Killer Mike ft. Bun B, T.I., and Trouble – Big Beast
No one’s got anything to say about Trouble’s chorus…
[Video][Website]
[6.89]
Anthony Easton: Why did this take four people?
[3]
Patrick St. Michel: In which New Yorker El-P tries to recreate the ugly 808 beats dotting countless Southern mixtapes, only for his production to veer off into Definitive Jux territory. Whereas someone like Gucci Mane would take a beat like this for some great punch lines, Killer Mike uses it to make his verbal haymakers that much more forceful. Bun B and T.I. sound fine but this is all about the snarling delivery of Killer Mike pumped up by El-P’s production.
[7]
Colin Small: This song reminds me why baroque rap maximalists like Ice Cube and the Bomb Squad are less influential today then their fame might suggest: music with such little subtlety is difficult to make well. “Big Beast” is on the edge. Mike’s flow is an acquired taste: at his best, his in-your-face punch fits into a beat’s crevices in a way that it seems like it shouldn’t, creating an jaw-dropping fireball of emotion and energy. (See 2006’s “That’s Life” for a perfect example.) Here, that isn’t really the case. Bun B has been phoning in the same cadence since 2008’s “Paper Planes” remix, and T.I. just sounds lost. Despite all this, El-P’s production manages to maintain the song’s momentum through brute force.
[6]
Jonathan Bradley: Toward the end of the final verse here, Killer Mike spits “I don’t make dance music: this is R.A.P.” and so much of “Big Beast” is the epitome of everything I love about a particular kind of rap music. It’s hardheaded and ugly and ignorant; I haven’t heard unhinged stick-up rhymes like “Lurking in the club on tourist motherfuckers/Welcome to Atlanta — up your jewelry, motherfucker!” since M.O.P.’s “Ante Up.” (Yeah, and that includes 50’s “Ski Mask Way.”) Even more piquant is the buzzing and discordant instrumental; producer El-P takes “bring the noise” to be a challenge the way Public Enemy did. It makes sense that Bun B and T.I. — both unexpectedly lively! — quote Cube and Mike interpolates KRS-One; this is how you’re supposed to do it.
[9]
Brad Shoup: Never realized how much Mike’s timbre resembles KRS-One’s; if you squint you might think the Teacher’s riffing on himself on the final verse. He’s right, this isn’t Luda territory; this one shakes with rage. El-P’s drums land like shells, snaps wink at Atlanta’s hip-hop history while the foursome takes the industry hostage. True to his onomatopoeia reference, honorary Atlantan Bun B litters his verse with ee-ahs; T.I. tries to update Wayne’s “goon to a goblin” line with mixed results (what’s any threat to a coward?). For such a forward-pushing approach, though, it’s weird to see “no homo” dragged back into the light.
[8]
Alfred Soto: R.A.P. Music collects remembrances of ATL past unyellowed by nostalgia while harnessing an anger at political figures ranging from Ronald Reagan (honored with his own song) to Barack Hussein Obama himself for separating the rich from poor. The rage is there in “Big Beast,” which apart from allowing a wide-awake T.I. (a fact we shouldn’t sneeze at) to bite down hard assimilates the rhetoric of Occupy Wall Street: “We some money hungry wolves and we’re down to eat the rich.” Docked a notch for embarrassed fag baiting.
[7]
Jer Fairall: Read my score not as an underrating of what is, by all measurable standards, a most awesome track, or as tiny scraps being thrown at an ace Bun B verse, a searing El-P production or “he sat me on the porch, said ‘that’s where little dogs sit’/pointed at the yard, said ‘that’s where big dogs shit,'” but rather as encouragement to those listeners who for some reason have no plans on hearing anything else from R.A.P. Music, that this is an album that gets richer, deeper, angrier and more awesome as it progresses, and that this is track one.
[7]
Jonathan Bogart: I mean I know why posse cuts are fast-tracked to be singles — the same reason every new Marvel character meets either Wolverine or Spider-Man in the first couple months of their title — but the empty-calorie hardasssedness on display here is really only a scene-setter to a much richer and more furious album. Which isn’t to say Bun B and T.I. don’t deliver like the scene-stealing champs they are. And the Drive homage in the video is cute.
[7]
Will Adams: The music isn’t so much a big beast as it is a cataclysmic force of nature. El-P engineers an exhilarating frenzy of twisted distortion that repeatedly pummels you with the message “Everybody knows I’m a mothafuckin monster” more than that other song’s music did. It ends up doing this much more effectively than the rappers on top of it, though. Bun B’s sharp coming-of-age tale comes closest, but as it stands now: where can I find the instrumental?
[8]
Anthony, was your pithy/inscrutable comment supposed to be clever? or funny? It is neither.
nope, it was genuine.
