| OutKast – A Life in the Day of Benjamin Andre (Incomplete) Lyrics | 17 years ago |
| One of the greatest hip-hop songs I've ever heard. A five-minute verse that tells a story with enough depth to fill ten novels. I especially love how he talks about Cadillacs in the beginning, and then comes back to it at the end...a song that's cyclical and elliptic. It's a song about missed connections, and the singsong lyrics, with its off-kilter rhyme schemes, supports this - nothing rhymes how you think it would, but it all falls together like acrobats catching each other at the last moment. He talks about the women in his life (two in particular), technology, the nature of art ("you stand blindfolded against the wall, we throw the darts, to poke you in the heart"), and just about everything else. The unreliability of language is a theme here (there are the people who try to guess Andre's Jamaican from his accent, and there's that line about the kid who never spoke because words fucked it up), as is lost love, both with regrets and without. I may be eading too much into it, but it's one of the greatest hip-hop songs ever, and I can only assume he spent a month or so working out the lyrics. It's like he knew he had made an album without any rap, so he poured it all into this one rap song. And the beat is slammin' too. A perfect song. | |
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