Can you play Spotify right on there? I can, yeah. All right. symmetry dusty pickup. This is crazy. Symmetry dusty pickup. Yeah. Okay,

here we go. Okay.

all right Justin Not as good as a T. L. Yeah, I didn't realize we flipped the same sample though that that's kind of these a little sacrilegious now I know but this is better than I thought it would be it sounds good. Yeah,

I was good. I used to do this

Sorry

sorry for that little segue. I had no idea I learned something from this. I didn't realize I flipped the same sample as them to worse effect.

Do you remember how you found it? Yeah,

record. Okay,

just great

digging. Great

digging. All right, sick, very cool. All

right.

All right, so let's hear a better version of it. Yeah! Yeah!

Goddamn!

Jesse. How

old are you when you chop that sample? Like 24. You are four years older. I was four years older than I'm in. That's

why I'm a podcast producer, not a rap producer for a living. Sorry. We haven't heard my music yet So if you're okay Justin. Okay, here we go original sample again Great

ear Justin I Mean

it's perfect. So they chopped this right there too. And then here's what they do with it Yeah,

they murdered me. I'm like, yo,

she didn't sound like this, Jesse. And

all they add to it is drums and bass. They

chopped it.

It's just it's so good.

And they put it to that They put it through that like flange. Yeah. Oh my god that that high pass filter. Oh my god Just that alone is oh my god. I mean it's just so it's just so good. Also, isn't it weird how like That

part that sample Is so good It feels foundational when I hear it. I'm just like, oh, this is what hip hop sounds like. Well, you know what I mean? Like there's some beats where you're just like, oh, if you're just like, what's a hip hop beat? I'm like, I pointed out, I'm just like, I don't know what it is every single time I hear it. It's literally

like one, play one second.

Like

I know what you're talking about. You hear it right there. Like, oh, that's gonna be great. So, oh, then fun fact, actually, the bass line, did you read this the bass, what the bass line originally was in this song? No. It was a tuba. They had a live tuba player come in the studio and lay down the bass track that you hear in the song now. And I apparently the tuba didn't cut through and it was a little too slow changing from note to note. But again, in my mind, I'm like outcast 19, 20 years old, trying to put a fucking tuba on this track, like just speaks to their experimentation in there that, you know, trying to take things be different, take things to the next level. So the production obviously is just fucking perfect. And then here's another thing I didn't discover till I did some research, fish and grits. Does he say fishing grits or fish and grits? What do you hear? Like fish and grits, like fish,

n, not saying and, fish and grits. Like

you're fishing for grits? No, like you're like fish and grits. Like slang, but.

N, the letter N, grits. So I think that. Like fishing grits and all that pimp shit, yeah.

Okay, did you know, I didn't know this obviously, until I researched it, but grits, apparently, in the South is an acronym for girls raised in the South. So he says you're fishing grits, like he's chasing women. And that's why he says all that pimp shit afterwards. I'm

gonna have to do a fact check. I've never heard about this. I'm not from the South. Fact check? I'm very clearly from the U .S. We've established that, so I can't say anything. Where did you get this? Now I'm trying

to remember it. I can't remember where I... If

we have any Southern listeners, please like, tap in and be like, here's the thing. I'm from the South, I've never heard this acronym.

And that's what's funny, you can't really fact check this old slang too. I mean, maybe it's still around, but now we're asking, pretty much the over 30 year olds at this point, if they remember, unless it's still going on today, I don't know. Anyways, I thought that was cool, a little clever twist. And then, okay, we gotta talk about the opening lines of each verse. Big Boy's opening

on this song is why I'm just like, no, Big Boy is one of the greatest rappers ever. But he says, well, it's the M, I, Crooked Letter, Ain't No One Better, and when I'm on a microphone, you best away a sweater, cause I'm cooler than a polar bear's toenails. So good. And what makes this even better is if, remember when artists used to annotate their own lyrics on Genius? Big Boy's verified annotation for this is, polar bears clearly have claws,

but you know. But you do. Yeah.

And I'm just like, this is why you're the fucking greatest big boy.

