“IV. Sweatpants” and Other Rap I Missed | SOTW 12/06/2024 (Coming To You… Late)

Hey, I’m back, exactly six months after I was last scheduled! This one’s an odd reintroduction—about a half-and-half split between obscurity and some of the most popular songs we’ve discussed on Songs of the Week, none of which are really great representatives for my taste in isolation—but this wouldn’t be fun if I just talked about Kate Bush every week, would it? I mean… wait, would it?

TIA TAMERA | Doja Cat (feat. Rico Nasty) What’s this—a startling dark horse candidate for 2024’s most played song—first place, in fact, for most of this summer, and still in the running for top ten? December seems to be a month for pop confessions on Max Todd. (Dot Com!), because today, December the 6th and no later, I gotta hand it to Doja Cat. I wish I could say I’ve been a fan since her truly bizarre debut “MOOO!,” but as usual, I discovered her about four years after everyone else. I’ve always been shamefully out of touch with the rap scene, and even when I do talk about it, I sound like Philip Seymour Hoffman in The Big Lebowski. You know, with a little “ah hah hah hah,” a little “Wonderful Woman. We’re all very fond of her,” if you will. So, doing my best to withhold any hoity-toity literary diction and what have you—no words like “prosaic” or “pathos” today—I’d say most Doja that floats my boat does so because it’s so random. “Random,” to be clear, is a word I’ve been pop-culturally shock-collared to never say thanks to millennial cringe, so let’s set the record straight: when I say Doja Cat is “random,” I don’t mean tumblr scene “randem XD”—i.e., where you’re sorted into the random house if you like le mustaches, bacon, avocados, or hamsters (barring if they wear shutter shades, in which case they’re epic)—I mean, like, reciting Roddy Ricch’s “The Box” like a lovestruck knight while wearing chain mail on Instagram Live random.

But because it’s a tainted word (an ironic category in and of itself), I’ve taken to calling this “anything goes” lyricism. Songs like “Tia Tamera” are truly a cut-and-paste collage put to a beat—a vomit of brands, references, taboos, and, yea, vomit—from IKEA, to Chia (Pets), to Nia (Long), to diarrhea, nothing is off the table. In another song, this magazine-cutout character might smear into an overstimulating slurry, but most verses stand out, and many are now mainstays in my lexicon (lexicon? And I said I wasn’t gonna be hoity-toity…). This blog alone quotes “They said, ‘Doja hit so sticky,’ I said, ‘Thank you very much’” all too often and doesn’t quote the next line, “Bent the whole world over and said, ‘Spank you very much,” enough. “He wanna eat up the caesar (Ayy)?” “Have a seat, bitch, please, Ikea?” “Skinny legend like Wiz Khalifa?” All bangers, many of which are enhanced—if you’ll allow for some intertextuality—by Doja’s Genius annotations. On “Beat the pussy up, call PETA,” she muses,

“Because the pussy do get beat up often and it’s a problem. Like, I really do beat the pussy up, I do. I can’t control myself. Call PETA, please. It’s animal abuse. No, I’m just kidding. No! I’m basically saying like, don’t have weak dick, like that’s basically what that means.”

On “Make a bitch sick, diarrhea (Ew),” we get another annotation gem:

“It’s more so like an internal disgust like, I feel like when I do big shit, it be makin' people’s hearts drop to they stomach. And when your heart drop to your stomach, then you gotta take a shit.”

…like, yea, go off I guess.

Though I’m sure these lines were compiled to prioritize “sticky” soundbites over thematic cohesion, the main motif here is prominent, black, twin sisters, like the titular Tia & Tamera Mowry and Serena & Venus Williams (annotation: “they’re both baby girl, I love them so much.”). This is because her… because of… her, like… because she… boobs? “Ah ha ha! That’s marvelous.”

