David Bowie (materializing suddenly): “Are you ready to go, small child?”
Small Child: “Where?”
David Bowie: “Outside all Time as you know it, little one.”
Small Child: “You mean to grandma and grandpa’s house?”
David Bowie (smiling gently, inscrutably): “No, little one, to
Rap:
[Ice Cube]
“I’m hard on ‘em,
yeah I’m ruthless.
You like a stress-sack,
boy you useless.
You know the side, trick.
Better get up on it.
Cuz it must be a single with Nate Dogg singin’ on it.
[…]
[Mack 10]
It ain’t a hit till Nate Dogg spit.”
Rappers: Ice Cube & Mack 10, “Gangsta Nation” (radio edit), off Westside Connection’s album Terrorist Threats
Grounds for entry: truth
Explanation:
I admit that from a strictly technical standpoint, this song features no killer verses—the rhetorikal skillzz of the 3 members of the thuggy, unknowingly self-parodic Westside Connection range from pedestrian (Mack 10) to passable (W.C.) to legit (a fading Ice Cube). No, the song is all about those tooting keyboards—hot damn, those keyboards—and Nate Dogg*. And these here clarion lines at the end.
To hear the 3rd and 4th lines cited above is to come across a lovely unexpected spring flower beside the path during a February walk in the woods, one of those revealing little lines in a rap song which, surrounded by all the posturing, all the posing, all the dick-swinging, tells you just a sweet little something about the MC. In this case, we now categorically know what Ice Cube doesn’t use to relax when he’s on tour or on the set of one of his many movies: Stress-sacks! In fact we know his exact valuation of their worth: Useless! Such a grim verdict leads us to imagine that Ice Cube, at some very stressful point in his life, turned desperately to stress-sacks for sweet succor, sat down with stress-sacks for an intense few moments of heavy breathing and heart-pounding and squeezing, was let down horribly by stress-sacks, and has never forgiven stress-sacks for this.
The 7th line is just true. True. That is all. Robustly, powerfully, terrifyingly true in a way that our sickly postmodernity has not equipped us to deal with. It is The Nate Dogg Axiom, and in identifying it Ice Cube displays a searing, veridical awareness of the mechanisms of his trade, and also of life, kind of.
The final line comes right before the instrumental climax of the song, in which the keyboards—oooooh those keyboards—are just unleashed. Mack 10 utters this during one of those end-of-the-song conversational rants that rappers will do, where they’re just kind of talking smack at no one in particular. Oftentimes these rants are curious mixtures of unversified and versified natter—the rapper will chat in measured conversational prosodies one second and then totally slip in a little rhymed, iambic couplet the next. This is a great example of that: a slight variation on The Nate Dogg Axiom in the form of a condensed, nearly perfect gnomic verse such like children might learn and recite at grammar school. You know, like “A stitch in time saves nine,” or “The early bird gets the worm”. I want my children to learn and recite this line at grammar school.
For it is timeless.
*Link leads to the uncensored song's utterly baffling music video
Sunday, February 25, 2007
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