Monday, April 11, 2016

Song of the Day #299 - 2 Chainz - This Me, Fuck It

Go home, big mansion, front look like a backyard!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFJtx02tgFU

In preparation for Song of the Day #300 I've been thinking again about how to define your "favorite" songs, what metrics are most appropriate, etc etc. It's difficult. A tempting one is "songs you have listened to most", in which case it would be obvious that my top six songs are the six songs on the 2 Chainz EP Felt Like Cappin. That is slight hyperbole.

I talked about the 2nd track awhile ago, and this final one I think serves as the perfect compliment... "MFn Right" has that simple, repeating flute loop, almost tongue-in-cheek with brightness, super airy, and starting with 2 Chainz rambling on about his love for Mike Will, alongside his and Zaytoven's producer tags, all very coherent, all very "above board", or something... and then, not even 15 minutes later, you return to this "flute motif", but now it's some crazy wandering low-key thing, accompanied by Timbaland's gigantic incomprehensible producer tag... like, just this sort of shift, I dunno if I can describe it very well, but it feels very definitive, very complete.

The verses are similarly "final", like, the ultimate statement of the album is right there in the title. That little space he gives between "this me" and "fuck it" is especially poignant, somehow. Like "this me" summarizes everything he's said in the preceding five tracks, and then he has to pause for a second, before deciding "fuck it". His stop-start to-the-point flow has the same sort of triumphant attitude... the heavily doubled lines matching perfectly his increasingly unrestrained voice, until it pulls all the way back down to the cool, levelheaded chorus. If this song was out when this video came out it would have been the perfect ending theme, I think.

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