Latest news with #MFDOOM
Yahoo
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Westside Gunn Goes Bar for Bar With Doechii on Surprise ‘Egypt' Remix
Westside Gunn has dropped off a surprise remix of 'Egypt' featuring some fiery bars from Doechii. On Friday (May 2), Gunn unleashed the unexpected collaboration on the world, which made sense considering Doechii was technically on the original 'Egypt' — or at least, her voice was. In the version of the track that appeared on Westside Gunn's The Heels Have Eyes EP back in April, he sampled a snippet of Doechii's Apple Music interview with Ebro Darden. 'One hundred percent/ You know, recently I've been into a lot of MF DOOM (OK)/ Rest in peace (Yup)/ I've been into a lot of MF DOOM, um/ Westside Gunn (Mhm), love him, he's so talented (Super)/ So incredible,' she said to Darden in September. More from Billboard With 'Anxiety,' Doechii Makes Historic Three-Peat on Rhythmic Airplay Chart Lorde Lands First ARIA Top 10 Since 2017 With 'What Was That' Maroon 5 Teams Up With BLACKPINK's LISA for New Single 'PRICELESS' Doechii, who was named Billboard's Woman of the Year 2025, caught wind of Westside utilizing her interview, and shouted him out on X in April. 'Westside Gunn just sampled me so pretty much kiss the blackest part of my a– and choke on a side ways d–k! He snapped omg,' she wrote on April 21 on X. The Swamp Princess also shared an Instagram Story of her listening to the sample on 'Egypt' and hollering and vibing out to the track once the beat drops. After dropping off the new version, which has Doechii spitting some serious heat around the 1:40 mark, the Griselda rapper continued to celebrate Doechii on X. 'I wanna Thank @officialdoechii for this Body Bag!!!!' he wrote. 'She's ALWAYS gave me my [flowers emoji] and I'm forever grateful and humble, u didn't have to bless me like this fresh from the Grammy win I REALLY [love heart emoji] this record it's so FUN!!!!' Listen to the 'Egypt' remix below. Best of Billboard Chart Rewind: In 1989, New Kids on the Block Were 'Hangin' Tough' at No. 1 Janet Jackson's Biggest Billboard Hot 100 Hits H.E.R. & Chris Brown 'Come Through' to No. 1 on Adult R&B Airplay Chart
Yahoo
22-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Doechii Says Westside Gunn ‘Snapped' When He Sampled Her on His Latest EP ‘Heels Have Eyes'
Doechii is singing Westside Gunn's praises after the Griselda rapper sampled her on his latest EP Heels Have Eyes. On 'Egypt,' the fifth and final track from the project he released on Friday, Gunn samples a snippet of Doechii's Apple Music interview with Ebro Darden. 'One-hundred percent/ You know, recently I've been into a lot of MF DOOM (OK)/ Rest in peace (Yup)/ I've been into a lot of MF DOOM, um/ Westside Gunn (Mhm), love him, he's so talented (Super)/ So incredible,' she told Darden back in September, which starts off Gunn's song. The 'Denial Is a River' MC can also be heard on the outro of 'Egypt' when she says, 'I just feel like, I just feel like the underdog (Mmm)/ Feel like the underdog and I just feel like, 'Stop playin' with me.'' More from Billboard Doechii Explains How SZA's 'Ctrl' Pushed Her to Break Up With Her Ex-Boyfriend Kneecap End Coachella Set With Pro-Palestine Messages After Censorship Claims Snoop Dogg Drops 'Last Dance With Mary Jane' Video on 4/20 'Westside Gunn just sampled me so pretty much kiss the blackest part of my a– and choke on a side ways d*ck! He snapped omg,' she wrote Monday (April 21) on X. The Swamp Princess also posted an Instagram Story of her listening to the sample on 'Egypt' and hollering and vibing out to the track once the beat drops. And Gunn didn't stop showing Doechii love. 'So much RESPECT & LOVE for BEST RAP Grammy winner the beautiful inside and out @officialdoechii for ALWAYS showing love …. btw This is what the game is missing… the showing of appreciation!!!!' he posted on X. 'Everybody wanna be so tuff and not show NO LOVE anymore but guess what those are the ppl that's gonna continue to be in LAST PLACE.' Darden reshared the same clip from Doechii's IG Story on his Instagram and wrote, 'Yea @Doechii ….. @westsidegunn knows!!! New Fly God 'Egypt' out now!' Best of Billboard Chart Rewind: In 1989, New Kids on the Block Were 'Hangin' Tough' at No. 1 Janet Jackson's Biggest Billboard Hot 100 Hits H.E.R. & Chris Brown 'Come Through' to No. 1 on Adult R&B Airplay Chart
