No one’s got anything to say about Trouble’s chorus…
[Video][Website]
[6.89]
Anthony Easton: Why did this take four people?
[3]
Patrick St. Michel: In which New Yorker El-P tries to recreate the ugly 808 beats dotting countless Southern mixtapes, only for his production to veer off into Definitive Jux territory. Whereas someone like Gucci Mane would take a beat like this for some great punch lines, Killer Mike uses it to make his verbal haymakers that much more forceful. Bun B and T.I. sound fine but this is all about the snarling delivery of Killer Mike pumped up by El-P’s production.
[7]
Colin Small: This song reminds me why baroque rap maximalists like Ice Cube and the Bomb Squad are less influential today then their fame might suggest: music with such little subtlety is difficult to make well. “Big Beast” is on the edge. Mike’s flow is an acquired taste: at his best, his in-your-face punch fits into a beat’s crevices in a way that it seems like it shouldn’t, creating an jaw-dropping fireball of emotion and energy. (See 2006’s “That’s Life” for a perfect example.) Here, that isn’t really the case. Bun B has been phoning in the same cadence since 2008’s “Paper Planes” remix, and T.I. just sounds lost. Despite all this, El-P’s production manages to maintain the song’s momentum through brute force.
[6]
Jonathan Bradley: Toward the end of the final verse here, Killer Mike spits “I don’t make dance music: this is R.A.P.” and so much of “Big Beast” is the epitome of everything I love about a particular kind of rap music. It’s hardheaded and ugly and ignorant; I haven’t heard unhinged stick-up rhymes like “Lurking in the club on tourist motherfuckers/Welcome to Atlanta — up your jewelry, motherfucker!” since M.O.P.’s “Ante Up.” (Yeah, and that includes 50’s “Ski Mask Way.”) Even more piquant is the buzzing and discordant instrumental; producer El-P takes “bring the noise” to be a challenge the way Public Enemy did. It makes sense that Bun B and T.I. — both unexpectedly lively! — quote Cube and Mike interpolates KRS-One; this is how you’re supposed to do it.
[9]
Brad Shoup: Never realized how much Mike’s timbre resembles KRS-One’s; if you squint you might think the Teacher’s riffing on himself on the final verse. He’s right, this isn’t Luda territory; this one shakes with rage. El-P’s drums land like shells, snaps wink at Atlanta’s hip-hop history while the foursome takes the industry hostage. True to his onomatopoeia reference, honorary Atlantan Bun B litters his verse with ee-ahs; T.I. tries to update Wayne’s “goon to a goblin” line with mixed results (what’s any threat to a coward?). For such a forward-pushing approach, though, it’s weird to see “no homo” dragged back into the light.
[8]
Alfred Soto: R.A.P. Music collects remembrances of ATL past unyellowed by nostalgia while harnessing an anger at political figures ranging from Ronald Reagan (honored with his own song) to Barack Hussein Obama himself for separating the rich from poor. The rage is there in “Big Beast,” which apart from allowing a wide-awake T.I. (a fact we shouldn’t sneeze at) to bite down hard assimilates the rhetoric of Occupy Wall Street: “We some money hungry wolves and we’re down to eat the rich.” Docked a notch for embarrassed fag baiting.
[7]
Jer Fairall: Read my score not as an underrating of what is, by all measurable standards, a most awesome track, or as tiny scraps being thrown at an ace Bun B verse, a searing El-P production or “he sat me on the porch, said ‘that’s where little dogs sit’/pointed at the yard, said ‘that’s where big dogs shit,'” but rather as encouragement to those listeners who for some reason have no plans on hearing anything else from R.A.P. Music, that this is an album that gets richer, deeper, angrier and more awesome as it progresses, and that this is track one.
[7]
Jonathan Bogart: I mean I know why posse cuts are fast-tracked to be singles — the same reason every new Marvel character meets either Wolverine or Spider-Man in the first couple months of their title — but the empty-calorie hardasssedness on display here is really only a scene-setter to a much richer and more furious album. Which isn’t to say Bun B and T.I. don’t deliver like the scene-stealing champs they are. And the Drive homage in the video is cute.
[7]
Will Adams: The music isn’t so much a big beast as it is a cataclysmic force of nature. El-P engineers an exhilarating frenzy of twisted distortion that repeatedly pummels you with the message “Everybody knows I’m a mothafuckin monster” more than that other song’s music did. It ends up doing this much more effectively than the rappers on top of it, though. Bun B’s sharp coming-of-age tale comes closest, but as it stands now: where can I find the instrumental?
[8]