this is me dumping now 008
On rapping your ass off, trying to rap your ass off at karaoke, and BuffCorrell
Last week kicked my ass and I missed publishing a linkdump. But I have a good reason for all of last week’s busyness: this week is VACATION. What am I doing for a week of vacation? NOT WORKING. On this week of the newsletter I’ll publish two themed linkdumps and a normal linkdump in the lead up to Me Now 111: an interview about sports betting.
Today’s theme is about karaoke, rap as performance, and my favorite YouTuber (that word still feels denigrating but I mean it with the utmost respect) BuffCorrell. The conversation on rap as performance started on an instagram story months ago some folks asked me to say more about. Today’s newsletter includes liberal resharing of the original posts and today’s extension of the conversation leaves us at the feet of not the best performers but the most committed. Laypeople embark on a perilous journey performing a rap song via karaoke. BuffCorrell is the apotheosis of karaoke commitment. If you’ve been around me over the last few years and given me access to a TV with YouTube on it you have likely seen BuffCorrell before. If not, strap in.
To open this up let’s start with THE all-time BuffCorrell performance. His Owl City cover:
Sharing the Ice Spice remix of “Fisherr” by Cash Cobain to my instastory started the original conversation. That combination of beat and flow scratched my itch for rap as a meditative salve, Gunna’s “Top Off” did the same for me during grad school. “Top Off” is at it’s best in Gunna’s COLORS performance. Quoting myself: I’m really interested in rap as performance, something lost over streaming, and so something about this COLORS performance I love is the way the song is delivered. If you watch (I’ll link) you can notice the moments Gunna is making thoughtful efforts as to whether to rock, bounce, gesture, etc all in the service of breath control. Something both over-and under-discussed in rap. But it’s the reason you should never do a rap song at karaoke, most songs require a kind of effort you won’t expect when you’re skipping whole lines in the car singing to yourself. And so I’ve always appreciated the way Gunna sneaks every breath, soundlessly, into the moments he’s on the up bounce in this video.
Do BuffCorrell’s dance moves get better than in the music break on Tame Impala’s “The Less I Know the Better”? I think not:
What followed that first insta story was a should’ve-been-working posting spiral. I shared two other great COLORS performances in the rant. First Schoolboy Q doing “Numb Numb Juice.” Quoting myself: “Numb Numb Juice” as a song is wild too. I couldn’t [karaoke] it if I wanted. This screenshot is the moment Q pantomimes a gospel singer to hold that “let’s get iiiiiittttttttttt” and you can see how much air it takes and how much his posture shifts to accommodate that
And Freddie Gibbs doing “Fake Names.” Self-quoting: I also think both of these performances are wondrous in their own ways. That Freddie [screenshot] is taken the moment after the beat changes and he comes back to the song with renewed energy and ferocity. He also has a bad (good?) case of Rapper Hands, something I was accused of in my undergrad pub comm class
Back to today. Something curiously human happens when BuffCorrell picks up a rap song: he runs out of breath and dances less. By all appearances BuffCorrell is fit as hell. He’s been posting videos to YouTube at a steady clip for eleven years. There are over 2,000 of them. When you watch as many BuffCorrell videos as I have you begin to predict how a known song will go even before watching. About two minutes in, reality appears, singing AND dancing requires just too much effort and breath control. In some videos, BuffCorrell is noticeably winded by the end of the song, the dancing has slowed, the singing becomes breathy. A rap song stretches the limits of his abilities. Where Gunna bounces in tune with his breath and the rhythm, BuffCorrell jumps, leans, and rocks against the flow of air in the room. Where Q leans back to make space for a particularly difficult line, BuffCorrell tries to squeeze the big moments through small windows. Where Freddie’s hands chop and stab to punctuate lines, BuffCorrell flails after words missed and lines slipping away. And I love each and every BuffCorrell video for the commitment, for every intricacy. (The below video is a heater, BuffCorrell doing “WAP”)
Bookending this linkdump with one of my favorite pieces of music journalism over the last decade: Jesse McCarthy’s “Notes on Trap.” The essay treats rap—and to be specific, trap—with a seriousness that doesn’t feel out of touch.
That’s all for today. Come back tomorrow as I think about language, who it serves in moments of crisis, and consider the morality dodging incumbent in hiding behind something being “complicated.” As always, if you have a link share a link, if you have a thought share a thought.