Song of the Week: “Suicidal Thoughts” by The Notorious B.I.G.

(Warning: This song is both extremely explicit and graphic)

This is one of the few songs that consistently forces me to stop what I am doing and just listen. Its honesty hits you square in the jaw, enough to wake you up and recognize its brilliance. “Suicidal Thoughts” is a painful song, it’s a real song. It’s an incredibly eloquent song. I would imagine that it takes a lot of courage to write a song like this, to air one’s laundry like this, to reveal insecurities like this. This is what music is about.

And not once does Biggie rhyme “champagne” with “airplane” with “champagne” again.

I do not listen to much rap or hip hop. In younger days, I was the kid who made the “can’t spell crap without rap” types of jokes. Then I found real rap music, music like this. I still don’t listen to all that much rap, but I have gained enormous respect for the genre since going through the music libraries of Tupac and Biggie.

Spoken word, poetry, rap are incredibly powerful art forms. Their reliance on rhythm and rhyme give them the necessary hypnotic power to unlock the human heart, but the lack of vocal melody eliminates distractions. The rap song is (or should be) all about the words. It’s all about what you have to say. When written, composed and performed correctly, when you have something good to say, the result is a song like “Suicidal Thoughts:” something so emotionally engaging that it exhausts the mind.

But, like any powerful tool, rap can be exploited. Its rhythmical ability to entertain can be separated from its powerful ability to convey a meaningful message. Because vocal talent is an entirely optional requirement, damn near anybody can stumble out on stage, rhyme a few words together, mention specific brands of alcohol or instances of promiscuous sex and end up packaged as a “rapper.”

There are still many artists who take advantage of the true potential of rap music. And sometimes that work, from both big names and small, shines through to the forefront. But that stuff has mostly been crowded out of the mainstream. The Corporate You-Know-Who’s have stepped in and crowned their own kings and set them up on golden thrones, thrones once reserved for people who knew what they were doing.