Rock And Roll (Could Never Hip Hop Like This) Part 2

Yeah, it may sound a bit cliché calling a thread by the title of a song, I just wanted to hear your opinions about the track and show you mine.

In the song you can clearly hear "Spring" [La primavera] by Vivaldi as sample played in the part of Jazzy Jay and Grand Wizard Theodore.
If you don't know what I'm talking about, here the song:

(0:00 -1:19, at the beginning the melody is taken over by whistles, we will find them at the end too);
And the track by Vivaldi:


It's not just this, if you closely listen you'll notice there are even the other seasons:
Summer [L'estate] (in the part of Mike 1:22 - 2:31)

(to confront 0:43 - 1:04, but I can't guarantee it's the exact sample they used);

In Rahzel's part there it comes Autumn [L'autunno] (2:49 - 3:29)


Right after, there he goes Chester. But where is Winter [L'inverno]? Why has it been replaced by Chester's verses?

Let's get into the theory/analysis I came up with.
The structure of the song seems to be cyclical:

• Spring, symbol of birth in which human energy is awakened. In fact, Jazzy Jay and Grand Wizard Theodore describe the origin of hip hop, came out from different genres:

"We didn't have no hip hop beats back in the days
We had to take it from everywhere, we can get it from
Its just trying to take it to another level
That what keeps the music new and keeps it fresh"

New and fresh are obviously qualities of nature in spring.​

• Summer is symbol of evolution and maturity, but Vivaldi intends to represent the season in its "explosive charge": it reached the phase in which the hip hop has borne its fruit, but also emerges the awareness that we need something new, Mike complains about lack of originality, a change is needed. Plus, Mike alludes to the triple stage of darkness, three barriers Allah had to surpass in order to born: organize the dark matter, give energy and then form himself and everything else.

• I think the interlude of Lord Finesse with the lines "Right about now, the funk soul brother, check it out now, the funk soul brother", samples from the song The Rockafeller Skank by Fatboy Slim, could refer to the "flipping" (sampling older culture and reusing it in a new context) and intends to collocate it into a project of revival, take what's "old" and turn it into something "new".

• Autumn is the season in which the leaves, the old matters and themes, start to fall and get ready to die and, then, reborn. In fact, there seems to be a denial of the old same matters.

• "This sky opens wide, swallowing again, once I am inside, I'm lost and can't pretend", these lines are pretty difficult to connect with the rest of the analysis: different theme, different melody, it changes it all. Why renounce to Winter by Vivaldi for these verses? This is the question upon which all the "theory/analysis" is based, the answer I came up with is given by the following lines

"These pictures in my mind are not a part of me
These memories all the time till I can hardly breathe"

There is a denial of previous materials, but Chester is aware there will always be a part connected to the "old him" that will not definitely disappear, but will be integrated in the evolution of the "next him" only if he gets over this initial rejection of the change. We can think about "him" as the hip hop in order to reconnect it with the rest of the previous discourse.​

• Here again Spring, that through the use of the initial whistles alludes to the rebirth.

​

Anyways, it sounds a bit too harsh try to connect the different parts of the song and pretend to collocate them inside a compositional scheme. This is just a theory/analysis (more theory than analysis) originated from the use of three out of four seasons that made me think about a precise collocation in the track's story, this process of birth-death-rebirth in which hip hop, as well as humans, evolve through a process of exteriorization (spring and summer) to internalization (autumn and Chester's lines), and so on. DJ Q-Bert himself says "They taught me to look beyond the superficial". Even if I do believe the "seasons" are there for a reason, I do not exclude that their presence is just important from a musical perspective: in fact, the song itself is a good example of different cultures and genres.

 

Thank you! I feared the theories were just too far fetched but the fact that you appreciated them means a lot to me.

Uhm, there's no need to delete or edit the comment at all, I accept criticism. I said it was more a theory than an analysis, we don't have enough informations to do a real one, I only tried to cover a "plot hole" since I noticed they only used three of the Four Seasons by Vivaldi.

 

I always had the hope that both Mike and Chaz parts of those song were like a scrapped demo and they put parts of it in those song. You can hear Mike whispering "breathe" behind Chaz vocals, it could be a good LP track (or, at least, another one to keep with us)