TS: Virtuosity in rap: MF Doom vs. Tupac

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alright, i was exaggerating. really, it's ghostface vs tupac

and the awkward question is "who is more virtuosic?"

― peter $.., Wednesday, 15 September 2004 23:45 (twenty-one years ago)

apples and oranges.

― jess (dubplatestyle), Wednesday, 15 September 2004 23:47 (twenty-one years ago)

ts: joyce vs. hemmingway

― jess (dubplatestyle), Wednesday, 15 September 2004 23:47 (twenty-one years ago)

argh

― oops (Oops), Wednesday, 15 September 2004 23:47 (twenty-one years ago)

obviously the answer is tupac. ghostface has a respectable flow, but it's got so much frill. i mean, it's forgiven. shit, ghostface might make a long list of alltime great rappers, but he doesn't have the rythmic skill of cadence OR cold enough rhymes to be near the top (of course in terms of handling technicalities, not that hard-to-define quality of "greatness" that ghostface obviously has on pac).

― PETER $.., Wednesday, 15 September 2004 23:50 (twenty-one years ago)

the difference btwn hemmingway and joyce is that hemmingway wrote abt things while joyce wrote abt thought, right? i never read either of them too well, but we're talking about a quantifiable handle of language, which joyce obviously wins, even if his balls are in his stomach. hemmingway had a heavier hand, sure, but joyce could get into some shit hemmingway couldn't touch with one hand paging through the New Yorker. is it like trying to compare dennis rodman and allen iverson? maybe. i'm torn. ayhgf

― peter $.., Wednesday, 15 September 2004 23:55 (twenty-one years ago)

tupac ruined hip hop. there, i said it.

― oops (Oops), Thursday, 16 September 2004 00:01 (twenty-one years ago)

this thread's only here bcs some1 in the van ice thread said ghostface was more a virtuoso at rapping
so after asking where are you i'll try to change the title of this thread to: Virtuosity in Rap: Who the Co'dest Nigga?

― peter $.., Thursday, 16 September 2004 00:03 (twenty-one years ago)

well, i guess in a way i understand oops. tupac had some arguably terrible effects in society.

― peter $.., Thursday, 16 September 2004 00:04 (twenty-one years ago)

but the important thing is that his effect on society is totally independent from his skill as an artist!

― peter $.., Thursday, 16 September 2004 00:05 (twenty-one years ago)

I'm mostly being mock-immflamatory, but didn't Pac make it so that one didn't even have to make good records in order to be worshipped by millions of hip hop fans?

― oops (Oops), Thursday, 16 September 2004 00:12 (twenty-one years ago)

oh pac made plenty of good records

― jess (dubplatestyle), Thursday, 16 September 2004 00:24 (twenty-one years ago)

unless by "record" you mean "album" and then i might agree with you

― jess (dubplatestyle), Thursday, 16 September 2004 00:25 (twenty-one years ago)

might

― jess (dubplatestyle), Thursday, 16 September 2004 00:25 (twenty-one years ago)

but ghostface is just so fucking weird

― amateur!!!st (amateurist), Thursday, 16 September 2004 00:27 (twenty-one years ago)

ghostface's weird is such a pose tho

― jess (dubplatestyle), Thursday, 16 September 2004 00:28 (twenty-one years ago)

"hittin switches on bitches like i been fixed with hydraulics" is hard to even say in the first place, much less really fast

― You've Got to Pick Up Every Stitch (tracerhand), Thursday, 16 September 2004 00:28 (twenty-one years ago)

how do you mean jess?

― amateur!!!st (amateurist), Thursday, 16 September 2004 00:29 (twenty-one years ago)

pac had plenty of weird moments too but they're more in that "random weird line" vein where the specific line doesn't seem to make any sense within the structure of the song or within his established persona like when michael jackson called you a vegetable or whatever. whereas ghostface is operating in a context of weirdness in abundance so his weirdness gets oddly diffused over time and with exposure.

