Ironically, it was The Game who named himself after the popular Milton Bradley entertainment…
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Rebecca A. Gowns: The Guess Who? No it’s Guess Who, Romanian hip-hop artist! With a glorious piece of Romanian pride, or, more accurately, a call to arms. “Onoare” means “honor,” something which he feels that no one has anymore; if it exists at all, it is being trampled. There’s this great bit here: “Am intalnit si romani fericiti, doar pe afara / Am intalnit si romani pacaliti, cam o tara / Am intalnit si romani linistiti, prima oara” (“I have met happy Romanians, on the outside / I have met Romanians who have been duped, an entire country of them / I have met quiet Romanians, at first…” and, it leads into the chorus — he suspects that the Romanians who kept quiet were not yet aware that their honor was being trampled.) It has a good sound, too; vaguely anthemic (in the original sense), with a great beat, sampled trumpets, and foreboding synth sounds that crest in little waves.
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Alfred Soto: With its horns and rippling keyboard runs, a dead ringer for a late nineties Roots track. He’s not boring, though, and I don’t need to know Romanian.
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Brad Shoup: If there are interviews about Guess Who’s definition of honor, I can’t find them. (I’d love to learn of any possible connection between this and this, for instance.) As something sonic, this works regardless of my ignorance: the synth buzz is a perfect compliment to the brass. Guess Who knows when to apply melody, and the live drums sizzle.
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Anthony Easton: How come all of these dance hall divas and pop-hop geniuses, who have been so good for so long at making with the loud and the ass shaking and the genius fast breakdowns, are moving into the broken, the exhausted, and the falling apart? Is it an economic thing, the great depression in colour?
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Ian Mathers: For Canadians who still hear “American Woman,” “No Sugar Tonight/New Mother Nature,” “These Eyes,” “No Time,” etc. on the radio all over the place, the conceptual whiplash here is akin to hearing a single from that hot new k-pop act The Led Zeppelin. Also, does he keep saying “illuminati” on the chorus?
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Will Adams: The first 30 seconds are a [9]; brass and synths have rarely sounded so good together. The rest is fine. Guess Who’s voice is engaging enough for me to listen despite the language barrier, and I have fun imagining that he’s saying “Illuminati” in the chorus. But the synths and horns are reduced to a hum, and all I want is to return to the overture.
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Scott Mildenhall: It’s pretty clear to ears unversed in the Romanian language that Guess Who isn’t exactly happy here, but what is it that’s upset him so? Well, judging by Google’s interpretation this is a pretty vituperative attack on Romania’s establishment, talking about corruption, false promises; a general lack of the titular honour. His biggest hit, “Tot Mai Sus“, was all about limitless possibility; this is anything but. The Rudimental-esque production (it has brass, basically) suggests resignation, but his delivery gets across a degree of anger – at the point of no return, sometimes anger’s all there is. One minor quibble is that the 50-second spoken excerpt, courtesy of late film director Sergiu Nicolaescu, might be a bit too long, but then full appreciation of it probably only comes from knowing what it actually is he’s saying, so it might be fair to let it slide.
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Sabina Tang: Google Translate yields the sense that Guess Who is concerned with the collapse of values, disillusioned with society and the political process. The falcon cannot hear the falconer; things fall apart, the centre cannot hold. No doubt he knows what he’s talking about. In the absence of translation, the song is distinguished by an electronics-shadowed brass band that renders it nearly danceable, or at least sway-able.
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Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: “Morality is suffering from a meningitis epidemic and our country has been dragged to the edge by leaders who are thieves.” That’s a rough translation of the sample that dominates the second half of Guess Who’s song. The source of the dialogue excerpt is late director Sergiu Nicolaescu’s 1999 epic The Death Triangle, a WWI superproduction about the Romanian war hero and nationalist icon Ecaterina Teodoroiu. Nicolaescu, who passed away in January, was an icon of Romanian cinema and a senator for the Romanian Parliament; The Death Triangle was co-written by Corneliu Vadim Tudor, controversial leader of the nationalist Partidul România Mare party. Movie samples are part of the hip-hop language, used to add dramatic flourishes or evoke aesthetic sensibilities – think of how inseparable “36 Chambers” is from Shaolin and Wu-Tang, for instance. The dialogue sampled – spoken by Nicolaescu himself, playing General (and future Prime Minister) Alexandru Averescu – goes beyond adding splashes of colour to “Onoare”, layering the song with the baggage of Romania’s relationship with patriotism and populist politics. It’s a cluster-bomb of references, reaching through Romania’s recent history and finding potential kindred spirits in the song’s glum “everything is broken” message. Depending on where you sit on the political spectrum, it could be troubling to imagine “Onoare” sides with PRM, yet Guess Who’s lyrics offer few soluble alternatives to what he cites as Romania’s “third world” status, the bleakness held back by the melodicism in his performance and the Golden Age-indebted horn loop.
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