While I’m allotting a lot of my admiration to Doja Cat, I’d be remiss not to mention her feature, Rico Nasty, even if her contribution isn’t my favorite bit. It seems like everyone loves her verse, and while I for sure enjoy it, to me her voice just isn’t as… I don’t know, weird as Doja’s? What I still can’t deny, though, is that she hits “I just made a hundred K in two weeks / Lil' bitch, do you need me to pull it up?” so hard. Like, hard enough that I think I couldn’t critique her to her face.

Thankfully, though, all I have left to end with is compliments. As most longtime Max Todd (Dot Com!) readers know well, no matter how much I love the lyrics, my first and final impression of most songs comes down to how I resonate with the music itself, and in that department, “Tia Tamera” is also a blast. Though it’s got a simple backing track, its descending, almost ominous progression accented by Doja’s “woah woahs” has an “ah shit, here we go (again)” quality that I really enjoy—despite notes stepping down, it really revs up to a super fun song. While Whosampled suggests there’s a sample of A Tribe Called Quest’s “Bonita Applebum” in play here, I think that’s just Doja quoting “Bonita, Bonita, Bonita”—I can’t hear any instrumental similarities, but I could be missing something. If it is indeed a Doja Cat original, props to her or her producers—it very quickly turned a song with lyrics I liked ironically into one that’s on my regular rotation.

Pairs Well With: “IV. Sweatpants” (Childish Gambino), “BOILED PEANUTS” (Doechii), “Light the City Up” (Cut the Lights)

HEROVILLE | Jim Noir Hey, little Jimmy boy’s back! With the recent release of his co-collaboration with Leonore Wheatley in their new band Co-Pilot, it may feel like we were discussing Jim Noir just yesterday (juuuust yesterday), but it’s been longer than it seems—since September of 2023, in fact. Through the privilege of his Patreon, I’ve still been a regular listener of his semi-regular EP releases, but these haven’t made Songs of the Week recently because, as bratty as it sounds, I think I was getting too much of a good thing. Though I’ve always loved Jim Noir for his magical abundance of sixties-pop gems, many of my previous reviews have noted the smell of burnout on many of his EPs from such intense output every month. If Jim Noir’s the sole reason you’re a Max Todd Dot Com consumer—I owe my massive fanbase to the trickle-down from his own, after all—then fret not, because I’ve been working on something that will spotlight every EP we’ve missed. I still love just about everything Alan Roberts writes, burnt-out or not—my fine-grained critiques are just a byproduct of how much I love his earlier work, and as much as I’d like to be impartial, I may just not resonate with his new direction as much (especially after his Bandcamp was ominously tagged “easy listening”). Despite his recent inconsistency, I’m glad he appears to be more focused on projects like Co-Pilot, his new weirdo music video, and the release of Jimmy’s Show 2, a compilation album featuring final drafts of his best Patreon bits. Still, I was excited that his penultimate EP—This Was That (Side A)—had branched away into more unconventional structures, chords, and sounds, so I figured it’d be worth reviewing to counterbalance my snobbish dissatisfaction.

Probably my favorite track of the bunch is the Britishly bizarre “Heroville,” a Lincoln Log song cobbled from choral nursery rhymes, surreptitious harpsichord, whimsical slide whistles, and off-kilter tempo changes. To me, Noir’s Brian Wilson influences have never been on clearer display—it might just be the title (and the slide whistle. And the clopping wood blocks. And the harmonies), but this could easily be his take on “Heroes and Villains.” In some ways, this might seem less like a change and more like a return to his sixties-homage roots, but I think this style allows for far more creativity than the indie-synth space he’s too-comfortably occupied as of late. In other words, as he himself sings: “I’ve changed you see / but only a little,” and in my estimation, this little shift forecasts big, blossoming things. This one’s certainly not his most conventional listen, but it still somehow manages to be catchy, and the end’s worth listening for, so definitely check it out on his Bandcamp.