― jess (dubplatestyle), Thursday, 16 September 2004 00:31 (twenty-one years ago)

I like some of Pac's records ( i didn't mean album), but I wouldn't say the good ones were plentiful. I admit I haven't heard a fair portion of his output.

― oops (Oops), Thursday, 16 September 2004 00:32 (twenty-one years ago)

that's a very poor paraphrase of a frank kogan idea, but more or less its the idea of a "context of abundance" vs. a "free lunch." (i dunno if you've read frank's disco tex essay or not amst.) xpost.

― jess (dubplatestyle), Thursday, 16 September 2004 00:32 (twenty-one years ago)

it works in the opposite direction too, of course: ghostface is so well known as this semi-robotic "street" kool keith delivering endless acrostics packed to bursting with knotted pop culture references and arcane personal mythology that when he goes and bust something straight up maudlin like "all i got is you" or one of his sex raps it seems all the weirder, like someone speaking a foreign language suddenly bursting into the star spangled banner.

― jess (dubplatestyle), Thursday, 16 September 2004 00:35 (twenty-one years ago)

but he seems to me to have the biggest cult of personality surrounding him than any other rapper. if he coughed while listening to a the el debarge, his fans would proclaim it to be the illest shit evah.

― oops (Oops), Thursday, 16 September 2004 00:37 (twenty-one years ago)

pac, not ghost

― oops (Oops), Thursday, 16 September 2004 00:37 (twenty-one years ago)

in terms of the technical skill of delivering a song, pac trounces ghost eight ways from sunday in that he possesses a much greater store of traditional entertainers values (tempo and mood variation, sarcasm, the ability to gently mock onesself, an understanding of his own inherent ridiculousness as a public figure [and the inherent ridiculousness of public entertainers in general) even leaving aside the fact that he has a much better technical knack for matching flow to a particular beat, for getting in and on and around that beat, for figuring out what makes it work. (this is on his best stuff, i mean. he's released a ton of make weight tracks.) whereas ghostface at his worst i get the feeling that he sometimes loses track of the beat entirely; he's got rhythm, but it's being created internally by the rhymes rather than by working the rhyme against the beat.

xpost: yeah, i don't argue with that at all oops, but i don't know what it much has to do with discussing pac v. ghost's technical virtuosity. i'm not much of a pac fan, really, and i think ghost has released better albums.

― jess (dubplatestyle), Thursday, 16 September 2004 00:44 (twenty-one years ago)

you're right, i'm getting offtopic. was just trying to explain why I think he made the actual records one makes somewhat superfluous.

― oops (Oops), Thursday, 16 September 2004 00:46 (twenty-one years ago)

pac's got a huge following because he was hugely charismatic to his audience. he was pretty, talented (to whatever degree you want to admit it, you can't argue it away completely tho), and exuded that tragic hero who wants to do right but is constantly tested persona that the public just eats up. i mean it was hugely charismatic to me and i was about 1 million miles away from who he was trying to reach and not that big of a fan of the actual output.

― jess (dubplatestyle), Thursday, 16 September 2004 00:48 (twenty-one years ago)

. when i see the word "virtuosity" I think of mastery to the point where one can do some complex shit that few others could, even if they practiced. Technique, not style. Studied perfection, not innovation.

you're also right about the way the each use a beat, or rather the way one does and the other doesn't. pac made the record superfluous, and ghost is doing the same with the beat.

― oops (Oops), Thursday, 16 September 2004 00:51 (twenty-one years ago)

tupac knew how to sell a song. he was just a good actor. period.

― scott seward (scott seward), Thursday, 16 September 2004 00:51 (twenty-one years ago)

that's what I mean. (leave it to a writer to put it better than I can). His appeal was never "that album/record/verse was ILLLLL" but rather "he's ILLLLL", full stop.

