Jhene Aiko. This is Ms. Aiko's third appearance on this top 40. That's legitimately impressive. I don't think even Lana has appeared more often. And the song is good enough, lyrically. I generally see the party songs and the thumpers done by about song 20. That's when the words of the songs really make Stephen feel some type of way. That's when we can actually jump into the lyrics and really feast on the meanings. Well, except for Grand Finale, obviously.
Freestyle: a music form that begs for structure. The rap battles I've heard (few) and improvisational poetry I've seen (more) all read like extended nightmares; one thought jumps to the next without fulfilling its purpose or explaining its presence. The rhymes are often very clever and the flow is unexpected. I know it takes a tremendous amount of skill. But the product is often a Gordian knot, begging for the clean steel sweep of Alexander's blade. Aiko is that blade.
I don't know if she wrote this freestyle before, or if she practiced parts of the lyrics. It's possible that she constructed the meanings and the relationships of lines before she started. Regardless, the freestyle has structure, even if it is only one.
Comfort Inn Ending: a song that only does one thing, but does it well. Aiko makes a claim from a realization. He's not the only one she can love. She's not the only one he was seeing. Each is not the only one with pain. Truth: their relationship is nothing. She explains what she knows to us as we listen. She really loved this guy, but the holes in the wallpaper got obvious really fast. Too many people showed up making claims on him/making claims on her. By the end, she's really jaded, trying to pass off their relationship as being worthless because she only wanted a shoulder to cry on when her brother died.
But. She makes that claim again, one final time: we're nothing. It's turned around, though. Mature.
And I was not only one who was hurting/And you were not the only one with the burdens/But if we're nothing, we're nothing, we're nothing, we're nothing, we're nothing, we're nothing/Why would you call this love when you knew that it wasn't?She's an adult about it. She's not petty. She just wants to know why he thought it was okay to use her. If this is freestyle, I'll buy this song right now because Aiko deserves the money. This is constructed to have a natural progression of thought, to be simple enough to follow, to introduce its concepts slowly and resolve them once (not to drive a point into the ground by repetition).
I only have one confusion, really.
What are the genders, again, of the players in the drama? The narrator is voiced by a woman (Aiko). The lover was told not to trust hoes (a term mostly for women). Dominik, David, Braden, Marquis, Sean, and Brian all had their way with the lover (these are all male names). The narrator left 'Quis, who I assume is the same Marquis from before (male?). Everything is ambiguous until the baby mama bursts in and resolves my questions: the lover has got to be male. I don't think lesbians have mistakes that make babies, unless medical science has failed me badly. Unless the narrator is two and they're switching without switching voices or singers, He has been toyed with romantically by men, fell in love with a woman, got a girl pregnant, and essentially had a very confusing couple of months. Maybe the video will clear things up.
Well.
Narrator: female. Check.
Lover: male. Check. (apparently white, with a black beard and a weird Jesus necklace)
Exes of the lover: (?) Anyway, there were two girls in a really nice Ferrari that Aiko drew on with black wax crayon to look like she was keying it. I'm not sure what was happening there, but they looked terrified. But there's still Dominik, David, Braden, Marquis, Sean, and Brian who had their way with him. It's hard to understand.
Anyway, I have some feelings about when famous people use their breakups as creativity juice. I've done it, but I try really hard not to write about the breakup explicitly. I don't want people to know my personal business, and I really don't want my ex to see what I'm writing about them. That's awful trash behavior, in my opinion, to drag your raw, exposed heart out to shame someone publicly. I still love the way the song sounds, though. It makes me slow and angry and sad, simultaneously, and I just want to hear the story, mostly, and I guess I wouldn't buy this song because I have other things I want to do when I feel like this. Comfort Inn Ending doesn't fill a need for me.
Oh, yeah. Before I forget: update.
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