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Crazy in love
By Oliver Wang
HIGH SCHOOL DANCES
were my personal laboratories for testing out new forms of
awkwardness. Yet, even when I was planted along the gym wall, there'd
be some songs that could drag me onto the parquet with blissful
abandon: the Cure's "Close to Me," Erasure's "Chains
of Love," and the atomic bomb of late-'80s suburban teen anthems,
New Order's "Bizarre Love Triangle." These songs invoked
what I recognize in hindsight as quintessential pop experiences,
luring me into a fantasy world where everything sounded and felt
perfect. Even if the moment only lasted three minutes, I could lose
myself – on the dance floor, in the car, with headphones –
in that manufactured magic. Soon after high school, though, those
encounters faded away. Blame hip-hop.
Or better said, blame
hip-hop's mistrust of pop. When I was forming a hip-hop consciousness,
the success of Hammer and Vanilla Ice alarmed the rap community
into treating pop as anathema to our ideal of artistic purity. In
our paranoid prognosticating, we were worried that hip-hop would
dissolve into pop, but we couldn't see what is obvious now –
it's pop that's begging for hip-hop's blessing.
Billboard confirmed
this two months back when, for the first time ever, all its top-10
singles slots were taken up by black R&B and rap artists. However,
I didn't need to read the paper to appreciate how deeply hip-hop
had redefined pop. That moment of realization came listening to
the Neptunes' "Frontin'. " Right around where Pharrell
begins to pant on the bridge, I remember what it's like to lose
myself in the sheer joy of pop – as enthralling as it is ephemeral.
The Neptunes, in particular, have learned how to distill shiny,
happy feelings into a sound, whether on Snoop Dogg's intoxicating
"Beautiful" or in the irresistible pull of Justin Timberlake's
"Rock Your Body."
These sublime moments
of pop brilliance filled 2003. When my girlfriend's sister got married
in September, she eschewed Mendelssohn's traditional recessional,
blasting Beyoncé's "Crazy in Love" instead, and
it was perfect. It's those horns, so lovingly lifted from the Chi-Lites
and polished by producer Rich Harrison. They're impossibly loud,
dramatic, passionate – just the kind of anthem for a pair of
newlyweds to charge into the world with. Unlike more patient songs,
"Crazy in Love" has no buildup – it's all release
from jump. I initially resisted it, more out of skepticism from
Beyoncé's celebrity, but once I got past the fact that she's
young, rich, and gorgeous, the song broke me like peanut butter
brittle.
Much the same can be
said of André 3000's "Hey Ya!," possibly the most
rousing, joyful song I've heard all year. I first heard it as I
was driving down Sunset Avenue after buying The Love Below
from the Hollywood Amoeba Music, and had anyone glanced into my
car, all they would have seen was a crop of black hair uncontrollably
shaking ("like a Polaroid picture!") back and forth. The
beauty of "Hey Ya!" (and The Love Below in general)
is that it's hip-hop that doesn't sound like hip-hop. André
takes a riff from '60s surf rock, gives it a Bootsy Collins swirl
with some Toni Basil hand claps thrown in, and mints a classic that's
as hip-hop to me as anything Jay-Z, 50 Cent, or Gang Starr dropped
this year. Maybe more so.
What's changed is that
after a decade-plus of keeping them at arm's length, my hip-hop
sensibilities and pop nostalgia have finally made peace. As a result,
I'm finally reawakening long dormant feelings of being young, innocent,
and open (just sans all the teenage angst that normally tagged along,
too). It is a blessing to know that even as I enter my '30s, there's
still music out there that makes me want to be 16 again, zits and
all, trying to hold on to a song as hard as I can before the moment
ends.
2003's best singles
• Beyoncé,
"Crazy in Love" (Columbia)
• André
3000, "Hey Ya!" (Arista)
• Neptunes, "Frontin'
" (Star Trak)
• 50 Cent, "In
da Club" (Interscope)
• LA Carnival,
"Blind Man" (Cut Chemist Remix) (Stonesthrow)
• Killer Mike,
"A.D.I.D.A.S." (Epic)
• Antibalas Afrobeat
Orchestra, "Che Che Cole Makossa"
• Method Man and
Ghostface Killah, "No Friend"
• DJ Shadow, "Right
Thing" (Z-Trip Remix) (Mo Wax)
• Mr. Lif, "Live
from the Plantation" (Definitive Jux)
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last month's noise.
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