Listen: M.I.A.: “Paper Planes (Remix)” įidgety piano chords played with clunky imprecision, a ticking rhythm section, and an opening line worthy of a great novel- so begins our favorite song of 2007. The hustler-as-freedom-fighter tone is especially effective in the remix, where Rich Boy’s casually triumphant drawl turns boilerplate gun-as-girl talk into defiant cop-heckling and Bun B extends his head-before-hands hustle technique “from the Third World countries to the second and the first.” –Nate Patrin The spine of “Paper Planes” is brilliant: Cranking up the bass on the most mournful track in the Strummer/Jones catalog, tying in an interpolation of the “Rump Shaker” hook with gunshots and cash registers, and dropping it on top of a supple boom-click beat that ringtone rappers would piss themselves for is stunt production at its finest, and instead of describing a no-man’s land with no asylum, Maya’s making paper by scoring immigrants some visas.
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Listen: UGK: “Int’l Players Anthem (I Choose You)” įrom 2004 onward, M.I.A.’s global agitprop, Third World solidarity, and guerilla-pop war zone trappings saw her transcending electroclash by sounding like, well, electro’s Clash- and that was before she sampled “Straight to Hell”.
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And that’s “Int’l Players Anthem”: a life-affirming blast of a song that’s somehow become a dirge. But both rappers attack the track with such glee- Bun’s commanding baritone effortlessly playing off Big Boi’s playful hiccup- that the joy of the delivery overwhelms the squalor of the words. Things get more complicated when Bun B and Big Boi enter, one enthusing about prostitution prospects while the other dizzily recounting a rough divorce. Andre’s verse lends a humane warmth to the greasy pimp-talk that follows, but the song really achieves liftoff the instant he trails off, as both Paul and Juicy’s atomic bass-rumble and Pimp C’s derisive sneer hit the track. On his starry-eyed, arrhythmic verse, Andre 3000 sounds like a lovestruck kid, his loopy grin clearly audible. Three 6 Mafia’s deliriously gorgeous Willie Hutch loop swoops and dives, while Outkast and UGK trace a relationship from beginning tof end. With Pimp gone, we’ll never get another song like this one, a summit meeting of three of Southern rap’s greatest duos. On December 4, Pimp C, one half of UGK, was found dead in a Hollywood hotel room. It’s cold comfort, though in Sound of Silver’s next song, we learn that growing up, too, is a form of anxiety that keeps coming till the day it stops. As he re-situates himself using the only constants that remain- coffee, the weather- he triggers a fresh sense of self-awareness, resigning to the everyday responsibilities of adulthood, which seem liberating in this context.
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The glockenspiel chimes that accompany each word Murphy sings help pierce the bleary warble that hounds him, and suspends him within that frozen moment. His voice, faced with a set of circumstances he avoided in the past, sheds its cool façade and betrays a boyish frailty in the face of sheer confusion.
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Faced with the mortality of a relationship, James Murphy’s artistic burden changed: After the fateful morning of “Someone Great”, it no longer seemed enough to coolly dissect how sensations form scenes it became time to consider the fragile emotions of the people within them.