Pairs Well With: “Violin” (They Might Be Giants), “Heroes and Villains” (Brian Wilson), “Penny Lane” (The Beatles)

IV. SWEATPANTS | Childish Gambino While the Rap-I’ve-Missed train is still rolling (leaving me at the station several states away), I couldn’t forget yet another rap relic I stumbled upon well after its heyday—ten years after, in fact. Ever since utterly falling in love with “Me and Your Mama” last year (hee hee), I’ve been craving more Childish in my life (we’re on a first name basis these days), and so went down a belated deep dive this summer to see what else I’d discover. Unfortunately, I didn’t turn many stones as good as that first gem, but I say that with one serious exception—holy shit, how has no one told me about “IV. Sweatpants?!”

Though just as loaded with lyrical and instrumental genius as “Me and Your Mama,” “IV. Sweatpants” rocks my socks off with completely distinct execution. Before we get knee-deep into some of these skeevy lines, though, I think it’s important to understand the context of this song as sung by Glover’s evil twin as a sort of self-parody, perhaps taking the piss out of his villainized image post-superstardom. To be fair, it’s not exactly a subtle tone—even more so than “Tia Tamera,” this backing track balances an overtly ominous descent with goofy percussion fit for Scooby Doo tip-toeing. “IV. Sweatpants” even has its own analogous “woah-woahs,” though these sound a bit more like Toad about to throw down (while “trippin’ off of them toadstools”). It’s an atmosphere that, despite its sillier elements, I’d call delightfully spooky, and as far as I’m concerned, it’s a justifiable outlet for brilliantly icky lines like “I got more tail than that PetCo” or “your girl drank my daycare.” Childish is classy like that.

Not to belittle Doja (I’d never to pit two queens against each other, especially if they both rhyme IKEA), but Gambino levels up her “anything goes” lyricism with some truly inspired wordplay, enjambing puns and repurposing reflected phrases line-to-line. Aside from your typical punny, pop-cultural lines like “Hip deep in that Pepto, I got five on her like Ben Folds” or acrobatic rhymes like “Bring a girlfriend, man, trouble when I see her / ee-ee ee-ee Onomatopoeia” that are almost too impressive to be funny, I’m most amazed by the jokes that layer inter-line. Like, one single “Half Thai thicky / all she wanna do is bangkok” (I know) would be noteworthy, but practically every phrase in this song is that clever, and they all weave together! Going from “Got a glass house in the Palisades / that A-K-A” to “white hood white hood / o-K-K-K” or “No hands like soccer teams” to “y’all fuck boys like Socrates” is crazy, dude—like, each of those pairings have at least three things going on between them, by my count (even if the Socrates callout lands a little late). Plus, speaking of onomatopoeia, Gambino makes mid-song interruptions cool when they almost never land for me in musicals—like, there’s so much momentum built up by the time he’s growling “Ain't nobody sicker in my Fisker, ‘vroom-vroom,’ ho,” that, by the time he cuts the song short mid-“ain’t nobody,” it really works as an effective screeching halt for the murmured punchline, like a backhanded producer’s note: “fiskers don’t make noise when they start up, just so you know.”

Momentum, I think, is the magic that makes “IV. Sweatpants” next-level. It can be Rico Nasty and Doja Catty, but its implicit build is on a slow course to burst, and when this silly villain song’s backing track suddenly cuts as Gambino snaps “and I don’t give a fuck about my family name,” slamming a fist of clattering silverware to the table, things turn convincingly chilling. There’s something cinematic about this stomach-dropping outburst—sometimes, the scariest movies are watching a tense dinner explode in slo-mo, and I love how perfectly this descent is captured. Though I think the standalone song captures it perfectly, it’s worth mentioning that “IV. Sweatpants” is cinematic because it has a cinematic accompaniment—a music video also directed by and starring the multitalented Glover himself.

