Lost In The World

This week I’ve been all about Kanye West’s “Lost In The World,” the most gripping track on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. Kanye is one of the few commercial producers with a high enough profile to be able to license whatever samples he wants, so he carries the banner of memetastic collage-based music in the mainstream, and god bless him for it. Click through for the song on YouTube.

There’s nothing going on in contemporary music that interests me more than the vibe of this track. The blend of electronic and tribal drums and Auto-tuned singing draws on the same sonic palette as “Love Lockdown,” which continues to be my favorite song of the 21st century, but “Lost In The World” is much bigger and denser.

Samples

The intro of “Lost In The World” is a long sample of Bon Iver’s “Woods.”

I don’t usually have a lot of patience for quavery-voiced indie folk, but I always enjoy an Auto-tuned a capella. Kanye was right to want to jump on it. “Woods” is a musical cousin of Imogen Heap’s “Hide And Seek” which I’m surprised that rappers haven’t taken more of an interest in sampling.

At this point there’s nothing too surprising about rapping over sampled singing, but I like this idea of layering tons of new sung vocals on top of samples. Aside from Bon Iver, the liner notes list Charlie Wilson, Kay Fox, Tony Williams, Alicia Keys, La Roux, Alvin Fields and Ken Lewis singing or chanting. Their voices are layered and processed into an otherworldly thickness. It’s an arresting blend.

The album’s liner notes say that “Lost In The World” samples the famous beat from “Think” by Lyn Collins and the JBs — listen at 1:25. I can’t really hear it under all the other layers, but I’ll take Kanye’s word for it.

This song was most famously sampled in “It Takes Two” by DJ EZ Rock and Rob Base, but it appears in about nineteen thousand other tracks too.

The line “Who will survive in America” comes from Gil Scott-Heron’s “Comment #1.” I assume Kanye drew inspiration from the congas for his tribal drums too.

This has nothing to do with anything, but in the New Yorker profile of Mr. Scott-Heron I learned that he and I went to the same fancy private school. Small world.

The lyrics

When it comes to pop, the production usually outweighs the lyrics in substance by a hundred to one. “Lost In The World” is special, though, because through much of the song, different lyrics are being sung simultaneously. That’s some pretty hip stuff. Bon Iver’s sampled part goes:

I’m up in the woods
I’m down on my mind
I’m building a still
To slow down the time

When the rest of the vocalists enter, they sing:

I’m lost in the world
I’m down on my mind
I’m building a city
And I’m down for the night, down for the night

Says she’s down for the night

I’m never alone
Down the time

I’m lost in the world
I’m down my whole life
I’m new in the city
But I’m down for the night

Down for the night, down for the night

Then we come to Kanye’s actual verse, which, meh. It’s a mostly a string of simplistic cliches, though there is one pretty remarkable line:

You’re my stress and you’re my masseuse
Mama se, mama sa, mama coosa

First of all, very nice internal rhyme. Secondly, Michael Jackson fans will recognize the quote from the end of “Wanna Be Startin’ Something,” which is itself a quote of Manu Dibango’s “Soul Makossa.”

What does it all mean?

In an essay in The Awl entitled “Understanding Kanye: Sweet, Sweet Robot Fantasy, Baby,” Mike Barthel describes Ye as turning himself (figuratively) into a robot.

Kanye had to fight to be taken seriously as a rapper, and he only succeeded once he started becoming a cyborg. A car accident in 2002 left him with a metal plate in his jaw, and instead of trying to cover up the unreal, he brought it to the fore, recording a song while and about how his jaw was still wired shut. The resulting single, “Through the Wire,” was his first hit, and the song that convinced Roc-A-Fella to give him an album deal. He had found beauty in a piece of machinery that would normally be hidden under a more believable imitation of the real. In so doing, he created a verbal analog of his most famous production technique, “Chipmunking,” in which a sample is sped up to match a faster beat and consequently raised in pitch as well. Chipmunking is a kind of joke about beatmaking; producers work to make a sample match their preferred tempo without changing pitch, but by exaggerating these seams, Kanye made the unnatural pleasing. He was learning the value of the mechanical in and of itself.