A reminder that this song makes me feel like throwing people through brick walls.
As long as you throw four people, presumably.
Mike’s opening verse actually made me jump up from my desk one day and nearly break the light fixture with my head. Not a lot of songs do that.
Yeah, this is still pretty great.
“nope, it was genuine.”
Genuinely what? It’s impossible to parse except as a less-than-pointed wisecrack.
Sometimes, brevity is the soul of condescension.
I like how Mike’s first verses are kind of rhythmically foursquare, which sets up a nice contrast with the behind-the-beat Bun B verses and the loping T.I. verses. It makes Mike sound relatively fierce. His final verses take more liberties with the beat, but he’s proved his point.
I do not understand what happened in the studio, to require a song this simple, to have four performers or writers. I am not condescending, I am cuirous.
Have you heard of “guest spots” on rap singles? It’s a thing. (You’ve reviewed other examples.)
Also, have you heard of duets? It’s where two different singers contribute to one song. Sometimes they harmonize, sometimes they alternate verses. Often (as is presumably the intention), each contributes something different, whether its just a different timbre or a different persona.
It also might be the case that the rapper T.I., in particular, is a bigger name than Killer Mike, and his presence on the lead track/single would pique the curiosity of those who would not have otherwise listened to or purchased an album by Killer Mike.
Next week on Pop Music 101, I’ll be talking about “radio play”: what is it, who needs it.
Also, less patronizingly: I’m curious what you mean by “simple.”
i am not sure that this text holds up the weight of four voices.
Do you mean “holds up the weight” or “holds up under the weight”? Does this mean the voices are too heavy or the text is too frail? And what do you mean by text? “Text” as in lyrics? “Text” as in “I took one too many cultural-studies courses at university”?
You do not convince me that you are actually uncertain of why there should be four rappers/singers on this track (as for writers, well as the Giant from “Twin Peaks” would say, “one and…the same”). It is a song that reps Atlanta. It is on an album by veteran commercial underachiever for whom a new label has high hopes. Therefore, it probably seemed like a good idea to invite two arguably more famous Atlanta rappers to take several verses apiece on the lead single. There’s a possibility it may also have been fun (not to be confused with fun.).
The imperatives are clear. If you think the execution falls down, and that seems to be what is going on, you have failed to make a single observation about the song that scans let alone convinces. At this point, you’re either taking the piss, being willfully obscurantist in an attempt to cultivate some kind of “sideways-thinker” mystique, or just totally obtuse. Or some combination of the three.
Whatever. Keep on with your bad self etc.
We were getting somewhere before this took a dark turn into U MAD BROville.
Ted:
The second paragraph was really useful. I do not know as much about hip-hop as I should. When I say things like “I am not sure” or say that I do not understand, then I want information so that I can become a better critic. I rarely make rhetorical questions
I don’t like this track (i like the video, I like some of the musical introduction. But what I don’t like about this track, is that though it talked about Atlanta in interesting ways, is that the four narratives combined into a lesser one. It seemed to have the same kind of story told over and over again to diminishing returns. It seems that it is much more sophisticated than I gave it credit for.
Listening to this several times after you brought this to my awareness, I understand the overlapping of narratives is much smarter than I had previously not noted.
As for using the word text–it’s not that unusual (you could find much better examples of spending too much time in grad school than that–flanuese is this year’s best example) I meant all of the stuff that surrounds the song, as well as the song itself. So, it’s not just the lyrics, but all of the studio politics you mentioned, that are involved in it as well.
One more thing–one of the great things about the Jukebox for me, is that it features a stable of critics who are willing to talk about things that they are “experts” at, but also, that they are learning about. In this sense, it’s an experiment in taste, and in the implications of pop music on the listener. I feel like it would become circle jerky and boring if it was the same four people who wrote about the same four genres.
Thank you for making me listening to the song more carefully, and more explciitly. It should be changed to a 6 or a 7 instead of a three.
Cheers
ase
Anthony, thank you for your kind response, especially when my replies have been fairly uncivil. But I believe you have just proven my point.
Since your last post is just a more patient and less impacted version of what you wrote in the original roundtable, why not just write in a way that is clear and communicative in the first place? Perhaps it takes a few more minutes to resolve the opaque “Why did this take four people?” into the clear-as-day “It seemed to have the same kind of story told over and over again to diminishing returns” (though frankly it seems like that process was working in reverse: you compacted a simple, legible observation into something that sounds suggestively pithy and oblique). But the difference is between something that doesn’t strive to communicate and something that does.
Lest you think I’m picking on a minor comment, many of your contributions to TSJ overall strike me either pretentiously verbiose or affectedly naïve (though equally banal or meaningless). Occasionally you write a clear, sensible, “textually”-supported observation, and in those cases I find myself agreeing with you more often than not.