When a song has such natural narrative flow, though, it’s bound to attract other writers and editors to include it in their media, which means I get to nitpick about needledrops again. I was equal parts pleasantly surprised and just… regular surprised, too, that “IV. Sweatpants” scored a battle in the Marvel cartoon Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur, one of those awesome animated series I’d have eaten up as a kid. Obviously, this animation is really something else, but while I’ve seen people unilaterally praise this sequence, I think “Sweatpants” makes for a bit of a janky fit. Like… is it hilarious just how heavily censored this song is, almost like listening to it on a spotty radio? Of course, but I’m not sure it was worth it for the bit. I guess maybe it was included because of the “paint me as a villain” line because the villain, Gravitas, is packing paintball-gun adjacent gravity juice (?) in this battle, but like… I dunno man, you couldn’t have found a good rap song that you don’t need to censor every fifth word for? I’m not trying to be pearl-clutching here, I just feel like if you’re gonna chop up the song that much, it might be worth finding a better fit. I say that, but like… I’m not the one with an awesome superhero cartoon. “Don’t be mad ‘cause I’m doing me better than you doin’ you.”

Pairs Well With: “Tia Tamera” (Doja Cat (feat. Rico Nasty)), “Ain’t It Funny” (Danny Brown), “CATFISH” (Doechii)

DOLLY DAGGER | Jimmy Hendrix So, I know we’ve already spoken about Jimi Hendrix’s posthumously-released First Rays of the New Rising Sun in my review of “Freedom,” [Reviewed 11/25/2022], but that was back before every song was its own essay, and like… while my Sisyphean struggle has always been to return to “short and sweet,” I think a lot was left unsaid in that impressionist smear of an opinion. Here’s my second-go around.

For those who don’t commit my every word to memory, 1997’s First Rays of the New Rising Sun is a compilation album arranged by the Hendrix family almost thirty years after Jimi’s death in 1970. Though this was their attempt at reconstructing an album Hendrix had been whittling away at while unwittingly living his final days, New Rising Sun is hardly the first time these tracks have seen wide release. Though Hendrix had soft-launched several of these songs live, most of their airtime prior to 1997 was actually posthumous, having released across, not kidding, three compilation albums of unfinished studio recordings—The Cry of Love, Rainbow Bridge, and War Heroes—catapulting songs like single “Dolly Dagger” to chart-topping status. I think there’s a beautiful angle about lasting legacy here—about art as a means of immortal communication—but to me, this onslaught of posthumous material cynically seems like striking the iron while it’s still hot, especially in the context of the notoriously greedy Hendrix family. I don’t know how comfortable I am touting a character assessment like that without facts to back it, but purely based on anecdotes I’ve come across, they’ll wring as many eggs out of their golden goose as it’ll give.

Even setting the money-milking allegations aside, consuming posthumous releases just feels ethically icky. Prince, for example, meticulously kept his demos locked down in “the vault” due to the same perfectionist tendencies that made his music so refined. To release something he felt the world wasn’t ready to see to me seems like an ancestral desecration, though that’s an unhealthy projection of my fear of having my childhood diaries read aloud to a committee of everyone I’ve ever known. Then again, without such a committee, how could we ever remember the past? Visionary psychologist Carl Jung’s Red Book—a collections of dreams and visions that informed most of his theories, something he feared would undo his professional credibility—was only recently released in 2009, ultimately unifying and clarifying his model of the psyche, and more importantly, offering me a life-changing read. Arguably, history is defined by what we hide, inadvertently preserving it for our descendants to discover—buried bodies, mystery cults, and kicked coprolites are foundational flesh for our skeletal memories. From an anticapitalist perspective, posthumous releases are greedy grave-robbings ripping privacy from the passed; from a historical perspective, posthumous releases are sacred time-tunnels to a lost past; and from my own perspective, posthumous releases sound like a ruinously embarrassing interruption to the afterlife. That said, I’m too young to say, but micromanaging my past might just be a mortal shortcoming I’ll outgrow—surely the dead shed it with the rest of their earthly tethers. In my last post I said “I'll always find a way to feel guilty for enjoying things,” and I think that was my most dead-on assessment in all of this—it’s easy to get sucked into this disorienting, ethical dithyramb, but at the end of the day, I’m lucky enough to hear “Dolly Dagger,” and it fucking rocks.

