Eminem, Mazie, and the Importance of Bad Music
I'd never trust a person who claims not to like bad music
It feels like every music critic eventually feels the need to make a list of great recordings you need to hear in order to properly understand the history of popular music. What every critic feels less of a need to do is to make a list of terrible recordings you need to hear to round out that picture.
If you were making a list of the greatest music of the 1950s, you'd probably include songs by Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry and Little Richard. You probably wouldn't include Pat Boone. And that's a travesty. Not because Pat Boone is good. He's horrible. But he is probably the only act of the decade that rivaled Elvis in terms of record sales. Not including him and his once-popular compatriots provides both an incomplete picture of the decade and also makes it seems like the music of yore was all great. Spoiler: It wasn't. We just don't listen to the bad stuff anymore.
But maybe even more importantly, popular music that is terrible is sometimes as influential as great music. Here's an example. In 1971, David Bowie released his seminal album Hunky Dory. While the entire album is great, the fourth track, Life on Mars?, is its centerpiece. (In fact, Pitchfork called it the best song of the 1970s.) On the chorus of that tune, Bowie sings the following:
Sailors fighting in the dance hall
Oh man, look at those cavemen go
It's the freakiest show
Take a look at the lawman
Beating up the wrong guy
Oh man, wonder if he'll ever know
He's in the best selling show
Is there life on Mars?
In these images, Bowie smashes together the highs and the lows of the social ladder, the caveman and the lawman. It's an evocative refrain that pairs well with his soaring, cinematic arrangement. But that line "Oh, man look at those cavemen go" is lifted from the end of the chorus of an obscure number one hit from the early-1960s called “Alley-Oop”: "He's the king of the jungle jive / Look at that cave man go."
Though the record is largely forgotten and, in many ways, not very good, it came to influence one of the most celebrated artists of the 20th century. And that's because “Alley-Oop” was popular while Bowie was growing up. In short, bad music can leave an impression as deep as great music. And there is bad music being made today that will influence the next generation of iconoclasts. So don't ignore it.
A New One
"dumb dumb" by mazie
Part of my job at Audiomack is to use our data to identify up-and-coming talent. Two years ago, one of our systems flagged an artist named mazie. Her songs were short, playful, and somewhat silly.
Though mazie was building a nice career, things changed dramatically in August 2022 when her song “dumb dumb” was featured in the Netflix show Do Revenge. Suddenly, she was getting millions of streams and her music was trending on TikTok.
“dumb dumb” fits well within mazie's oeuvre. In fact, I'd use the same three adjectives that I used two paragraphs ago to describe it. Regardless, what fascinates me is that not even a month after it started blowing up, she released a sped-up version of the song. Literally the exact same song just played at probably 1.25 times the speed of the original.
The act of re-releasing songs with the speed manipulated is a larger trend. On Spotify, you can find full playlists of sped-up songs, sometimes dubbed "nightcore". On YouTube, you can search nearly any song and add the suffix "slowed + reverb" to get the opposite. The re-release of “dumb dumb” falls into the former category. While the trend was first explored by DJs and producers in the early-2000s, it has come into vogue on TikTok. While artists are now releasing official versions of these speed-adjusted tracks, this is an audience-driven trend. Artists just noticed that people were ripping, manipulating, and re-uploading their tracks.
For a long time, what you gave to the listener was what they got. But with the proliferation of the internet and recording software, there is no finality. A recording can always be updated. And it might not even be by the artist.
A New One
"Till I Collapse" by Eminem ft. Nate Dogg
If you're shocked that I'm calling an Eminem song "old", then you should make sure you are stretching before you exercise. Many of his songs are now old enough to drink alcohol legally. Regardless, I was reminded of this song while I was making a TikTok in celebration of Eminem's 50th birthday.
Though this record begins with a murmur, it quickly transitions into a stomping-and-clapping military march, Eminem intensely professing his love for rap (e.g. "Till I collapse I'm spilling these raps long as you feel 'em") and bragging about how good he is at it. Outside of the music, this track is a valuable document because in the midst of claiming that he is the greatest rapper of all-time, Eminem also lists who he considers to be the other greats.
I got a list, here's the order of my list that it's in
It goes Reggie, Jay-Z, 2Pac, and Biggie
André from OutKast, Jada, Kurupt, Nas, and then me
If you missed that, the list goes Reggie "Redman" Noble - one half of the duo Method Man & Redman - Jay-Z, 2Pac, Biggie Smalls (a.k.a. The Notorious B.I.G.), André 3000 - one half of Outkast - Jadakiss, Kurupt, Nas, and then Eminem. Beyond Kurupt, most of those men are consistently hailed as some of the greatest MCs to ever do it.
I've oddly always felt like there was a parallel between this song and Stevie Wonder's classic “Sir Duke”. Both are celebrations of music (Eminem: "Music is like magic, there's a certain feeling you get / When you real and you spit and people are feeling your shit | Stevie Wonder: "Music is a world within itself / With a language we all understand") and both feature their creators tipping their caps to their influences. Though Eminem shouts out an immortal octet of rappers, Wonder sticks with a pentet of jazz legends: Count Basie, Glenn Miller, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Ella Fitzgerald.
But here are some of music's pioneers
That time will not allow us to forget
For there's Basie, Miller, Satchmo
And the king of all Sir Duke
And with a voice like Ella's ringing out
There's no way the band can lose
Looking at their music alone, Eminem and Stevie Wonder have very little in common. Despite that, there exists a universal thread that we seeing running through all songs. “Till I Collapse” and “Sir Duke” - siblings separated at birth - provide a crumb of evidence for that.
Relaxing and floating downstream,
Chris Dalla Riva
Want to hear the music I make? Listen to my new EP.
Want to see to more of my recent favorites? Listen to this playlist.