― oops (Oops), Thursday, 16 September 2004 00:53 (twenty-one years ago)

jess you are brilliant

i never made it through kogan's famous disco tex essay but i will try again. link?

i like the idea of ghost making the beat superfluous. do you mean his rhymes have such an (off-kilter but sure) internal rhythm that the backing can serve other functions? i think this is true, if that's what you mean. but then it's true of almost all rap from about 1993-94 or so.

― amateur!!!st (amateurist), Thursday, 16 September 2004 00:54 (twenty-one years ago)

...surely another question to be tackled by the league of formalist critics....

― amateur!!!st (amateurist), Thursday, 16 September 2004 00:55 (twenty-one years ago)

Pretty much what I meant, yeah. You can't have him doing acapellas for a whole album You need *something* to surround his lyrics. I picture Ghost in the studio, asking for a beat to be thrown on, not caring what it is, continuing his rhymes for hours,not even realizing that the beat has been turned off and everyone went home.

― oops (Oops), Thursday, 16 September 2004 01:03 (twenty-one years ago)

i like the way you wrote that, jess. pac molds his flows, marking words in ways vastly more complex than ghost.
(this is on his best stuff, i mean. he's released a ton of make weight tracks.) i understand yr being general, but what tracks are pac at his best?

amateurist, i don't think you can reduce ghost's style to being typical of 93-94, esp. if we're talking abt his modern reptr. the 93-94 style you might be talking abt is the wu-tang's, and ghost transcends it so notably that he can still sell records (my thoughts go out to odb). i like the idea, too, but i don't think it's that the beat is really superfluous to ghost, i just don't think he's mastered the technique of molding flow to beat like pac, or more currently, 50.

― peter $.., Thursday, 16 September 2004 01:03 (twenty-one years ago)

Jess what you've been describing isn't "technique" as it was discussed in the VIce thread though! When I think of ppl who are technique/virtuoisity fetishists in hiphop, usually they like dudes like Canibus and Nas is like their god. (no value judgement on either of tthose artists incidently i love nas and hate canibus)

― djdee2005 (djdee2005), Thursday, 16 September 2004 01:05 (twenty-one years ago)

i wasn't saying ghost was typical, just that a flow that doesn't stay on the 1 (that has a really strong implied four beats/measure but actually darts around it) began to take over hip-hop from around that time. it seems to me. ghostface is merely one notably virtuosic manifestation of the general trend. i might be talking out of my ass.

― amateur!!!st (amateurist), Thursday, 16 September 2004 01:07 (twenty-one years ago)

It is improbable that more nonsense has been written about the aesthetics of tupac than anything else, amateur!!!st.

― Clive Bell, Thursday, 16 September 2004 01:07 (twenty-one years ago)

I was pretty confused there for a minute til I realized you meant the Vanilla Ice thread and not the Vice Magazine thread.

― oops (Oops), Thursday, 16 September 2004 01:08 (twenty-one years ago)

also this accounts for the "whoah!" feeling of exhiliration when they DO come back to rapping on the beats. method man does this almost to the point where it becomes too obvious as a strategy. ghostface keeps it surprising enough to get excited abt.

xpost

HAHA me too

― amateur!!!st (amateurist), Thursday, 16 September 2004 01:09 (twenty-one years ago)

It is improbable that more nonsense has been written about the aesthetics of tupac than anything else, amateur!!!st.

-- Clive Bell (...) (webmail), September 15th, 2004 9:07 PM. (later) (link)

huh? why is this addressed to me?

― amateur!!!st (amateurist), Thursday, 16 September 2004 01:09 (twenty-one years ago)

djdee2005, canibus technique fetishists don't fetish technique so much as facetious complexity a la rakim

― peter $.., Thursday, 16 September 2004 01:10 (twenty-one years ago)

although i guess i've kind of just described a really basic function of latterday hip-hop, no revelation or anything. sorry for being captain obvious.