Whether we deserve to hear it or not, “Dolly Dagger” might just be the best Jimi Hendrix ever was, which makes it all the more a bummer that his output was abruptly halted. Yea, I know: “Jimi Hendrix is God and the sky is blue, more breaking news at 12,” I get it, but have you ever heard a guitar growl like that? That man is a matador taming fire-bellied dragons with his hands, making strings grumble and purr like a race car clearing its throat—it’s such guttural guitar that I couldn’t find comparisons outside of Black Sabbath and Soundgarden. Jimi was delivering metal beatdowns before the genre existed, with this blast lasting five heavy minutes and earning every second, even if it feels like a workout to listen to. I can’t believe an audience was blessed enough to witness this piece live—my soles might not be touching the floor by the time his solo shreds the outro to the tune of regular, harmonized cries.

Much like with Glover earlier, as a multitalented musical machine, Hendrix is so virtuosic on Guitar that it overshadows his other heights. Dude was, for example, no lyrical slouch, and even if he was, he’d sure make up for it in delivery—“Yeah, look at old burnt out Superman / Tryin' to shoot his dust on the sun” is so striking and sarcastic, and it’s probably the least stabby phrase in this piece. Our titular Dolly Dagger is on the receiving end of this shotgun blast of shade, with layered lines like “Been riding broomsticks since she was sixteen”—come on, how fun is that? Maybe it’s a little less fun remembering that this isn’t about some stereotypical “no-good harlot blues buzzard” but rather Jimi’s on-and-off girlfriend and groupie Devon Wilson, who he names when announcing “watch out, Devon” before shredding to high hell. Though it hasn’t been confirmed for obvious reasons, this hypothesis seems like a bullseye since the song not only calls out Wilson directly, but references a story catalogued in James Lough’s This Ain't No Holiday Inn: Down and Out at the Chelsea Hotel 1980–1995. Reportedly, while at a party where Wilson’s other, concurrent boy toy was in attendance—some guy named Mick Jagger—Hendrix watched as, right in front of him, Jagger nicked his finger and Wilson licked the blood from it. “She drinks the blood from a jagged edge” might be a badass line standing alone, but in context—

“Here comes Dolly Dagger
Her love's so strong gonna make you stagger
Dolly Dagger
She drinks the blood from a jagged edge”

—Hendrix is purposefully breaking the rhyme scheme so that the listener hears “Jagger” first. Yeeouch. Clearly, this song is sizzling with resentment, but then again, I’m not sure if the circles Jimi rolled with were always this messy-messy-messy—even without the heroin, it all sounds socially hellish to me. Whether or not he fed off of this freaky scene, I’m always impressed by what he made of his pain. Really makes you think “god, why’d that motherfucker have to go and get himself killed?” What a tragically human way to end a transcendent run.

Pairs Well With: “Rat Salad” (Black Sabbath), “Heavy Liquid” (Thee Hypnotics), “Hit It and Quit It” (Ty Segall covering Funkadelic)

