Song of the Day #187 - Madvillain - Great Day (Four Tet Remix)

Looks like it's gonna be a great day today...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmoPrwIgoy8

More DOOM, more nostalgia for this era. Madvillainy was the first album I ever torrented, y'know? It was just too frustrating to get on limewire or whatever. And the rest is history or whatever. This album's history also seems unending, as even in the afterglow of last year's godlike Pinata, people were asking Madlib about the sequel. It seems to be pretty much done, dripping little singles here and there. I'm thinking it's a sort of Detox situation where DOOM is unsatisfied, maybe.

It's quite the legacy to live up to. Madlib and DOOM are two guys skilled enough to sound good with any rapper or any producer but they sound best together. And not only that, but both of them brought their A+ games on every single track. And while the original production on this, the penultimate track, is as flawless as the rest of them, it's a testament to DOOM's ability that Four Tet could do something completely different and still make it this hype.

I can remember sitting on the bus and listening to this and imagining some sort of music video in my head... I did this with pretty much everything I listened to at the time, and still do pretty often now... Anyways, I pictured like... a slow zoom in to Four Tet (who looks a lot like an Indian version of me, a friend of mine pointed out) on some sort of DJ setup thing, settling at 0:14, when the "main" sound comes in, and then like... as all the other bleeps and bloops come in, a garden starts growing around him, staticky in a sort of "technoey" way, "glitching" to the rhythm of the music... and then DOOM is summoned up in a similar manner, and he starts rapping, and like, a blue sky starts pouring down around them, the sun and stuff, making a "great day". Y'know?

I can remember this very vividly, I'm not sure why. I guess it's just how evocative the song is. Four Tet's stuff has a real "organic" sort of quality, I think it's how you can hear these fractured strings in a lot of his beats, and then a less distorted version comes in, it has a real "returning to nature feel". The way it escalates is so beautiful, dropping off near the end to emphasize the triumph of the last bars, and then transitioning into a full on solo performance, a perfect response to DOOM's legendary verse. There's a real sense of them "riffing" off each other in this regard, both of them feeling very free in their commingling and improvising, even though the actual construction of this track was nothing like that at all lol.

On the subject of DOOM's verse, is there anything really to say? It has the following lines:
"Looks like it's gonna be a great day today/to get some fresh air like a stray on a straightaway"
"The rocket scientist, with the pocket wine list"
"Dolla he can overhear the hashish vena/He just came from over there, the grass is greener"
"Spit so many verses sometimes my jaw twitches/One thing this party could use is more booze"
"Couldn't find a pen, had to think of a new trick/This one he wrote in cold blood with a toothpick/On second thought it's too thick/His assistant said: "DOOM, you sick", he said "True, through acoustics""
"Easy as pi, 3.14/One more one false move and they're done for"

Hng! The internal rhyme! The assonance and consonance! The esotericism! The density of meaning! The blending of humour and thoughtfulness! All in the same song! Each and every one of these regularly gets posted in "What's your favorite rap lyric" threads that attract backpackers who bemoan my beloved trap and equate cleverness with quality but this time they aren't wrong. And they wouldn't be wrong if they chose any other line in the whole song.

That's just how DOOM is. And unlike Young Thug, who's verses are blessed in a lot of the same ways (I will defend this position), DOOM doesn't make it look easy, y'know? Not just fun times that happen to be incredible. Like you hear DOOM and you think "holy shit this guy is a genius", "no one else could ever do this", etc, but then also "there's no way he couldn't do this", there's no way he could tear himself away from the pen until he had this, and there's a deep inner glow of accomplishment you can share with him through this: it really is going to be a great day.