’s influence was widening the pant-size of each and every one of my friends. Its spontaneous lexicon had, fo’ shizzle, entered the mainstream vocabulary just as the effects of Full House family values were wearing off.
While I once genuinely thought that rap music was the zenith of artistic achievement, I can now comfortably slap my former self. But hey I was also guilty of collecting pogs and going to math camp. If you can’t laugh at yourself, you can’t laugh at anything, really.
University for me coincided with an explosion of bandwidth, which meant I could download tunes at ridiculously fast rates. So while my musical tastes had taken a left at Albuquerque, I relished in downloading some of my old favorites – this time for comedic purposes. Ryan and I would often procrastinate our Complex Analysis Math Problems to listen to Macho Man Randy Savage rap albums (Did you know that Macho Man Randy Savage has a rap album?) We also spent hours, drunken hours, analyzing what I once thought was the coolest song of all time:
MC Eiht’s “Goin’ Out Like G’s”.
(click for a larger view and explanation of what it means to go out like a G)
Over the years, rap music has acquired a bad reputation. Sure, there’s some objectionable material out there. But outside of its general degradation of women, unoriginal and often stolen melodies, “rhymes-so-it’s-poetry” lyrics, obsession with the material, and stereotypically uncultured and ignorant mannerisms for the purpose of entertainment, rap music really is a thing of beauty.
*(Bonus If You Can Correctly Identify The Songs Referenced Above In The Charts And Graphs Of This Post)
(image: “Microsoft Word.” Source unknown. Hilarious)
wow this post had me laughin like a madman. lol
penomenon – ll cool j
gin & juice – snoop dogg
can’t touch this – mc hammer
big poppa – notorious big
california love – tupac feat dr. dre
i’m stumped on the second to last diagram, there’s a lot of compton in there so i want to say nwa, but i’m not 100% sure.
hahaha you collected pogs?? hahaha
Mr Porter:
I basically gave away that second to last diagram in the paragraph preceding it. It’s MC Eiht’s “Goin Out Like G’s”, a rip-roaring adventure in fellowship and funk.
The first graph is not LL Cool J’s phenomenon, but that’s not a bad guess because the lyrics in the chorus are almost exactly the same. The rest of your guesses are top notch.
And Ryan, yes, I collected pogs. Not Alf pogs, at least, but pogs nonetheless.
Hamid, you still listened to rap/hip hop when I met you in university. Also, there is still the odd annoying rap song in our iTunes. I don’t think your passion for that lovely music has completely faded!
Dude! I just peed my pants laughing. You’re awesome Hamid.
pogs are a gateway drug to pokemon and yu-gi-oh… so I guess you kicked the habit before it got out of hand
this is one of the funniest things I’ve read! The Microsoft Word tag-line and the venn diagrams KILLED ME!!! LOL…
And Macho Man did NOT have a rap album…WHAT!?!?!?! And yo, is he still married to that Elizabeth chick? Hahaha
Brookie: oh come on, I see you shakin’ your tailfeather when that song comes on!
Christian: Thanks! Although it’s not quite doing drunken parkour on top of parked cars, I had a lot of fun with this one.
Romi: Thanks for laughing! I must admit, however: the Microsoft Word image is not my creation. I don’t know who did it, but found it on the Interweb. All the venn-diagrams and charts were done by either myself or my buddy Ryan. Macho Man does have a Rap album, you can find it here:
Macho Man’s Album: Be A Man
While they were married, they divorced in 1992. Also, Miss Elizabeth passed away in 2003 from taking mixed pills of hydrocodone, Xanax, and steroids with vodka.
and don’t forget one of my fav. ytmnds: a machoman-timberlake mashup
http://popmusic.ytmnd.com/
REALLY!?!?!?? What the hell was Miss Elizabeth doing taking steroids?!?!! Crazy….
This article is a RIOT! I couldn’t stop laughin’!
Actully before you can analyze rap music, you need to go farther than snoops time or biggys time, you need to go all the way back to africa. I understand that alot of rap artists today have lost their way, and the beauty that is hip hop n rap music. Gangsta rap is a diffrent area as well, see from your back ground i can tell you may have only heard these songs, but if you actully talk to real gang members, you mite understand more. If you want good hip hop and rap, i suggest Immortal Technique.
ha awesome