Never let the truth get in the way of a solid

bar. Big boys flow on this opening verse. He's still one of the greatest rap verses. It's everything that he's doing on this. He's in his twenties and he's rapping better than people who've been doing it twice as long. I think, does big boy, because all right, this is gonna be my hot take. Can I give you a hot take corner? All right. Once again, Andrey's verse on here, his second verse, very, good. But opening your bar with, now my oral illustration, be like littoral stimulation is tough. It's so good. It's really hard to get over that bar. It's pretty, am I being a hater? Or, because it's like, what did you hear it in the context of the song? I'm like, whatever. But when you pull it out? I'm like oh Yeah, man. This was this was the peak of the hotel To

the female gender the female gender is insane, but then See

I kind of

like it

Let me know when it's wet enough to enter. No. Oh my god. No, man. My oral illustration. Be like clitoral stimulation to the female gender. Ain't nothing better. Let me know when it's wet enough to enter. If not, I wait because the future of the world. Big

boy's just like, dog, have y 'all ever thought about some polar bears toenails? And then Andre's just like, bro, guys, let me tell you about Clinton Torrance. Just the

rhyme scheme, though, is awesome. The rhyme scheme,

but that's the, it's the jazzy bell problem. Yeah,

and the flow and the - The

flow is so different. Andre is wrapping his ass off to the point where what is shit comes off him. Like, I don't care if it's problematic.

Keep talking that shit, Dre. The alienators, cause we different. Keep your hands to the sky. Like sounds of blackness, when I practice, what I preach, it don't lie. I beat the baker and the maker of the beast of my pie. Now break a, break a tenfold, can I get some reply? Now everybody say no.

And I didn't even know, did you know what am I crooked letter meant? Or do you still, I would never knew what it meant until I looked it up actually.

Mike? So

it's am I crooked letter, apparently in the South is S. So I can play you an excerpt of a song called Mississippi, made famous by Ella Fitzgerald.

By the MI Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter, I, Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter, I, Humpback Humpback. So

people thought, people thought, he had to explain this like for the, I think it was the 20th anniversary of this album. He did an interview about, they asked him about this or came up and people thought it was, am I crooked letter meaning miss, meaning misfits, which was the original name of OutKast. So everyone, even if you look on Genius now, people are still interpreting as essentially referencing their first name misfits. But he said he's referencing Mississippi, referencing that song. And he's like, it's because he's flowing like the Mississippi River. So little known fact there.

I liked that I was dissected. Can I discuss, we've already kind of broached probably my favorite portion of this song. Okay. Verse three, verse four, big boy Andre going back and forth. I think Andre's second verse is not only way better than his first verse, it's like in contention for probably one of my favorite verses of the entire album. That

opening, you're talking about softly as I. Softly as I play piano when the dog found

a way to channel my anger now to embark and then the pocket he gets into, no drugs or alcohol, so I can get the signal clear his day. When he does the put my Glock away, I got a stronger weapon that never runs out of ammunition, so I'm ready for war.

OK. You heard the h -e -l -e, and so back the hell up off. Shh, softly as if I play piano and the dog. Found a way to channel my anger now to involve the world's a stage and everybody gots to play they part. God works in mysterious ways, when he starts the job I'm speaking to us. We'll be so sincere with this here. No drugs or alcohol so I can get the signal

clear It's they put my block away. I got a stronger weapon that never runs out of ammunition. So I'm ready for war once again What to me separates like Southern Playalistic, which is like great rapping from something like 80 aliens is pockets like that We're like they'll get moments, big boy and Dre, where I'm just like, oh no, this is kind of teasing, just how phenomenal they will get in just a couple years. By the age of 25, they're just like what we know them as, but there's moments on ATELEONs where I'm like, oh nah, y 'all have uncovered something artistically. Yeah,

and I'll say at some point in the season, I'll probably try to break this down. It's always so hard to break down rhythm for me with rap verses, mostly because I don't rap and I can't reproduce it. But to your point about the pockets, it's like they're so unpredictable. A lot of times if you just look at the lyrics for, especially Big Boy most often, but even Andre, it's like you'll go to the end of the bar, like look at any rap lyrics, 99% of them, go to the end of one line, look at the next line, and at the end of the first line, you'll get the rhyme, at the end of the second line, you'll get the rhyme to the rhyme, right? It's like standard and rhyme cadences. You go to like, to big boy especially, and try to find the rhyme scheme. It's like, if you just read the words out loud, sometimes you're just like, where does this actually rhyme? And then you listen to the verse and it's like, oh, he's rhyming just these hyper rhymes back to back or like, and he's just finding these little grooves, but then he'll like, both of them, they'll find a groove, but then pivot away from it because the word scheme or just the words that they're wanting to rap takes them away from it. But then they find it, it's like a jazz player kind of like improving, like just finding little pockets and going off just almost stream of consciousness style. And it's just like, to your point, like it's hard, again, it's hard for me to explain, but you know what I'm talking about.