From Yesterday to Tomorrow

The Spin: Donny Goines – Minute After Midnight
Release Date: December 16, 2008
2008
[rate 3.5]

It is often mentioned that Hip-hop is a genre, nay, a culture that thrives on trends. Donny Goines and Kanye West represent two very differing perspectives on the nature of hip-hop and its evolution. Like a cultural gladiator, hip-hop seems to be ever-evolving, for better or worse (D4L anyone?). Hip-hop has certainly seen its share of triumphs and bitter losses. But in a culture where there is often so much turmoil, positive music that moves its people serves as a beacon, especially over a landscape that until recently was longing for great minority leadership.

Donny Goines is raw. He might rhyme in predictable couplets, but he’s been a long time coming. Donny Goines, like Souljah Boy before him, is, to a great degree, a product of crafty internet marketing. One area where he most definitely differs is in his East Coast-friendly hustle. If you’ve shopped for a mixtape in the past several months, you’ve most likely come across this man’s particular breed of grimey Bronx swagger. He tells it like it is, and being from New York, he doesn’t have to tell you about his swagger. There was a time when swagger was assumed, not boasted of. It seems so recent that hip-hop was, for all intents and purposes, synonymous with New York, and New York, only. But since all of Lil’ Wayne, Kanye West, T-Pain, Dem Franchize Boyz, Yung Jeezy, et al., have so firmly gripped the hip-hop charts, there has been little room for the deft, albeit perhaps often complex to its commercial detriment, lyricism and soulful, grimey, but creative beatcrafting that the East for so long provided.

Like De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest, even Grandmaster Flash before him, Donny Goines is not content to merely showcase catchy vocals, he has something to say. And the beats behind him are provided by a smorgasbord of well-known hip-hop producers. His album is laced with beats that sound of the fare of so many hits five years ago. Perhaps this is telling of where New York is at right now, but it’s clear throughout the album that Donny Goines is content with the reality of what he remembers rather than focus on pushing those boundaries. The confidence he exudes leaves the listener convinced.

The album’s “Intro” (and i parenthesized because it’s titled, “Intro”) starts things off declaring, “nothing is a far stretch,” and throughout the tale he tells, he manages to make you believe it most of the time. In “The Triumph”, we’re reminded that while all those pasty old pundits we see on TV seem to be rather fixated on Ronald Reagan’s wonder, the 80′s left minorities wondering if things could deteriorate any more. Donny seems determined to fight the righteous fight for all of us, whether we co-sign or not. He’s simply too unabashedly honest to make you think that he doesn’t intend to execute exactly as he says. He paints a clear, yet depressing picture in “Ghetto USA” that should make any self-respecting human reach into his/her wallet for a Sunday morning contribution at least. Sped up samples remind us of Mr. West’s initial influence on hip-hop in “Ricky’s Story”. This track is notable because, while the rhyme scheme doesn’t actually change from the rest of the album (it’s painfully consistent), it’s basically double-timed here, for a nice change of pace and a refreshing internal rhyme effect. He sounds a little Tipper-ish, warning, “Now they’re wondering where is he and none of them can convince me this isn’t a pity since he started bumpin’ that Fifty. His mind frame on high fame and fly chains, so he figured if he supplied ‘caine his life changed, cause all the rappers on TV and CDs made it seem as if it was easy with these keys”. That’s a long quotable, but where is this rapper on the rest of the album? I digress. “I am Moving” is a notably fresh-sounding track. This track is the strongest on the album, despite deviating so far from what the rest of this compilation is doing, providing a more ethereal canvas for radio-friendly lyrics. Goines gets back to his element on “Can’t Fit in my Shoes”. The backing track depends on a sped-up vocal sample and break-emulating drums. Easily he draws us into his world and into his perspective with lines like, “I aint convinced you nothing more than a whole bunch of liars that spit”, as he struggles with doing what’s necessary whilst being financially broke. In “Can You Hear Me”, he poses the questions, “Why would you make a virus that left so many of your people lifeless? Why put the world in crisis, separate the rich from the poor where I live?” Hard to argue against that. The backing track satisfyingly uses a synth-created melody and classic hip-hop drums. The final three tracks on the album lack the enthusiasm, accessibility, and head-bobbing beats from earlier in the album.

This is hip-hop that a lot of the more devout hip-hop veteran fans can grip. Donny has managed to create quite a buzz, even finding his way onto MTVU for the video to “I Am Moving”. The problem is that there’s nothing new here. It’s a good album, and as someone that wants to see hip-hop do better than it has the past few years, I have a desire to see new hip-hop artists get away from glossy, over-produced tracks, or worse, beats made in five minutes by kids from Atlanta, with Dr. Seuss-style rhymes. However, this album just isn’t that interesting today. Yesterday, it would’ve fit in with the in crowd, but tomorrow it’s history. The album gets three out of five stars, and owes a lot to the subject of the second half of this: Mr. Kanye West.

