The “I Gave You Power” Test
Chris Ryan: Any rapper can be corny. Great rappers transcend corniness. Let’s call this the “I Gave You Power” test, named after the song from Nas’s
It Was Written. On that 1996 track, Nas raps from the perspective of a gun. This is not my reading. Nas actually says so in the beginning of the song. He talks about being bought, sold, and used “like I’m a motherfukking gun … I can’t believe this shyt.” Neither could I. I still remember the first time I heard it: My favorite rapper had gone from
the barbecue to the freshman creative writing seminar in the blink of an eye.
2 Then Nas actually started rapping. It was like
watching Larry Bird play left-handed — like he was intentionally handicapping himself with a cumbersome metaphor, just to see if he could overcome it. By the middle of the first verse, around the time Nas/the gun is getting passed from Ohio to Little Rock to Brooklyn, I realized something: In 1996, not even Nas could fukk up a Nas song.
There is so much to digest on
To Pimp a Butterfly, but I find myself increasingly drawn to its second half, specifically “How Much a Dollar Cost.” This motherfukker raps about meeting a homeless man who is actually God. A girl in my freshman seminar wrote a story with literally the same plot. It did not involve Radiohead’s
“Pyramid Song,” but that’s only because “Pyramid Song” hadn’t been recorded yet.
I can pay no higher compliment to Kendrick’s rapping than to say I am prepared to change the “I Gave You Power” Test to the “How Much a Dollar Cost” Test. In 2015, not even Kendrick can stop Kendrick.
how at the end of 'hood politics' the intro to 'how much a dollar cost' builds up into the actual song