Anyone who traffics heavily in samples, as Kanye does, is going to confront the dissolving boundaries between “fake” manipulation of recordings and synths and “real” instruments and vocals. All hip-hop deals in that tension, and the best practitioners throw it in your face.

This influence of the mechanical floats in and out of his first two albums, though it fights with his natural tendencies toward the natural. You can hear the tension on “Slow Jamz,” a prime chipmunking track, when Kanye contrasts the unnatural speed and pitch of Luther Vandross with the biological abilities of Twista, someone able to imitate the hyperspeed feel of digital sound manipulation with natural verbal techniques.

When the other guest on “Slow Jamz,” Jamie Foxx, pops up on the second album’s “Gold Digger,” it’s to do the same convincing imitation of Ray Charles that he did in the movies. But after Foxx’s intro, we get the real Ray Charles, or maybe the “real” Ray Charles, since it’s a recording of a live performance that’s been cut up and rearranged. Foxx’s intro is a sort of signal to us that there’s more going on here than just sampling, but once you’re into the track, it’s easy to lose those issues given how closely the use of Charles’ “I Got a Woman” hews to rap conventions for sample use.

This idea of putting a real recording of fake Ray Charles up against a “fake” sample of real Ray Charles: very hip stuff.

It seems almost unkind to point this out, but between “Late Registration” and “Graduation” Kanye’s mother died after complications from plastic surgery. Technology had always served Kanye well before—in the form of his producer’s tools, it was the vehicle that took him from obscurity to the cusp of stardom—but now his mother’s own cybernetic changes had ended in death. The mechanical had turned on him.

The video for “Stronger” shows Kanye’s heart being surgically removed before he goes on an Akira rampage. Not too hard to figure out the emotional intent there. But the song is still a brag: “That that that that that don’t kill me can only make me stronger.”

My friends are about evenly split on the album that follows, 808s And Heartbreak. I come down strongly in favor. The tension between organic and inorganic reaches a new pitch. On the one hand, there’s the pervasive Auto-tune and the clinical drum machines and synths. On the other hand, Kanye is liberated by the automated pitch correction to emotionally go for broke in his singing, knowing that anything he puts down will come out sounding musical. Mike Barthel shares my love for 808s And Heartbreak.

When he premiered his first track from the album, at the 2008 VMAs, the spot on his chest that was covered in bandages in the “Stronger” video was now filled. But instead of a real heart, he had a digital one, a pin made up of red LEDs blinking on and off, a crack running down the middle. The operation had been, at least on its own terms, a success. Kanye was now a full-fledged cyborg. On “Love Lockdown,” his voice was filtered through AutoTune with a sharp attack and a subtle bit of distortion to produce the sound of a human trapped, maybe unwillingly, inside a robot. The same effect was applied to almost all the vocals on the album, and while it was deliberately artificial, it was also, like he had said, stronger: where before he could only rap, now he could sing. The off-key caterwauling of “Drunk and Hot Girls” was now a precise tone full of a kind of electric soul. It wasn’t the raw emotion of humans, but the synthesis of emotional impulses and mechanical restraint, a computer’s inauthentic attempts at automatic expression which nevertheless sprung from a real human need to communicate.

And that brings us to the present. Kanye has all the money and fame and power a human being could ask for, but he’s still lost in the world. The alienation and self-doubt comes across loud and clear. But the power and confidence does too — all those singers, all those tribal drums, the angry defiance. This is a surprisingly challenging and avant-garde track for a supposed pop hip-hop album, a wall of sound spaced with yawning silences in pure digital black. If Kanye keeps putting out music like this, he can be as big a public nuisance as he wants.