ART OF SONG
Why?
“These Few Presidents”
Alopecia
2008 | anticon.

I like hip-hop; a lot of people like hip-hop. A lot of people claim to like hip-hop. A lot of people hate hip-hop. A lot of people claim to like hip-hop but hate rap. Some people think rap is violent and hip-hop isn’t. People don’t know the difference between the two. Most people (including myself) don’t know shit enough about hip-hop to really make a justified claim. I know this. I still like hip-hop.

Instead of discussing the merits of the genre, or attacking it because Q-Tip doesn’t shred a guitar, and Clipse sold cocaine, and therefore obstructs the morality of our kids, I’m going to make a claim that’s more fun to debate: anticon. founder Jonathan “Yoni” Wolf (aka Why?) is a contender for the greatest active lyricist in music. And he raps!…sort of.

“These Few Presidents” is the third track from last year’s brilliantly morbid Alopecia, and one that best exhibits what Why? is all about. In his somewhat nasally, sneer of a voice, Wolf rap-sings “At your house/ the smell of our still living human bodies/ and oven gas/ you pray to Nothing out loud/ two first names and an ampersand/ embroidered proudly on a kitchen towel.” In a single line, he hits on: 1) impending death 2) the human desire for marriage 3) fear of commitment 4) uncertainty in a higher power 5) the perceived simplicity of intimacy. And none of these themes are buried; the listener doesn’t have to dig them out from a pile of symbols and non sequiturs the way Bob Dylan, Conor Oberst, Silver Jews’ David Berman, or any non-ODB member of the Wu requires.
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