A Decade on Shuffle, Part 2: Crime Tales and Faint Hope
The dices have spoken: lots of rap in this entry, plus one monument of French chanson.
Before I continue this trip within my music pantheon of the last decade, here’s a quick proposal: if you like this newsletter, feel free to forward it to one person we both know and love, and who could be reasonably interested in my erratic writings. I try to avoid the social media noise, I’m not in the mood for retweets, and I like the intimacy of a small, familiar audience. I trust you to choose wisely.
On that note, back to our randomized program…
22.
Rick Ross ft. Stalley - Ten Jesus Pieces (2012)
In his great memoir Hurricanes, Rick Ross used a quasi-biblical catchphrase that neatly summarizes the idea of Rick Ross as a myth-builder, but also a certain ethos at the core of hip-hop culture. “I was rapping my reality but I was also rapping my destiny”, he wrote, “I was speaking things into existence.” Since his breakthrough with the motivational anthem “Hustlin’” in 2006, the Miami rapper has indeed spoken into existence a larger-than-life street emperor persona. Through sheer gusto and relentless focus, Ross made it an ever-expanding work of art, leaving in the dust long-standing debates about hip-hop veracity. “Ten Jesus Pieces”, the final track off God Forgives, I Don’t, his fifth studio album, feels like the spiritual apex of the Rick Ross story, an interweave of struggle, luxury, pride and gratitude. The production of J.U.S.T.I.C.E League, key architects of Rick Ross’s lavish sound, makes the song one of hip-hop’s all-time great album closers. Building upon a heart-wrenching sample from R&B vet Jeffrey Osborne, the trio rolls the end credits over a backdrop of ambiguous emotions—intoxicating like a victory lap, yet poignant as an elegy. Ross released more albums ever since, but “Ten Jesus Piece” might remain his definitive sign-off.
05.
Drake - Further Thing (2013)
The 2010s were pretty much the Drake decade (the Drakeade?). The Toronto upstart became a cultural behemoth by blurring genres and postures—a cocksure rapper consumed by self-doubt, an R&B heartthrob with an inclination for goofiness, a grand curator of emerging sounds, and the savviest pop star in the meme-verse. By 2019, Drake was one of the most reliable music IPs on Earth, delivering a humming routine of hits, but the early years of the decade represented a specific, and ultimately short-lived phase of his career: Drake as a thoughtful album conductor. With 2013’s Nothing Was the Same, Drake and his close-knit roster of producers refined the formula established in Take Care two years earlier. Listening to a Drake album meant sharing his triumphs and grievances, in some kind of airtight environment that felt like success but always carried an air of desolation. In the first minutes of Nothing Was the Same, “Further Thing” captures that quintessential Drake vibe, with its ready-made Instagram captions (opening line: “Somewhere between psychotic and iconic”), its connoisseur nods to local rap heroes (a sample of Memphis rapper’s La Chat) and this melodic blur that approximates the feeling of flying a private jet through the clouds after taking one too many Xanax. Drake’s uncanny ability to mix the brash and the miserable—a true millennial feeling—might explain why so much of the zeitgeist of the 2010s felt just like him.
64.
SCH - Gomorra (2015)
Crime tales have been a staple of French rap throughout the genre’s history. Mixing off movie influences and real-life street stories, rappers would inhabit gangster figures for storytelling purposes, and with divisive effects (the pitfalls of the gangster fantasy has long remained a flashpoint amongst fans, critics and artists). In the nineties, these songs generally functioned as escapism through fiction—think of Stomy Bugsy’s committed acting in “Avoir le pouvoir” or Oxmo Puccino’s pulpy “Pucc’ Fiction”. Yet, along the way, the stories got increasingly bleaker, darker and maybe a little too literal. “Gomorra”, a standout track from Southern rapper SCH, is a testimony to the exploding popularity of the genre in 2015 (the video racks up 44 millions views on YouTube) and its troubling fascination with violence (the video also has a body count of six deaths, the gentlest one by poisoned pizza). One way to look at this trend is that rap simply reflected the evolution of crime drama in this century, peeling away the glamour for more surgical realism (the song and its video are inspired by Gomorrah, Roberto Saviano’s cold examination of Napolitan mafia turned into a cross-media franchise). Another, more pessimistic view is that fast money and mindless violence have become one of the very few horizons available. In that sense, “Gomorra” sadly echoes the casualties of drug trafficking in and around Marseille, home of SCH, over the last few years. What’s left is a brutally intense and operatic track, elevated by the use of Auto-Tune, the inescapable pitch-correction software. As he muses about eye-for-an-eye vengeance until no one is left standing, SCH’s digitalized voice sounds like a long repressed sob, or a plea for help. It’s the saving grace of “Gomorra”: a concealed vulnerability that this lifestyle, whether real of imaginary, can hardly authorize.
78.
Bernard Lavilliers, Jeanne Cherhal - L'Espoir (2017)
There’s something in “L’Espoir” that I can’t quite explain, by lack of musical training. It’s in the piano, and how the main motif evolves through the verse, but never really soars. Instead it goes in a lower, somber place. It’s a remarkable melodic idea for a song called “Hope”. Since the early 70s, Bernard Lavilliers has been a mainstay of French chanson, delivering classics across a wide spectrum of genres, from protest songs to reggae to paranoid rock. A folk singer at heart, Lavilliers has sung portraits of everyday characters set up against the punishing forces of History. “L’Espoir”, a late-era single written and recorded with Jeanne Cherhal, presents the same worldview, but here the song feels deeply personal. The lyrics evoke hell and anger and war, but what prevails is not indignation, but a feeling of newfound serenity. When I heard the song for the first time, in late 2017, I was walking in the Paris streets. It was the end of the summer, and I couldn’t help but hearing in “L’Espoir” an oblique memory of the recent tragedies that shook the city to its core. I heard something about me too, and how my life had changed for the better. It was timely and moving. “L’Espoir” conveyed the possibility of happiness, always fragile, bruised by life chaos, but ready to blossom with every new morning.
59.
Young M.A - Walk (2017)
The video for “Walk”, one of many one-and-done tracks released by Brooklyn rapper Young M.A’s in the late 2010s, has the ideal setup to showcase her no-frill technique. Like “OOOUUU”, her breakthrough hit from 2016, the “Walk” video takes place in a sparsely-decorated environment. There she is, in a bare-bone recording studio, wandering around, lighting a blunt, drifting out of focus and out of her own lip-syncing, interacting with the camera like she’s giving a pep talk to a close associate. Young M.A belongs to a dynasty of rappers for whom the act of rapping shouldn’t feel like a well-rehearsed performance, rather a casual conversation carried on with extreme swagger. It’s deliberate effortlessness—rapping like she’s not rapping. The sinister beat, which aggregates layers of horror movie soundbites, suffuses the air with a menace that Young M.A, a master of cold understatement, only needs to suggest.
In the previous entry, I wrote about James Blake, Frank Ocean, Julien Doré, Sampha and Mohini Geisweiller. Check out the full playlist on Tidal and Spotify.