Whenever I’m warming up to record or perform, I sing the first lines from Alicia Keys’ “You Don’t Know My Name.” There’s something about it that’s perfect to test range, accuracy of pitch, and breath support:
Baby, baby, baby, from the day I saw you
I really really wanted to catch your eye
There's something special 'bout you, I must really like you
'Cause not a lotta guys are worth my time
It’s a perfect encapsulation of the early aughts R&B scene; there’s a skit right in the middle, plenty of acrobatic runs, and a cinematic music video. It was produced by Keys and Kanye West (John Legend is credited for background vocals) and won a Grammy for Best R&B Song that year. The groove is led with a bumping bass line and stacked vocal harmonies, with help from a sample from The Main Ingredient’s 1975 song “Let Me Prove My Love to You.”
Alicia Keys was only twenty two when the song was released as the lead single of one of her most successful albums, The Diary of Alicia Keys (2003). She was poised for fame following the success of her first record, Songs in A Minor (2001), especially “Fallin’” and the five Grammy awards it won. This album “confirmed her place in musical history” and cemented her status as of of the R&B greats. These days, Alicia Keys can pretty much do anything she wants: write books, star in movies, host television shows, launch a skincare line. But when “You Don’t Know My Name” was released, Alicia Keys was a fresh-faced, explosive force in the industry, a prodigious pianist and talented songwriter with a powerhouse voice to match. Her Tiny Desk Concert is one of the only that I’ve seen feature the audience audibly whooping during the performance. She’s perhaps the most influential R&B artist of the century thus far.
“You Don’t Know My Name” is, in my humble opinions, one of Kanye West’s most underrated production credits. His work with Keys preceded the release of his debut record The College Dropout (2004). Prior to becoming the preeminent rapper of his generation, West gained notoriety as a producer at Roc-a-Fella Records, Jay Z’s label. He struggled to gain recognition as a solo artist and worked for years to attain a record deal. One night a few months after getting signed to Roc-a-Fella, he fell asleep at the wheel and crashed his car in a head-on collision, breaking his jaw. The experience inspired the cornerstone song of The College Dropout, “Through the Wire.” You can hear in the recording that his jaw is literally wired shut.
“Through the Wire” is the nineteenth track on this record. Though it’s the song that kicked off West’s creative flow, but it’s not the first banger on the album. The College Dropout is chock-full of incredible bars, like this verse in “All Falls Down:”
It seems we living the American dream
But the people highest up got the lowest self esteem
The prettiest people do the ugliest things
For the road to riches and diamond rings
We shine because they hate us, floss cause they degrade us
We trying to buy back our 40 acres
The song was originally meant to sample Ms. Lauryn Hill’s MTV Unplugged version of “Mystery of Iniquity,” but due to rights issues was performed in the studio version by Syleena Johnson, who does an uncanny impression of the original. Her raspy, soulful voice is the focal point of the chorus and acts as the glue between the rock-and-roll electronic guitars and Kanye’s decidedly hip-hop cadence.
The lyrical content of the song focuses on materialism in the Black community, a recurring theme in West’s discography. “New Slaves” off of Yeezus (2013):
They wasn't satisfied unless I picked the cotton myself
You see it's broke nigga racism
That's that "Don't touch anything in the store"
And it's rich nigga racism
That's that "Come in, please buy more"
"What you want, a Bentley? Fur coat? A diamond chain?
All you blacks want all the same things"
Used to only be niggas, now everybody playin'
Spendin' everything on Alexander Wang
And “Feedback” from The Life of Pablo (2016):
Awesome, Steve Jobs mixed with Steve Austin
Rich slave in the fabric store picking cotton
If Hov J then every Jordan need a Rodman
Man, Jay, they don't really want no problems
Driving in the same car that they killed Pac in
Driving in the same uh that they killed Pac in
Hands up, we just doing what the cops taught us
Hands up, hands up, then the cops shot us
Kanye was addressing the systemic racism and the prison industrial complex years before they became mainstream political touchstones. He saw racism everywhere and made a point of rapping about it. He criticized George Bush over the federal Hurricane Katrina response in 2005 in one of the most iconic television moments of the last decade: “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people.”
And he was right. Recently, Kanye’s polarizing cultural stature has cast a shadow on the days when he was lauded as a musical genius. His forays into the political landscape have been misguided at best, signs of serious mental instability at worst. Regardless, his early records are slam dunk after slam dunk, and his callouts are both scathing and accurate. He’s a complicated figure, but I’m personally not ready to write him off just yet.
“New Slaves” features Frank Ocean on backing vocals; he appears like an angel in the noise of the outro. His song “White Ferrari” appears on this playlist directly following “All Falls Down,” a song released when Frank was just a teenager. Their collaboration is an important moment for both artists and the hip-hop scene on the whole, the old guard acknowledging the new. They went on to work together on Watch the Throne (2011) and The Life of Pablo.
“White Ferrari” is one of my favorite songs off of Blonde (2016), Frank Ocean’s sophomore album. I don’t have much to say about this record that hasn’t already been said, and I’ll save my thoughts about other tracks for another issue. I’ll close with my favorite lyrics from the song:
I care for you still and I will forever
That was my part of the deal, honest
We got so familiar
Spending each day of the year, White Ferrari
Good times
In this life