― amateur!!!st (amateurist), Thursday, 16 September 2004 01:10 (twenty-one years ago)

rakim is such a bore

― amateur!!!st (amateurist), Thursday, 16 September 2004 01:10 (twenty-one years ago)

(the eric clapton of hip-hop)

― amateur!!!st (amateurist), Thursday, 16 September 2004 01:10 (twenty-one years ago)

I don't think Ghsotface is a very good point of comparison with regards to "technique" for all the reasons Jess has listed. I should also mention that Jess captures what I love about ghost better than anyone else i've read.

xpost peter I think you're defining "technique" different than I.

― djdee2005 (djdee2005), Thursday, 16 September 2004 01:12 (twenty-one years ago)

disco tex (ha ha it took me about two times to get through it...i don't think it's kogan's best writing-wise, but it's got some of his best ideas.)

i have this pet theory that i've never tested that an album of ghost acapellas would be just as interesting as his studio albums. ghost's beats have always seemed very "straight", a "straight foot", only funky in the most nominal-sense. i think this gives him a lot of space to do his thing without fucking up the rhythm of the whole track. instead of finding space within the off-beats (which are way more prominent in rap in 2004 than they were in 1994) he's almost the off-beat himself, allowing that 4/4 thwack to nail things down.

i mean, i'm not trying to paint ghost as some idiot savant who just gets in the booth and does his thing. he can clearly do pop (or at least pop-esque) choruses and structures when he wants to. but it doesn't seem to define him, to be what he's about, or what he wants to do.

xpost: haha i was going to bring up canibus actually! yeah, i haven't been reading the vanilla ice thread, but i have a feeling i know exactly what djdee is talking about. "virtuosity" in rap usually does mean "the guy with the sickest breath control". i guess technically it probably means that, say, jazz too, but i think we really have to rewrite the book on "virtuosity" then since obviously what made coltrane great is not the fact that he could play variations on a scale for an hour!

― jess (dubplatestyle), Thursday, 16 September 2004 01:12 (twenty-one years ago)

actually come to think about it the better comparison might be trane vs. miles!

― jess (dubplatestyle), Thursday, 16 September 2004 01:14 (twenty-one years ago)

(which are way more prominent in rap in 2004 than they were in 1994)

yeah true.... but all i did was take a stab at a date when that started creeping in with force... the death knell of old school, if you will.

― amateur!!!st (amateurist), Thursday, 16 September 2004 01:15 (twenty-one years ago)

xpost: (cat on a "spiritual quest" [less a dig at trane than a distancing move re. face] that forces him to practice for hours a day vs. a guy who went from hardcore to schmaltz, attacking them both with the same intensity of skill.)

― jess (dubplatestyle), Thursday, 16 September 2004 01:16 (twenty-one years ago)

dee, i meant only what jess said in his last sentence of the post before this. actually three posts agosdfvcxgvc

― peter $.., Thursday, 16 September 2004 01:16 (twenty-one years ago)

elvis vs. beatles

― amateur!!!st (amateurist), Thursday, 16 September 2004 01:17 (twenty-one years ago)

god 2pac as one in a line of new elvises is an inspiring thought...

― amateur!!!st (amateurist), Thursday, 16 September 2004 01:17 (twenty-one years ago)

some get greil marcus on the line

― amateur!!!st (amateurist), Thursday, 16 September 2004 01:18 (twenty-one years ago)

ghost's beats have always seemed very "straight", a "straight foot", only funky in the most nominal-sense. i think this gives him a lot of space to do his thing without fucking up the rhythm of the whole track. instead of finding space within the off-beats

I've always thought that producers should give an mc a simple beat to lay down their verses, then alter and build on that beat. (Or even swap it completely for another beat) Have the music react to what the mc did. Then have the mc lay down lyrics again to that "new and improved" beat! And then....
I think I've heard about people doing this here and there, but it should be de rigeur.

― oops (Oops), Thursday, 16 September 2004 01:20 (twenty-one years ago)

Frankly, I think that 99% of producers aren't talented or musically imaginative enough to pull it off.

