Have you ever been so mad at something you need to take your time before you respond to it? Like, it upsets you so much you have to back off it so you can calm down before you actually tackle it? Yeah, this song did it for me. It's taken me more than two years since it was released before I finally calmed down enough to write something. Why? Because in my mind, minus 20 seconds, this could have been an absolute classic, a banger, a song people would talk about 30 years from now due to how perfect it is. We're talking, "Papa Was a Rolling Stone" or "Sympathy for the Devil" level.
The T.L. Barrett sample at the beginning setting the mood, the Metro Boomin' tag dropping perfectly into the melody, and the up-tempo flow mixed with Kid Cudi singing the hook make an almost gospel song out of this. It's church music for the new millennium. Praise was written about this saying it was both advanced and familiar at the same time, which is something difficult to do. (Gnarls Barkley's "Crazy" comes to mind when I think of those two things happening simultaneously.) "Beautiful morning, you're the sun in my morning babe!" What a great line. The song just keeps moving, flowing in the right direction with a beat that just puts a smile on your face. Kanye's a great producer, as he's shown on other people's albums, and I feel him collabing with Metro Boomin was the right thing to do. Two straight up pros bringing the best out of each other. Then comes that 20 seconds I mention above.
But before I get to why that part upsets me, let's do the rest of the song AFTER the 20 seconds. The song moves back into a discussion about how he met the girl mentioned in the missing 20, which follows a very familiar trope in popular music discussing a love interest and how they make you feel. Familiar, but not worn out. The rest of the song, with the backing vocals and the music make this song a classic! It was used numerous times in Vines back before that App was killed by twitter, and even in a lot of YouTube videos, showing it had a lot of reach. The fact that it was so popular, and still is apparently among Kanye fans, shows that people agree with me. There's nothing that would have stopped this song from hitting Hip-Hop immortality like songs that enter the mainstream and stay there forever. (I'm thinking "Shook Ones Pt. 2", "California Love", even "White Lines".) But that 20 seconds kills all of it.
Now, the 20 seconds I'm going to talk about completely kills, in my opinion, all of the song. For my audience, I'll describe it as best I can without actually using the words Kanye does, since cursing ain't my forte in the blog. He describes having relations with a model who uses skin lightening techniques on a private part of her body, which then gets on his t-shirt making him feel stupid. He repeats the word describing the body part and uses it to describe himself. Honestly, that makes it sound more intelligent than it does in the actual song. It's apathetic writing at its best, and idiocy at its worst. This is a man that wrote some amazing songs with great lyrics. (My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is a classic, no matter what you think of Kanye.) So much could have been done with it, and he's a clever enough wordsmith to make a story out of it. I keep thinking Slick Rick would have KILLED that verse with his sing-song flow and told a story of meeting a girl. They could have kept the portion after about being high when he met her down in Tribeca and it still would have had me bopping. But no, gotta put in the portion about getting bleach on his t-shirt. It still astounds me that the guy who wrote "Monster" and produced "Izzo (H.O.V.A.)" could be so disinterested in what is obviously lighting in a jar.
So there you have it. So many words about 20 seconds in a song. It should have been better, and it kills me that there is an almost perfect song out there that I could have shared with my son to demonstrate why hip-hop is actually an art form that should be respected. Maybe Kanye can write a song called, "20 Seconds from perfection" as a rebuttal. I'd probably listen to it.