Yahoo
08-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
"This makes no sense at all in terms of functional harmony. So why does it sound so good?: A music professor breaks down Doechii's Denial Is a River and Boiled Peanuts
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Ever since Doechii won the Grammy award for Best Rap Album, my socials have been saturated with her. I am very far outside her target audience, but when even my fellow middle-aged dads are this excited about an artist, you know that she must be having a moment. I am not qualified to explain Doechii's unique place in the hip-hop landscape. For that, I recommend Craig Jenkins' profile on Vulture. What I can do is recommend that you watch her recent performance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, embedded above. This is fresh and immaculate, and I was stunned to learn that it was Doechii's first time doing her own choreography, and that she put it all together in four days. I guess this is why all the press about her mentions her hyper-intense work ethic. Doechii worked with hair artist Malcolm Marquez. She cites Solange, artist Carlota Guerrero and hip-hop legend MF DOOM as inspiration. The Colbert performance is a medley of two thematically-related songs from Doechii's mixtape Alligator Bites Never Heal. Yes, it's a mixtape, even though she won Best Rap Album for it. You may wonder what the difference even is between a mixtape and an album at this point. I am old enough to remember when mixtapes were cassettes, but now the word denotes an album with a casual vibe that's sometimes given away for free. In Doechii's case, this means that the songs are short and fragmentary, sometimes seeming like sketches. Presumably her first 'official' album will be structured more conventionally. The performance begins with a narrator reciting quotes from a 2012 interview with MF DOOM about why he wears a mask. There's another MF DOOM quote between the two songs, and a third at the end. The first song in the medley, Boiled Peanuts, is built on a samples of Jano's Revenge by Los Sospechos. Rap producers have embraced Phrygian, possibly because of its Hollywood associations The track alternates Bm and C chords, implying B Phrygian mode. This scale traditionally evokes Iberian or Arabic music, and lazy Hollywood film composers have routinely used it as shorthand for evil, darkness, or the exotic. Rap producers have embraced Phrygian, possibly because of its Hollywood associations. You can hear it in Doo Wop (That Thing) by Lauryn Hill, Get Ur Freak On by Missy Elliott, Versace by Migos, and many other songs. The beat is a medium-slow boom-bap groove, meaning that it's a funk pattern with just enough sixteenth-note swing to feel organic. The jazzy horns on the sample also evoke the boom-bap era. Doechii's music is stylistically diverse, but this is the side of her that appeals the most to my fellow 90s kids. Speaking of the 90s, The Tiny Desk version of Boiled Peanuts interpolates the horn sample from Rebirth of Slick (Cool Like Dat) by Digable Planets. That horn sample, in turn, comes from Stretching by Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers. The second half of the medley is Denial is a River. The instrumental is labeled as 'an MF DOOM type beat' by Ian James - perhaps this is what motivated to Doechii to quote the DOOM interview. This track is also in B minor, and it also uses chromatic bass movement. But unlike Boiled Peanuts, there is no traditional key or mode that it fits into. Ian James took a B minor chord and transposed it down by seemingly arbitrary amounts. (I assume he did this with a sampler, but he could just as well have done it with DAW automation.) The resulting chord progression is Bm, Bbm, Bm, Am, Abm. This makes no sense at all in functional harmony terms. So why does it sound good? It's a profound music-theoretical mystery. People don't usually think of hip-hop as a source of harmonic inspiration. Rhythm, yes; timbre, absolutely; but harmony isn't typically the central focus in a hip-hop track. However, I learned a very important harmonic concept from my own attempts to produce hip-hop: if you have a satisfying beat, anything you put