― oops (Oops), Thursday, 16 September 2004 01:21 (twenty-one years ago)

yeah i think more rap albums would probably be improved by producer and rapper working in-studio together at the same time, rather than by rapper buying beat CD-R's by the boatload.

― jess (dubplatestyle), Thursday, 16 September 2004 01:22 (twenty-one years ago)

miles davis overshadows coltrane's legacy, not only popularly, but in skill. coltrane was tame when it came to tech virtuosity, and it would be a terrible shame to write off miles as meandering thru scales aimlessly. of course i'm talking about him only in his prime. after bitch's brew, coltrane kept on doing interesting things, while miles was smoking crack, noodling around on keyboards. but that's irrelevant. our study is blind to everything after 1969.

― peter $.., Thursday, 16 September 2004 01:22 (twenty-one years ago)

i mean, if rap is going to be entering its age of prog-bloat and schmaltz-pop, we might as well get the goods to go along with it!

― jess (dubplatestyle), Thursday, 16 September 2004 01:24 (twenty-one years ago)

tupacs beats always had that smooth jazz quality anyways!

― peter $.., Thursday, 16 September 2004 01:26 (twenty-one years ago)

so rap needs a gil evans?

― scott seward (scott seward), Thursday, 16 September 2004 01:26 (twenty-one years ago)

I really like Madvilliany but what if DOOM and Madlib actually exchanged musical ideas? It could wind up being overthought and overtweaked, but I think, with 2 guys as talented as they are, it would almost have to improve DOOM's delivery, Madlib's beats, AND the sum of the two.

― oops (Oops), Thursday, 16 September 2004 01:27 (twenty-one years ago)

oops, producers don't do that bcs rappers mold their words to a beat. at least that's how pros seem and all the rappers i know seem to work. the beat cd-rs are a system that works. of course the sound fx dre dropped in ems early shit (before he produced himself) made things more interesting.
but it's interesting you brought that up. i have this vision of antipop-type prog rap where a rapper flows over a beat, and the producer molds the beat back to the flow. this is my get rich quick scheme, at least.

― peter $.., Thursday, 16 September 2004 01:29 (twenty-one years ago)

oops again, the problem w/madvillainy and jaylib is that they are lazy potheads. it is strange though

― peter $.., Thursday, 16 September 2004 01:32 (twenty-one years ago)

haha i was just gonna say that

― oops (Oops), Thursday, 16 September 2004 01:34 (twenty-one years ago)

coltrane was tame when it came to tech virtuosity

um what?

― djdee2005 (djdee2005), Thursday, 16 September 2004 05:49 (twenty-one years ago)

i think of ghost as the eric dolphy or rap, if we're gonna get into jazz analogies -- completely idiosyncratic while simultaneously completely indebted to a previous tradition. dolphy kinda takes canonical charlie parker bopisms into uncharted territory just like ghost, as jess said, adheres to perhaps now anachronistically (dated?)straight production that gives him both more room to style over as opposed to riffing on one particular rhythm or on the production: like 'on fire' where mr. banks basically has the same rhythm in his delivery the whole time; or, 'oh boy' or 'hold u down', when samples in the beat meld w/ the verses

jess also otm re: coltrane; i think someone like jay-z kind of embodies that same quality as being able to absolutely tear when he needs to but not letting that technical virtuosity get in the way when laying back is called for (cf. 'can't knock the hustle' and 'softly as in a morning sunrise'). ghost can't lay back like lil flip or biggie or pac, but then again i don't really need him to

― jake b. (cerybut), Thursday, 16 September 2004 08:10 (twenty-one years ago)

Coltrane died in '67, bitches brew wz recorded in '69, btw. But both had their problems with drugs and constantly broke their groups and changed who they were playing with. Miles engaged with funk and rock, coltrane went into 'free' and african percussion. I don't mind either as individual players and gd techinique on trumpet is diff to gd technique on sax; 'trane isn't as big a fave on sax as some others, but then again I've heard more sax than trumpet players.

