Rap verses make for unwelcome guests in pop songs, more intrusive than enhancing
By Alex Goodman
April 3, 2011 11:27 p.m.
Cee Lo Green’s newly released single, “Bright Lights Bigger City,” is for the most part a wonderful song. Strutting across a tight bass line, Cee Lo sings about looking forward to the weekend, without wondering for a second which seat he can take.
But then, after about two minutes and 20 seconds, Wiz Khalifa jumps in and ruins everything.
Most famous for saying the words “black and yellow” over and over again, Khalifa attempts what has become a tired, overblown staple of pop music: the guest verse. What he does with his time could hardly be called rapping, though ““ more like talking, very slowly, with swagger.
Khalifa’s verse doesn’t appear on the original version of the song, the first full track on Cee Lo’s magnificent 2010 album “The Lady Killer.” “Bright Lights” has simply been re-released in this new form, despite having a perfectly adequate music video uploaded before “Fuck You” became the viral smash of last summer.
It could be simply because Khalifa is famous, at least for now: “Black and Yellow” currently has about 60 million views on YouTube. Adding his name to the track is bound to attract a crowd that wouldn’t already listen to the song.
Or it’s because we have pathetically short attention spans, and the Internet is a ruthless gladiatorial arena of entertainment. We can all appreciate a great song, but we’re a lot more likely to find it with a sexy handle like “the one with all the profanity” or “the one with Wiz Khalifa.”
Of course, these days it’s hard to beat “the one with Kanye West,” which Katy Perry scored last week when she debuted a cosmic fantasia of a music video for her single “E.T.” with a surprise guest spot from West. For Perry, the high-profile guest seems almost gratuitous; she’s on a Charlie Sheen-sized winning streak already, and the video alone, an acid-fueled mix of “Avatar” and “Wall-E,” would have been enough to warrant plenty of posts on Facebook.
The song doesn’t need any help either ““ a pulsating gem of electro-pop, “E.T.” holds up admirably against the world-dominating “Teenage Dream” and “California Gurls.” West adds nothing at all, opening the song and interrupting again before the final chorus, relying on his name and reputation rather than any kind of lyrical skill.
But West has never been a particularly impressive MC. He doesn’t rap quickly or with great flow. His attempts at wordplay are few and far between yet always sound self-satisfied. He rarely says anything insightful, let alone meaningful.
West survives on his significant talents as a producer, with which he has expanded the musical vocabulary of his genre, and his galaxy-sized ego. His appearance in “E.T.,” spinning in a space pod, is symbolically appropriate, even if musically speaking it’s unappreciated.
These are interesting times for rap music, which for better or worse has proliferated into a multi-limbed beast. There are the shallow, candy-coated hits like “Black and Yellow” and Soulja Boy’s “Crank That”; the uplifting philosophizing of Lupe Fiasco; the vitriolic word-gymnastics of Eminem; the alien weirdness of Lil Wayne; the melancholy musings of Drake and Kid Cudi; the demented post-modernism of Das Racist.
No one can call rap a fringe market anymore ““ it has become a genre as massive and varied as rock music. That means a ton of terrible, mediocre or utterly forgettable. It means a select few artists will emerge from the crowd and prove themselves exceptional.
And it means there will be those who let fame go to their heads and insist on ruining a perfectly good song by rapping badly in the middle of it.
If you’ve grown tired of guest verses infiltrating your favorite songs, email Goodman at [email protected].
“Pop Psychology” runs every Monday.