“WELL YOU KNOW WHAT, THIS HAS BEEN AN INCREDIBLE PLEASURE…” | David Bowie Speaking of posthumous releases, there’s been quite a lot of post-Blackstar Bowie since his passing almost nine years ago, and not all of it has seemed entirely ethical from the outside. Though I can’t confirm, I doubt the dead mind much what does or doesn’t stay buried with them, but especially in the case of those who transcend personhood entirely and become something mythic, I think their families and legacy are owed only our best intentions when extending their story. While I can’t say this of the rumored Bohemian Rhapsody cinematic universe Bowie movie (pause to throw up in mouth), Moonage Daydream—a 2022 film somewhere between documentary, music video, and abstract collage—appears to have been made with the utmost respect for its subject. Given how long my Stories of the Month posts tend to stretch, I never found the time to lay out my thoughts on Moonage Daydream (🌕🌕🌕🌗🌑-🌕🌕🌕🌕🌑, depending on my mood), but its corresponding album of rarities, snippets, and leftovers from Bowie’s prolific sonic footprint has plenty worth shoehorning into a Songs of the Week context. For those curious, Moonage Daydream is a wildly different documentary experience than any other I’ve come across, and I think that has its pros and its cons. Namely, the movie is essentially an artfully-cut collage of Bowie’s various interviews, concerts, music videos, and films in nearly-linear order, albeit spiced with some shiny animations to transition. No narrator holds viewers’ hands—the unfocused sequence of Bowie’s career, like any natural life not shaped by a storyteller, unfurls organically across carefully curated clips. This composition has a really unique effect that I’m still mixed on. Undeniably, this is a really mature mode of presentation which allows a story to exist with less preexisting biases or pressures and allows the audience to have wider takeaways. On the other hand, it’s making a story that could be widely accessible quite niche—in lieu of a narrator, it relies on a lot of subtext and assumes you know a good amount of Bowie lore going into this movie, which is a great way to miscommunicate (or simply miss) information that might enhance the experience. Like with my own legacy, I get really micromanage-y about how others experience media I care so much about, and the idea that someone could (gasp) have a different opinion about David Bowie’s diverse and varied art is something my brain spends far too much time being anxious about. It’s almost as if I’m protecting myself from secondhand embarrassment about my heroes; as if somehow, my own unhealthy defense mechanisms also extend to the artists I love so that no one has to see their mistakes. Clearly, it’s a bit of personal preference, but from a mostly pragmatic perspective, I think there are a lot of pieces of Bowie’s story—particularly his magnum opus, Blackstar, written at the end of his life—that are far better told plainly rather than through Moonage Daydream’s cryptic allusions. So, that’s where I’m stuck: I’m not sure it’s the job of an art documentary like this to be accessible first, but as someone who’s such a huge fan of Bowie’s story from beginning to end, I can’t help but feel like it’s a waste to relegate it to mysterious references.

Still, one thing I’m certain I loved about Moonage Daydream was its cuttingly personal Bowie voiceovers that bookend the movie. Many of them are poignant meditations or wry, trickster commentary, but the one that really knocked my socks off was an unexpected interjection in the credits—a disembodied “goodbye” from David Bowie himself. Given the death-defying nature of Blackstar, it’s never really felt like David Bowie was truly gone, but hearing his voice unexpectedly say “well, you know what, this has been an incredible pleasure…” as the screen went black had an almost supernatural effect, especially when he half-sung a sparse, sentimental goodbye song—less a performance, and more like a lullaby for a baby on one’s knee. Obviously, I never knew Bowie personally, nor did the vast majority of his fans, but his voice nevertheless carried like a visitation from the dead—a resurrection and, simultaneously, the cosmic closure of saying goodbye from beyond the grave when, in life, he never had the chance. Look, I know parasocial relationships are problematic, and I don’t want to pretend losing Bowie was analogous to losing someone I tangibly loved, but I’m not gonna say I didn’t cry. It was deeply felt, it was cathartic, it was a real kick in the ding-ding.

Since this isn’t exactly a traditional song, I’ve paired it with similarly surreal album-enders that feel either like a supernatural curtain-closer, a startlingly personal snippet, or just a winking bookend. Thank you, and goodnight.

Pairs Well With: “Goodnight” (The Beatles), “Oblio’s Return (Narration)” (Harry Nilsson), “Beginner’s Guide to Birdwatching” (Haley Blais)

COSMIC CONNECTION | Sabina Espinet So, of all the cliffhangers I left everyone with for five months, perhaps the worst dangler was introducing my mom’s art last time as foreshadowing for featuring it in my next episode—for the first time ever in a Songs of the Week, no less. You wanna talk about a cultivated oeuvre, a life’s winding work? She’s been painting these insanely awesome alien babies since she was younger than I am now, and has only recently bookended this gestating image in an incredible art collection called Immigrant: A Traveler’s Guide. Yea, they’re flying off the shelves as we speak, but if you haven’t gotten your hands on a copy yet, don’t be shy—you can buy it here. I have never been more proud of my imaginative heritage, and many of these pieces cut to the core myth of my familial line thus far, so this was obviously a very meaningful read for me, but I also think there’s a universal anthem to otherness here that it has never been more important to make America aware of. Plus, there’s a pretty solid playlist at the end for your perusal… just saying.