What can justify a line as icky as “She wants me to come all over her damn face”? This can: “I can still hear the voices of the children I never had”.
Sampling off Curtis Mayfield’s 1970 first solo album (the bass line is all the way thru the track), Kanye is considering the repercussions of promiscuity in ways rap stars don’t. The song is dour, nasty, a downer. But the question raised is almost theological perverse. It is Biblical: spilling your seed on stone, onanism as sin: a vision of a promiscuity without risk as serial killing of children never born. “I never understood planned parenthood, because I never met nobody planned to be a parent in the hood…”
In away, this is a future song, Kanye passed on with “Power”: the concerns are so deep, so at the heart of the matter, I don’t understand what it is doing here.
I’ve never heard anybody sing about the irresponsibility of birth control, or, perhaps I mean, price of it.
Jay-Z has performed his best raps since American Gangster on Kanye’s tracks. Much, much superior than BP3. That’s why you shouldn’t lie about music, when you hear them perform something really great, like Jay-Z’s rap here, you have nothing to compare it to.
But the song isn’t good: it is a terrible failure flaying in all directions with no centrifugal force to it. It is a failure worth 20 successes.
It is hip hop as the art form Jay-Z has been claiming it is and it still sucks.
By the way, if you don’t know the 1970 Curtis you do anyway, not just the sampled here “The Making Of You” but also “(Don’t Worry) If There’s A Hell Down Below We’re All Going To Go”, and “We the People Who Are Darker Than Blue”. the extended version includes an 8 minute plus “Move On Up” and some terrific demo versions.
If i was in a Mayfield mood and writing my top ten albums of all time I think I could include it as well as the masterpiece he wrote for Aretha Franklin, Sparkle.