Who remembers Ye’s first major production? Ding! Time’s up! “This Can’t be Life” from “Dynasty: Roc La Familia” by Jay-Z. And the first time we ever heard Mr. West’s voice on a major? Ding! Survey says, “Never Change” from “The Blueprint” by Jigga.

Those songs contained samples from Harold Melvin and David Ruffin (of Temptations fame). Contrary to popular belief, Kanye was not the first to speed up vocal samples, he just brought it to prominence by sticking to his guns as hip-hop handed the reigns to Jay-Z and ignited a young producer’s career during one fateful summer.

How times have changed. Kanye’s sampled electronica and indie rock, told us how he really felt about George Bush, worn a crown of thorns, and cried for us over the loss of his mother. It’s amazing how daring Kanye can be and how he manages to command hip-hop to catch up to him and conform, just in time for him to lead us elsewhere. Now is time for elsewhere. Wayyyy elsewhere.

I must admit that I like Kanye. He’s overly sensitive, he’s ego-maniacal, he has no sense of what is socially acceptable, and as daring as he is, he’s often a copy-cat (after all, T-Pain definitely was using a vocoder long before all these guys were, right?). Still, he is like that great scoop journalist or better yet, he’s like a psychic who constantly predicts earth-shifting events and then goes and makes sure these events actually happen. It’s hard to say whether he’s a step ahead or whether he’s changing the natural course of music. Plus, he’s so vulnerable that you have to appreciate the man’s willingness to wear everything on his sleeve.

This album is initially alarming. About half the album seems devoid of snare, and hi-hat or cymbals are even harder to come by. Synths and soul samples are replaced by piano, pads, and stringsets, full of reverb and/or delay. While Kanye has progressively deviated from more traditional hip-hop styles, his mastering of studio engineering (more extensive use of effects, notably) has allowed for cleaner, often more minimalistic production methods.

The most impressive thing about this album is how strinkingly raw the emotional output is. When Michael Jackson released, “Off the Wall”, one of the last singles released was “She’s out of My Life”. The song met minor controversy because, toward the end of the song, Michael’s vocals start deteriorate as his apparent emotion overtakes him. Ironically, it’s this same sensibility that helps and hurts Kanye’s album. Detractors will be basically correct when they say that he can’t sing. But that lack of real vocal training and lack of vocal chops cause him to rely on a greater emphasis on evocation of emotion.

This go-around, the greater controversy may be the current trend of using a vocoder. It’s been argued that its use in Kanye’s case is more as a crutch than for effect, although that seems pretty nonsensical, considering all the singing he’s done on previous albums. Still, such extensive use of the vocoder, combined with the fact that Kanye’s not rapping, combined with the sparse atmospheric beats, this album is being deemed by many as an experimental album a la Common’s Electric Circus. But much like Electric Circus, if you are willing to open-mindedly accept the music for what it is, it certainly holds plenty of merit.

That aside, there is one consistent argument to be made against Kanye’s music, historically. Lyrically, West has always been below the bar we set for great hip-hop artists. While his beatmaking acumen, his penchant for witty marketing and P.R., and a vulnerable but headstrong personality have led to practically innumerable megahits, he will not be remembered like Bob Dylan, James Taylor, Bob Marley, or Marvin Gaye for witty lyrical offerings. He often relies on monosyllabic rhymes, and he rarely delivers with any sense of unpredictability, rhythmically or lyrically.

Overall, this is a more contiguous album than his earlier works. This is really the first time since his first album where he takes you somewhere, with a different perspective from what we’re accustomed to, and allows you to feel the world through his emotions. I certainly appreciate the risk that Kanye has taken, and this is definitely his most mature album to this point. Still, all the sparseness exposes Kanye’s vocals and lyrics far too much for comfort. There are definitely points in the album where it seems a grade school child wrote the simple lyrics and then Kanye simply sang them into a vocoder while curled up into an emotional ball. This album is very effective most of the time, but some of the time, you cringe slightly. I give it three and a half stars.

Ultimately, the radio has left us with very little besides 808′s and Heartbreak, to give his title another meaning just suited for the purposes of my piece. Hip-hop has been evolving, sure, but at the very least, one could argue that we’ve allowed the lyrics to regress. Maybe neither Donny Goines nor Kanye West can lead us to a place that invites a new infusion of creativity lyrically and beat-wise, but even if they can’t, hopefully, hip-hop can find a happy medium while living for today.