Overtones is a column by Jayson Greene that examines how certain sounds-- a snare crack, a synth blob, a ghostly string sample-- linger in our minds and lives.
"On Sight", the first song on Kanye West's Yeezus, is a vengefully ugly piece of music. The snarling pile of synths that jump-start the song are so corroded that it's difficult to discern where the beat is, or if Kanye's voice falls on it. It is the most bracingly amusical moment of the rapper’s career-- it hits like a blast from a riot hose. But then, a minute and sixteen seconds in, something even more interesting happens: a soul sample crashes in.
Well, it isn't a soul song, strictly speaking. It's a soulful gospel number, called "(Sermon) He’ll Give Us What We Really Need", recorded by the South Side Chicago choir the Holy Name of Mary Choral Family. And it isn't technically a sample, either-- according to Yeezus lore, it's a painstaking studio recreation of the original, commissioned by panicked label executives as a backup plan while Kanye reportedly spent the dwindling hours before the album's release tracking down the choir director for permission instead of finishing the record.
But these details don't change the impact of the hymn: in the suggestion of popping vinyl, wobbly pitch center, and faded-world poignance, there is no mistaking how Kanye wants it to perceived: It is a Soul Sample on a Kanye West Record, no matter how it got there. Of all the rich discussion fodder West dumped in our laps this week with the proudly unfinished-sounding Yeezus, I found myself increasingly drawn to these little moments where he gestured, however faintly, towards his earlier self. They felt like dropped clues.
There's something taunting and mean about the soul samples on Yeezus; they are like nightmare versions of West’s earliest work.
Few rappers or producers this millennium, after all, have a more intimate relationship with soul music than Kanye West. And on a record about forcibly severing all ties, the one tangled thread Kanye can't bring himself to cut completely is this one, linking him to the most universally beloved black music of the last 50 years. But the relationship has changed, or curdled: The voices rip through like unwelcome memories, dropping rudely into the evil din and then cutting right back out again, like a needle knocked off a turntable. The snippet of "What We Really Need" on "On Sight" plays uninterrupted, like tears streaming down a face, for 13 seconds, before it is snuffed out. West echoed this gesture in his recent New York Times Q&A with Jon Caramanica, summoning his beloved early soul-rap beats and dismissing them in the same breath: "Jay-Z was an amazing communicator that made the soul sound extremely popular," he said. "And because I could make the soul sound in my sleep, it finally gave me a platform."
It was Caramanica, in that interview, who first called Yeezus "the anti-College Dropout." Back in those early days, when West was sporting the "pink Polo and a fucking backpack," he sampled Nina Simone for "Get By", a song about desperation that used Simone's music as a ray of hope and determination. On Yeezus, Simone is once again sampled. A loop of her voice from "Strange Fruit" is the Angel of Death on "Blood on the Leaves", balefully cataloging the "black bodies swinging in the summer breeze." There is no hope here, only horrors. There's something taunting, and mean, about these moments; they are like nightmare versions of West’s earliest work.
Hip-hop and soul music have always maintained a volatile, uneasy symbiosis. In his 2010 memoir Decoded, Jay-Z wrote about the potent mix of emotions soul music inspired in him. “The music from that era was incredible, full of emotion," he writes. "[It] was beautiful in part because it was keeping a kind of torch lit in a dark time. I feel like we-- rappers, DJs, producers-- were able to smuggle some of the magic of that dying civilization out in our music and use it to build a new world. We were kids without fathers, so we found our fathers on wax and on the streets and in history, and in a way, that was a gift: We got to pick and choose the ancestors who would inspire the world we were going to make for ourselves."
The generations of rappers who fell in love with that grand, burnished soul sound loved it, in part, for the vanished world of their parents it represented. Soul music could be lots of things-- anguished, driven, consumed by lust or spiritual torment-- but even at its darkest, it was always lit with at least a faint ray hope. Rap is not hopeful music; it is music predicated on the understanding that determination can be hope's viable substitute.
The dance between hip-hop and soul has always been on either side of this lens, and rappers who tapped into it found ways to tag it, make it their own. When Ghostface Killah screams about beat-downs and the squalor of his early-80s childhood, for example, over the Delfonics’ sunlit hymn of pure devotion “La-La Means I Love You" on "Holla", he makes a devastating point-- about worlds gone, about cherished memories clutched to through dark times, about not-quite-extinguished hopes, and how the glowing embers they become so often take the form of cherished old songs. The juxtaposition is so rich with poetic contrasts that it opens up little seams. It's like getting three songs for the price of one: Ghostface’s finely-observed street story, the amber-hued soul classic playing the background, and then the shadow song that opens in up in the tragic gulf between the Delfonics' "you are the one for me" and Ghostface pointing guns at your head.
Within Yeezus' sonic landscape, the hopeful music of previous
eras is more like gall rising in the throat than anything else.
You can hear a lot of this painful relationship with soul music on Yeezus: The samples are fleeting, improperly EQ'd, sort of unreal-sounding, and often mocking. They seem to evoke previous eras more as a taunt than a balm. West perverts lots of civil rights imagery in his lyrics, too: "I put my fist in her like a civil rights sign" is the most viscerally sickening thing he's ever said. On the same song, he turns "free at last" into "show me your tits." The jaundice on the record sounds like the 70s, or at least a version of that decade that lives on in our cultural memory-- burnt up tenements, curdled dreams. In this landscape, the hopeful music of previous eras is more like gall rising in the throat than anything else.
There is one relatively undefiled soul sample on Yeezus, and it comes with closer "Bound 2". The sample is by the Ponderosa Twins Plus One, a Cleveland group made up of two groups of identical twins and a school friend of theirs named Ricky Spicer. "Bound" was part of a two-sided single put out by Sylvia Robinson on All Platinum Records, the imprint that would eventually be reborn-- after Fed investigations, bankruptcy, and a fateful visit to the Harlem World nightclub, where Lovebug Starski was performing-- as Sugar Hill Records, hip-hop's first hit label. This is a tiny piece of the genre's sacred text, a background detail in its origin story, and West treats it with a tenderness that feels touching after the brutalizations of the previous 36 minutes. It plays out, untouched and flowing, while West gives us as much of a devotional pledge as he feels capable of: "Ayo, we made it to Thanksgiving/ So ay, maybe we could make it to Christmas." This isn't hope, exactly, but it is a viable substitute.