Bad Isn’t Good Enough

II. John Vs. “Stupid Hoe” by Nicki Minaj

Take a few minutes to listen.

Alright, so, the question here is, why is this bad? I mean, I am going to assume that you don’t like it, given the kinds of music we evangelize here and how limited our audience is at time of writing. If you do like it, just imagine I asked you why it’s good and rephrase the points I’m going to make in an optimistic fashion. Otherwise, I’m just going to float a few suggestions.

So, first, it’s loud. Relentlessly loud.
Second, no melodic component. Most well-regarded rap songs have a melodic component. Picking one out of a hat, “The Real Slim Shady” leans on the melody underneath the verse.
Third, lyrically annoying.

Loud is actually the only legitimate complaint. Some people do not like loud music, and that’s fine. They’re your ears, do what you need.

The second point fascinates me, as when most people say that something is music, they are exclusively talking about this. I have this discussion a lot since in my circle of friends I’m the only one routinely evangelizing rap. Now when it comes to defining rap as “not music,” and melody’s place in that, the idea I suppose is that there’s no long-form melodic components. A rap beat at it’s most stripped down only needs a little bit of melody, enough where you can recognize what the song is but not too much that it interferes with the record.

Compare this to, picking one out of another hat, “Midnight City” by M83. It is tonal maximalism. Layers and layers of synthesizers, constructing a melodic web moving in the same direction. There’s nothing there without them.

Stupid Hoe, in contrast, only invokes melody to pour salt on Lil Kim’s wound. The rest of the song is expressed not with tonal change, but with expression. Tone of voice. Things like this. This is one of the true mights of rap, that it can shed melody and still retain it’s identity with ease. There’s no reliance on… well, we’ll get to that.

Third, lyrics. There’s a number of images around, where the point of it is that choruses back in the day were sweeping and lush, and now it’s simple repetition, ergo modern music sucks. Not even really willing to entertain this argument, but I will offer this.

The music that, say, Zeppelin or the Beatles was following was all dull and hyper-literal. We just got finished with an album like that in the album club, where the singing is all clean, and there’s no nuance to the lyrics. Not that there needs to be. Just that there was so much of that music had a pushback. That push-back was Led Zeppelin, or the Moody Blues, or Pink Floyd. Music where the language was very dense and prose-like. Hell, that pushback started before “rock” as we know it, with the growth of folk music.

This cycle continues forever. The point of lyrics in music is pushback against the language of superiors, be they influential adults in your childhood or the music your parents listened to or whatever. The lyrical component of truly modern music is going to upset people, because it is aimed at the nerve center, at where all the communication you’ve grown to rely on is weakest in structure. By the way, if you are hoping to not be “the old jerk who hates all new music and yearns for the good old days,” it is going to be vital to have compassion for how language is going to change in front of you.

Stupid Hoe’s lyricism is symbolic of this. It’s boastful, it’s referential, it’s even a little absurd. This is what conversation sounds like now, just amplified to a degree that the old built-in mechanisms of communication established by schooling and parents reacts quickly and rejects it. This is natural, but is a problem. Maybe this can be your moment of clarity and rehab can start.

Anyways, the thing that’s vital here is that it doesn’t appear to be deliberate, which makes it that much stronger. Nicki isn’t dropping melody because she’s trying to prove anything, and she isn’t talking like that because she’s trying to destroy the modern era. This shit just happens. It’s natural. It’s how music develops and changes. It’s hard to force that kind of destruction.

WINNER: “Stupid Hoe” by Nicki Minaj

WHY: Because she isn’t beholden to dead royalty and barons.

Wait, what?