on top of it will sound intentional and 'correct.' This kind of odd-length phrasing and asymmetry is unusual, and that makes it ear-grabbing You can try this yourself. Put on a looped breakbeat and try playing random chords on top of it. You can pull roots and chord qualities out of a hat, or just record yourself mashing your fist on a piano. It won't take many repetitions before your chords start sounding acceptable, and then they will start sounding great. It might take four repeats if it's an unconventional progression; it might take more if it's just random note clusters; but it will absolutely work. This is true of anything, by the way: clips of speech, samples of environmental or found sounds, pieces of high modernist atonal music or musique concrete; hip-hop beats legitimize all of it. Anyway, I want to point out a particular line from Denial is a River, using the radio-friendly lyrics from the Colbert performance rather than the more explicit original ones: 'Now he think he slicked back 'til I slipped back, got my lick back, turned the dude to a knick-knack.' Up until this point, Doechii's flow has been streams of sixteenth notes, organized into familiar patterns, but this line disrupts the flow. The accented/rhymed syllables are spaced every three eighth notes until 'knick-knack', which comes after five eighth notes. This kind of odd-length phrasing and asymmetry is unusual, and that makes it ear-grabbing. The next line is rhythmically more straightforward, but listen to the pitch, it's a distinct descending melody: 'I moved on, dropped a couple of songs, and then I went and got signed, now it's 2021.' It's a cliche to say that rap is unpitched, or that it's on a monotone, but neither of these are true. Every time you utter a vowel, it has a distinct pitch, though that pitch might swoop up and down a lot. Rappers may not control their pitch as tightly as they control their timing, but pitch still matters. Rappers may not control their pitch as tightly as they control their timing, but pitch still matters The importance of pitch in rap flows is easy to demonstrate to yourself. Take a rap line that you know well and say it with the wrong pitches: go up when you're supposed to go down and vice versa, or stay on the same pitch when you're supposed to move and vice versa. Very often, the stereotypical 'white rapper' voice is annoying because it uses the wrong pitches. But wait, you might ask. If rap has structured pitch, what makes it different from singing? I would say: not much. But if all vowels are pitched, doesn't that make all speech a kind of singing too? To answer that, we would have to define what 'singing' is more clearly, and that is beyond the scope of this column. But all speech does have a strong component of musicality to it; that's how we convey emotion, among many other things. Diana Deutsch discovered the Speech-to-Song Illusion in 1995, in which she transforms ordinary speech into a song simply by repeating it. This 12tone video explains it well. Doechii has some other memorable speech-like melodies in Denial is a River, or melody-like speeches. Listen to the descending pitches on the line 'Mmm, nah, whatever', and the way she uses pitch to highlight the word 'like' in 'I like pills, I like drugs'. This line is full of gaps where the explicit language would go, and I actually like the effect of the gaps, it only enhances the off-kilter flow. Even Doechii's heavy breathing at the end of the song is melodic. Finally, one last nod to the 90s: the line 'I ain't a killer but don't push me' is a 2Pac quote. The hook to Catfish from Swamp Sessions has a string of rhymes that's MF-DOOM-worthy: Doechii rhymes "hoorah", "too fly", "Ventura", "jeweler", "medulla", "schooled her", "chulas" and "ruler". NISSAN ALTIMA from Alligator Bites is breathtakingly filthy, but if that doesn't faze you, it's a remarkable display of MC skills. Doechii tends to repeat a phrase from the end of a line at the beginning of the next line: 'I'm the new hip-hop Madonna/I'm the new hip-hop Madonna'. Not only is the rhythmic placement of the repeat different, but the pitch contour is different too. Nice technique. Given the wild eclecticism of Doechii's music so far, I can only guess what she will come up with next. I look forward to finding out.