― Julio Desouza (jdesouza), Thursday, 16 September 2004 10:13 (twenty-one years ago)

tame in that the sax isn't like the trumpet. :0

― peter $.., Thursday, 16 September 2004 11:34 (twenty-one years ago)

this is a great thread. for a frustratingly short example of what a production-rapper symbiosis like the one proposed above might sound like, see 1:41 to 1:44 of freeway's "in my life".

― m. (mitchlnw), Thursday, 16 September 2004 13:59 (twenty-one years ago)

Oh man I hadn't seen this thread at all until just now! I was all gonna be like "man, I loooove Doom and all, but you've got to be kidding me".

― nickalicious (nickalicious), Thursday, 16 September 2004 14:13 (twenty-one years ago)

btw breath control otm

― peter $.., Thursday, 16 September 2004 15:31 (twenty-one years ago)

I think it's just Madlib that's the lazy pothead, 'cause MF Doom has more stuff out (three albums -- Madvillainy, Viktor Vaughn 2, and better-than-both* MM Food -- two 'Special Herbs' comps, and a fuckload of guestspots). Maybe he mixes weed with methamphetamines. Staying blunted but keeping busy.

*assuming you like long mostly-instrumental/comedy sample interludes and a track featuring MC Paul Barman being a fucking dork**. I do. On occasion.

**oh settle down, it's for like 90 seconds and he drops this great Smurfs reference

― alfalfa romeo (natepatrin), Thursday, 16 September 2004 22:11 (twenty-one years ago)

(re MM Food: "Beef Rap" + "Super" + "Con Carne" + "One Beer" + "Chocolate Milk" = fill the rest of the record with outtakes from that last Styles of Beyond record and I'm still happy)

― alfalfa romeo (natepatrin), Thursday, 16 September 2004 22:13 (twenty-one years ago)

(actually it's "Con Queso" that's the fuck-yeah track; "Con Carne" is merely good)

― alfalfa romeo (natepatrin), Thursday, 16 September 2004 22:14 (twenty-one years ago)

two years pass...

-- oops (Oops), Thursday, September 16, 2004 1:20 AM (2 years ago) Bookmark Link

oops... otm?

― and what, Saturday, 18 August 2007 20:46 (eighteen years ago)

HAH

― mark s, Saturday, 18 August 2007 21:22 (eighteen years ago)

o god plz go back in tym and forcibly inject tranquilizers into my etc

― luriqua, Saturday, 18 August 2007 21:28 (eighteen years ago)

if you take something like 'get buck' for instance: yeah polow's extra sprinkles make that more super fun, but it still doesnt overshadow the fact that buck's rap is fucking awesome and not very easy to pull off at all either, even though it's not some tricksy twista shit at first glance. (cannot imagine any rapper killing that beat better in fact.) so i dunno, it depends what angle youre looking at it from i guess? (oops kinda makes it sound like "... and hopefully if we layer over the rappers enough we'll finally have some bloody MUSIC for a change")

― r|t|c, Saturday, 18 August 2007 21:38 (eighteen years ago)

y didn't someone ddos me

― luriqua, Saturday, 18 August 2007 21:43 (eighteen years ago)

^^^ blog it ^^^

a e if u revive that vanilla ice thread we will be at e-war again ftl, fuck the world

― luriqua, Saturday, 18 August 2007 21:51 (eighteen years ago)

^^^ stop bringing shame upon urself

seppuku tym

― luriqua, Saturday, 18 August 2007 21:55 (eighteen years ago)

internal rage meter 4 luriqua: [||||||||] HARD RAGE

― luriqua, Saturday, 18 August 2007 21:57 (eighteen years ago)

one year passes...

tupac ruined hip hop. there, i said it.
― oops (Oops), Wednesday, September 15, 2004 8:01 PM (4 years ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

― :) Mrs Edward Cullen XD (max), Tuesday, 25 November 2008 15:02 (seventeen years ago)

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