skykicking

Maybe I'm misreading it, but this Spizzazzz post seems to imply that Crooklyn Clan's "Be Faithful" is not the most well-known urban track ever. I seriously think it would be in Australia! I have never been to an R&B club, a party, a uni function, or pretty much anything where this hasn't been played at least twice! People who fucking hate rap will start screaming "All you chicken heads! Be quiet!" from the very first bar! Even "California Love" and Ice Cube's "You Can Do It" bow down to this one!

Apart from being a great track, "Be Faithful" is a sterling example of urban as physically impacting music with almost no other context or value - it doesn't make sense to hear it outside of a dancefloor (or in Save The Last Dance) because it doesn't have any other purpose than to make people dance and shout. There's not really much else R&B or rap that is so fundamentally mono-functional, so rap-as-disco, and that's probably not a bad thing (most of the time you have stuff like Joe Budden's "Pump It Up" or especially Ludacris's awesome "Stand Up" - tracks which are dancefloor killers but bring so much else to the table that it's impossible to limit them to this function alone) but I'm glad for the existence of "Be Faithful" because it makes explicit this particular impulse within urban music. One which is quite separate to narrative, or poetry, or sonic complexity, or humor, or even "what the fuck"-factorishness (no-one is surprised by "Be Faithful" at this stage of the game); rather it's an impulse towards the pleasure-principle, towards gratifying the hips and the elbows and allowing horny kids to pick up on the dancefloor and drunk kids to intensify their drunkenness through raucous celebration. Play us a song we know and watch us beam with delight. This is the secret, too, behind "Crazy In Love" and "Rock Your Body" and "In The Club" and "Scandalous" and "Jenny From The Block": the bodyslam as comfort food.

- 12:26 PM 0 comments

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