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BLAOW!, Part Two ? The Sound of Ghostface Killah Shattering Preconceived
Notions of Art and the Modern Aesthetic. Some might view ...
Submitted by wab2113 on December 18, 2007
Category: Music and Movies
Words: 1313 | Pages: 6
Views: 108
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Some might view the Ghostface Killah song "Holla," off his 2004 LP The Pretty Toney Album, as being a minimalist, lazy, unoriginal, nonsensical, or just plain bad piece of art, if it is indeed even art; such critics, however, miss the postmodern genius of the Wu-Tang member and Theodore Unit founder's radical aesthetic. After all, similar charges were leveled against poets like Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and William Carlos Williams, who are now firmly entrenched in the literary canon of Western civilization, and contemporary painters like David Salle, who pioneered American visual postmodernism with a succès de scandale in 1980's New York.
Ghostface produced "Holla" himself. At first glance, this seems to fall more in line with the punk "do it yourself" aesthetic than any sort of postmodernism. However, in the context of this song, "producing" simply means Ghostface chose the song he wanted to rap over, in this case The Delfonics' 1968 smash hit "La La (Means I Love You)." Because of this unique nature, an analysis of "Holla" is not possible without at least a cursory glance at the song that serves as its backdrop. This song, an enduring classic of soul in common time, was produced by Thom Bell and Stan Watson. It begins with the high-pitched sample of a fiddle, with a light drum loop that persists throughout the song. The fiddle soon drops out, leaving the drums, whose perseverance mirrors that of the main singer, who is determined to win the target of his affection despite his lack of wealth ("Now I don't wear no diamond ring"). While he cannot compete with his fellow suitors materially, he makes up for it in sincerity: while "their lines don't mean a thing," he says in the first verse, he adds in the second that "the things I am sayin' are true." His earnestness is also evident in the longing nature of his voice, the way he cannot even find words to express his feelings, saying instead that "la la la la la la la la la means I love you," accented by...
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