Today Twitter and Watch the Throne fans the world over celebrate the five-year anniversary of Jay Z and Kanye West’s “Otis.” Now’s as good a time as any to relive the magic, starting with Funkmaster Flex’s 22-minute-long, hilariously devastating debut of the song on July 20, 2011 .
There’s a game that I love to play called Exquisite Corpse, and I was introduced to it at this poetry salon a friend would throw every few Saturdays. You write a couplet based on a subject or prompt, fold over the piece of paper so that the couplet is invisible and pass it to the writer next to you. She writes a couplet, unaware of what you just wrote, and does the same until a poem is created by a room full of writers who have no idea what any of their collaborators wrote. The poem is always shocking and lovely. Maybe that’s always the outcome, when you’re dealing with a secret collaboration of sorts.
Producers like Kanye West have been sampling iconic old school songs and sounds since the beginning of rap, but the aritist somehow managed to out-Kanye himself on Watch the Throne’s “Otis.” It’s not just the interwoven composition of the sample of Otis Redding’s “Try a Little Tenderness,” but it’s the boldness of declaring the beloved, deceased singer and producer a featured artist on the track. “Otis,” featuring Otis insists that, although Otis didn’t know it back in 1966, he was destined to be a future collaborator of two musical titans. “Otis” implies, in fact, that the collaboration was already beginning to unfold when Redding recorded his own vocals. For some, sampling is just sampling, or it’s even stealing, but someone like Kanye makes it an art form that resurrects the dead—one that plays out so profoundly on a song like “Otis,” that I can’t resist the urge to describe what happened as a secret collaboration that started in the past. “Otis,” then, has the power of a soulful time machine. Like every poet who’s played Exquisite Corpse, Otis Redding had no idea what was coming after him—had no control and yet, had everything to do with the final, collaborative project. To quote some other geniuses of the rap sample, “this is powerful music.”
Aside from the poetic brilliance of the sample, the title and the declared “feature,” the lyrics stand as supreme examples of a certain “sophisticated ignorance” that only a handful of rappers have mastered. Earlier this year I wrote about my 7-year-old son “using the word “nigga for the first time and after finishing the piece, I immediately searched for what I knew had to be the image to go along with it: a screenshot from the Spike Jonze-directed “Otis” video. It was perfect, though I didn’t know why until today. Listening to Funkmaster Flex going insane as he debuted the song to the world from Hot 97, it occurred to me that Kanye’s line in the fourth verse—”sophisticated ignorance/write my curses in cursive”—spoke to the exact difficulty I had in explaining why the use of “nigga” remains complicated. There is such a thing as sophisticated ignorance; in rap it’s practically a philosophical device. It’s nuanced, and my 7 year-old certainly doesn’t possess it yet—and may not ever. Yeezy and Hov not only possess it (likely, invented it on some level), but they understand it enough to be self-referential, to write the braggadocious, capitalistic lyrics heard on “Otis,” only to complicate them at various points throughout the song and on other Watch the Throne tracks like “Murder to Excellence,” “Niggas in Paris,” and “Made in America.”