How Big Is Your World? Good Rap Songs.

-Common featuring Pharrell 'Announcement'
Click here to download 'Announcement'
First, there was the 'Planet Rock'/electro homage 'Universal Mind Control' and now there's the Biggie-aping 'Announcement'. That rubbery, back-and-forth guitar, Common switching up some lines but totally mimicking Biggie's flow on 'Just Playing (Dreams)', as well as a quick reference to 'Me & My Bitch' (and a Puffy reference by Pharrell), it seems like maybe this new Common album will be some kind of hip-hop history lesson or something? The beat does a better job of sounding like an old, classic beat while retaining producer signature than Kanye's weirdo Dilla attempts. The female "Uh!", the guitar-sound approximation of 'Just Playing's bassline sound close enough to connect to the Biggie rarity, but there's also some crazy cornball fluttering synths, and crazy marching band booms that every half-perfect, half-annoying Neptunes production has.

The rap history thing's half cool because it's not like Common's saying anything interesting anymore (and he's out-rapped by Pharrell here), but it's annoying because this is the dude that in '94 was half-shitting on dudes like Biggie for ruining hip-hop, but uh, ultimately it's sort of exciting. Still, it's important to remember that the past two Common albums had these great singles and then were an album of boring, meandering turds, so, we'll see, but so far, this hip-hop history concept is a good look. As usual though, 'Invincible Summer's already conceptually muddled because you know, it's release date is in the fall?

-B.O.M.B 'Over Here'
Click here to download 'Over Here'
This song's just no bullshit. Under three-minutes, these really tight drums, and justB.O.M.B--"Baltimore On My Back"--rapping straight-forward stuff that's spare and direct and descriptive and nothing more or less. There's a good mix of influences here as well. Like so many smart thugs, he owes a great deal to 'Pac, but there's some golden-age New York influence in his delivery and the beat--especially those Primo-ish drums--but it's aware and internalizes more recent rap trends. The all-keyboard aspect of the beat, the purposefully simple and immediate lyrics, and the filling it all-out with ad-libs, show a relatively traditionalist rapper that didn't turn the radio off in 1998.

This is from B.O.M.B's 'Testers' EP which came out in May and sounds like what a lot of good rapper's albums would sound like if the just cut-out all the crap and only gave you good songs. More rappers need to release EPs. For awhile, mixtapes had the casual, tossed-off effect of EPs but they got bloated or just terrible quick. The EP is an ideal introduction to a new rapper and B.O.M.B's smart to take advantage of it as a way to release music. The other really-great song 'Sunday' from the EP can be found on Al Shipley's Government Names blog. I met B.O.M.B and talked to him for a few minutes a few months ago and he just gave me a copy of his CD which you'd think is the kind of thing more rappers would do but they uh, don't.

-Flying Lotus 'Parisian Goldfish'
Click here to download 'Parisian Goldfish'
Is this song based on the cowbell breakdown from New Order's 'Bizarre Love Triangle'? I even sent Flying Lotus a fucking MySpace message about it because it was bugging me so much. He didn't answer. There's a noisy, weird side of Flying Lotus' work that should get more attention than post-Dilla/Madlib knob twiddling. The best electronic music's all about feeling and atmosphere. It's silly to listen to mid-tempo beats when there's not someone rapping on them. The big joke of Lotus' 'Robo Tussin' remix of 'A Milli' was that his weirdo synth-fart bliss-out still wasn't as weird as Bangladesh's original. Maybe that wasn't the intention and Lotus is just unfairly categorized with think they're next-level "producers" like Madlib or Prefuse 73 because 'Parisian Goldfish' is pretty amped-up and ready for a party. No contemplation or head-nodding to this song necessary.

Everything's sort of maxed-out and a little full of static and squelchy and anchored by this cowbell workout break that Lotus puts every production trick over. It gets chopped-up, it awkwardly repeats, he adds more sounds over top of it, and he piles the break atop itself into a mechanical CD-skip-like repetition and then takes it away to just play the loop to glorious effect a minute and fifty second or so in.

-ABN (Z-Ro & Trae) 'Still Throwed'
Click here to download 'Still Throwed'
Imagine 'Get Throwed' from Bun B's 'Trill' but with Z-Ro doing more than the hook and Trae rapping instead of Pimp C, Jay-Z, and Jeezy and then some Linkin Park-ish keyboards all over it. Between this and the Linkin Park-ish 'Shoot Me Down' from 'Tha Carter 3'--but pretending Busta's 'We Made It' never existed--maybe Linkin Park are sort of good? Don't front on that 'Numb/Encore' "song" either. This song's interesting in contrast with the 'Trill' version in the sense that everything's just down a few notches.

The chugging guitars are mixed lower, and the stoned, bubbling electronics of the original no longer flutter in the background, they're slowed-down but louder and darker. 'Get Throwed' was a party song about getting high, 'Still Throwed' is a few years later, doing the same thing and it not being fun anymore...which is pretty much what every Z-Ro and Trae song's about. The key lyric here is Z-Ro's list of "same old"s, especially "strippers at the club dancing on the same old poles". It's not a surprise coming from Z-Ro, but this sense of being just as bored and disinterested by those three big, stupid hip-hop ideals of cool and power (drug dealers, girl, strip clubs) is really smart and honest. It's like when he raps about treating lesbians and gay dudes properly on 'T.H.U.G'. I've never been that into Trae and next to Z-Ro especially, Trae's gruff voice sounds jarring.

-Ratatat 'Black Heroes'
Click here to download 'Black Heroes'
Ratatat's schtick is pretty simple: Make every instrument sound like a synth or just be a synth, harmonize that shit, and make it sound like the music in a sad part of a video game. The closer of their latest album 'LP3' is the particularly affecting 'Black Heroes' and it really does bring up the feeling of like, a film-strip you'd watch in history class about the contributions of African-Americans. Imagine poorly-pencilled sketches of Marcus Garvey and Rosa Parks moving past to the tune of this song. This YouTuber had the right idea accompanying the song to an image of the Tuskegee Airmen. I think 'Black Heroes' is trying to get at like the pure immediate sense of the triumph of history and victory that you can get into when you're in like 3rd grade and Howard Zinn doesn't mean anything yet.

Because of their Brooklyn roots and love of all things electronic and video gamey, Ratatat are often seeen as ironists but there's really nothing ironic or funny about their music. They use all those sounds to move towards some weird, off-kilter sense of warmth and sincerity. These are kids who cried at the ending to Adventures of Lolo 2 and just took the beauty of electronics for granted. They're way beyond the played-out Kraftwerk-ian sense of "we're all mechanical and without emotions" and electronics will comment on that trope; it's sort of the same thing T-Pain's trying to do or Kanye does on Jeezy's 'Put On'.