Almost half a year went by before another single surfaced. The musical distance between “HAM” and “Otis,” released in July, demonstrates just how far the direction of the project had changed. While “HAM” is a blustery Lex Luger produced banger that feels coldly rigid. “Otis” is “HAM”s songs polar opposite and is better for it. A sample of Otis Redding’s “Try a Little Tenderness” clipped and looped for three minutes becomes a playground for Kanye and Jay to toss the mic back and forth. “I adopted these niggas, Phillip Drummond ’em,” grins Kanye while Jay threatens to “call the paparazzi on myself.” Where “HAM” was coldly mechanical, “Otis” is invitingly warm. “HAM” seemed a little too dead set on ruling rap radio; “Otis” doesn’t even have a chorus.
The pomposity of Watch the Throne works because it’s fun. It’s not a closed-door yacht club that you’ve wandered in by accident; it’s a million dollar hotel party that you’re invited to. And when the party’s over everyone gets to take an aluminum bat to the opulence. Everything is so over the top that it cant help being a blast, in the first minute and a half of opener “No Church in the Wild” Jay compares himself to the holy ghost and Kanye to Jesus. Things don’t get much meeker from there. Dubstep-rap is created and destroyed on “Who Gon Stop Me.” On “Made it in America” Frank Ocean invokes Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. Nina Simone gets auto-tuned on “New Day”, crazier than that is the fact that it works.
Somehow, all of this pales in comparison to “Niggas in Paris.”
Dissect every piece of “Niggas in Paris” and you’ll find a distinct before and after in rap music. Hits would no longer be measured in sales, but in “meme-ability”. “Ball so hard motherfuckers wanna fine me.” “Whats 50 grand to a motherfucker like me can you please remind me?” “That shit cray.” “Don’t let me enter my zone.” I could go on. Nearly every line from the song took on a life of its own, spreading across the Internet without a single penny of marketing money to push it. “Niggas in Paris” wasn’t just a massive chart smash, it was a cultural typhoon. Then there was the case of that wacked out beat. A whirling thrill ride, it set a new format for “going in” beats and launched the career of one Hit-Boy.
As if that wasn’t enough, on stage, Kanye and Jay dedicated themselves to turning the song into something beyond the confinement of petty “music and transform it into a religious experience.” On the first night of the Watch the Throne tour Jay stopped the song and had them bring it back. From there, the bar just kept getting raised as Kanye and Jay performed the song back to back night after night. On December 2, the tour made it back to the Chicago United Center. They performed “Niggas in Paris” nine times in a row that night.
For better or for worse, “meme-ability” would take over rap in the coming years. No city would be more directly affected than Chicago, which was on the borderline of finding its major voices; many of those voices were making noise in 2011. In 2012 the dam broke.
Previously: FSD Feature: Little Did They Know: Chicago Rap Music 2010 – 2013 [Part 1]
Where’s Mikkey Halsted? He was the best chicago rapper pound for pound of the last 10 years. *Credibility lost.