Thursday, March 12, 2015

Song of the Day #133 - Hudson Mohawke - Chimes

She like me 'cause I drink a lot of vodka...


I like HudMo as much as the next guy, like... I think if you're into the sort of hip hop I'm into, there's sort of a minimum amount you can like HudMo, where if you like him any less than that you're being ignorant. But like... I usually like him in the context of people rapping over his stuff, not as much for just his instrumentals. When I listen to the instrumentals, I have a sort of appreciation where it's as much about my ability to imagine someone rapping over it as it is about the song itself. And if it's something that actually has been sampled or used as a beat, I associate the instrumental with it, which makes it more fun... 

I dunno, it's like... HudMo is often about the "big moment", like the horns in this one - the "big dumb horn" sound basically being their signature at this point. And I feel like the big moment, although it sounds sudden and spontaneous and "defiant" and all that good stuff, it's actually been very meticulously constructed ahead of time. That's why I really like it to synch up with some vocal performance that reflects this spirit of sudden defiance with actual spontaneity. Like on "Blood on the Leaves", when the horns come in, obviously that isn't the production "losing it", but it really feels like Kanye is "losing it" when he gets to that part.

And that's why I slept on "Chimes" until just recently, 'cause I thought the official remix was kinda mediocre (a big letdown, really) and I couldn't get something that let me "unlock" the feeling of explosiveness in the track. Okay but then obviously something did - this amazing Rae Sremmurd freestyle, which I think is my all time favorite freestyle video of all time now (displacing Das Racist's one for selector). Like, have you ever seen people having more fun rapping? It's beautiful. The flow is nuts and the lines are hilarious. My favorite part, though, is when he goes way tf in on the fourth beat, and it feels like the finale, but there's still one more beat, and, of course, it's "Chimes"! And then I get like 5000% hype because really, this is a hype song. HudMo understands the structural dynamics of hype like no one else. He announced Lantern, a new LP coming out in 2015, aka "the year with 10x as many good albums as it needed", or "hey 2015! save some for 2016, maybe???"

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