Pampelmoose by Dave Allen of Gang of Four — music . media . web. culture

I’m always interested in what Sasha Frere-Jones has to say about music, especially hip hop, as he has a great knack at being clear and concise in his overviews. I recently read his take on Lil Wayne’s single A Milli. That’s the link to the whole piece but here’s the relevant clip –

“Lil Wayne’s “Tha Carter III” went double platinum in eight weeks. It is the biggest hip-hop album of the year, and will likely be one of the year’s biggest pop albums, too, in terms of both sales and cultural footprint. One indication of the album’s momentum and appeal is “A Milli,” currently the number six song on the Billboard Hot 100.

“Tha Carter III” selling a million copies in the first week was one thing; “A Milli” becoming a pop hit is quite another. “A Milli” is not a crossover song sweetened for the radio with borrowed hooks or easy melodies. The beat, by the producer Bangladesh, is both heavy and barely there, built from a sub-bass kick, a thin snare, and synthetic handclaps, none of which play at the same time. The song stops and starts, and never really builds up a head of steam. There is no chorus, and no melodic information beyond a loop that shouldn’t work but does: a vocal sample from a 1990 single by a A Tribe Called Quest that never, ever stops. Though the words sound like “a milli, a milli” repeated over and over, the sampled lyric may originally have been “a biddley-biddley,” a common opening gambit for MCs in Jamaican dancehall during the seventies and eighties. (Imagine a patois version of “Check, 1, 2,” or “Yo, yo.”)”

The last time I fell for a minimal groove/beat was a few years back when Pharrell dropped “Can I Have It Like That,” a slyly, sexy yet monotonous beat that nonetheless bubbled along with a sprinkling of glitter on top provided by Gwen Stefani’s vocal additions. Lil’Wayne tears things down to the foundations compared to that one.

Lil’ Wayne – A Milli
Pharrell – Can I Have It Like That