girls it ain't easy

2022-10-05

I've made a Spotify playlist of all the songs mentioned here. It's also at the bottom of this page.

Before middle school, the only music I listened to was the radio and whatever random illegitimately downloaded songs family members would put on our shared iPod. Down With Webster quickly became a favourite, so much so I would sit at our living room computer with my legs waving back and forth watching their music videos and dedicating lyrics to memory. To this day I'm sure I could confidently sing along to dozens of verses without missing a word. Funny thing is there really weren't very many songs I knew--with how little music I had explored at the time, knowing a half dozen songs meant I was huge fan. Favourites included:

Whoa Is Me - It's funny how the common spelling has shifted to woah, but I kinda like how the old spelling acts as a tell for the age of the song. It also took a few years for me to figure out this was a play on the idiom "woe is me" (I actually thought it was the other way around when I first heard the saying).
Royalty - I feel like a lot of mid-2000s music makes me wanna drive slow, and this song is probably a huge reason why, even though I was probably listening to it a decade before I ever drove. I think it's stuck in my mind since it had a resurgence when Royals went big.
Your Man - This is the music video I remember most distinctly, and paired with Rich Girl$ probably seeded some of my distaste for excess. Also the reason I'm writing all this so pay special attention to it.

There really aren't many other DWW songs I liked so here's the rest:

Obviously I never thought about this stuff too deeply. I thought the music was cool and the people making it were cool, so I don't really have much to say about them right now.

By university I had explored music enough to find a niche I was interested in. I heard about Westside Gunn in an r/hiphopheads comment section (embarrassing, but how I found a lot of music I got into). They recommended FLYGOD as the first album to listen to. I went to my illegitimate music plug and found nothing but FLYGOD is Good... All The Time. On first listen to Part Deux I knew I was a fan. I did eventually find the real FLYGOD album (it wasn't on streaming at the time) and went through the rest of WSG's discography. I believe this was probably my introduction to Mach-Hommy.

Mach-Hommy is an incredibly odd artist. I've only ever seen his face in one picture, otherwise he keeps it mostly covered by a Haitian flag. He used to not put albums on streaming services and sell physical copies for outrageous prices that looked like they were picked primarily for aesthetics (things like $222.22 or $777.77 for a vinyl). It's all seemed to work out pretty well though. His music gets a surprising amount of play, and he's somehow garnered an elite audience (he's spent more than a trivial amount of time with Jay-Z, been quoted on twitter multiple times by Kevin Durant, and I think I remember LeBron James putting him on his instagram story once). There's nowhere to read the lyrics to his songs since he sued Genius for putting his "intellectual property" on their website. He's got lots of interesting lore, but of course, the music is my favourite part. It's hard to pick favourites, especially since I usually listen to his music by the album, but here's some picks from his latest, Balens Cho (Hot Candles) (don't believe the release dates on Spotify and stuff, a lot of his music was uploaded way after its initial release):

At my current job, for some reason picking a hype up song was a mandatory field for signing up to the HR software. I put my whole onboarding off for days to consider it, and ended up picking LABOU.
"Holla at me if you want the throne back / Not bad for some gibberish and monotone raps" from SEPERATION OF THE SHEEP AND THE GOATS is one of my favourite Mach-Hommy lines. "Gibberish and monotone" really is a great way of describing a lot of his music at a surface level.
Now what sparked me to write all this: LAJAN SAL, which shares a sample with Your Man. I didn't even know sampling was a thing when I was listening to DWW, so at first I thought this actually was a DWW sample. It was surreal to realize this relatively esoteric, underground rapper still shrouded in mystery had used the same sample as a Canadian boy band in the mid 2000s for a radio song. The sample, by the way, is Girls It Ain't Easy by The Honey Cone , which isn't on Spotify, but a cover (I think) from Dusty Springfield released three years later is. As an aside, my first ever edit on Wikipedia was correcting the article for Your Man, which missed the "s" in the name of the sampled song. The song itself feels uplifting, but always makes me sad when I listen to it. I've spent a lot of time thinking about why.

WOODEN NICKELS (which I love) and SELF LUH (which I'm actually not a huge fan of) are the only other real songs from the project. For other albums, I'd recommend Wap Konn Jòj!, which was the first Mach-Hommy I heard (and actually maybe how I got started with him... it's possible I found him because of the Earl Sweatshirt feature on Mittrom), Mach's Hard Lemonade, which he actually made a short film for (it's kinda weird not gonna lie) or Pray For Haiti, which has an amazing cover art and is probably his most digestible album (possibly because Westside Gunn had a large hand in its creation). There's a bunch more, but he has a ton of music (I haven't listened to it all yet) so I'll leave it at that.