As mentioned, "Shawty Snappin'" is the name of the game, the beats have snaps in em (Snap!) and there's more corny jokes to be made about that, riffs about the "timbre" to hash out, but the real issue is not nested in the beats or whether this is a "bangin song" or anything like that. Today we're going to talk about form and content, ideelz and forms, and most important, what R&B shit that appears uninspired and boring can tell us about where rap has really been all along.
Ready? Good! Watch this carefully first (yes an embed that is actually needed):
The whole of this screed hinges on the chorus. T-Pain does a RoboCher thing, sounding more pitched than Anthony Kedis. This is prima facie bad, but the Painster does a lot of catchup work by selling his lines, hinting that the song's boozy club encounter, empty fun that it is, leaves Yung Joc and T-Pain wanting something more, something beyond typical next-day Myspace friendship.
Social networking technology, although not specifically mentioned in the lyrics, plays a key role here, as it represents the encroachment of digital reality on our humanity. For the sake of my argument, it's a good thing T-Pain's voice - so reverbed up that it sounds like it was shitted out the womb of a Fender tweedface amplifier nine months after unprotected sex with Peter Gabriel - has been digitized just enough that one starts to think he might really want to be friends with Shawty. What's more, there's a humanoid desperation behind all that binary-encoded button-pushing on the vocal track that makes a listener want to go Asimov/Radiohead philosophy on the whole thing and wonder if the essence of humanity really is best expressed when reduced to robotic, crass calculation. That is, once we are nearly machines, as T-Pain has nearly become, what makes us truly human will shine through the mechanized perfection and the human soul will finally reveal itself in all its imperfect and insecure glory.
"Shawty Snappin'" points to a reverse of the hippie "friend" who sits up late at night waiting for my neighbor to pass out from too many Blue Moons, then fondles her breasts, contemplates doing a Casper-from-Kids but is too scared and so just peeks at her panties for a minute and does the rest of his business in the sink, Clinton-style (true story). A schmuck like hippie friend pretends human warmth by padding a wristcutter chick's ego with "genuine friendship" then goes roboperv on her the minute she trustingly passes out on the couch. Human on the outside, robot on the inside, contemptible to the core. "What if God was a her?"
, e.g.
Rap is full of gangsters who go to great lengths to make themselves appear, on the exterior, as robotic as possible. Most rappers, except maybe Common, hate that hippie kid and would beat throw him out of baby girl's apartment, wait till morning (when the lady is conscious), then hit it with consent, condoms, and not a little bit of fury. Much better than the true-life hippie scenario; in fact, I hope there's a rapper around the next time I see that dreadlocked groper. Remember the high-tech Shady/Aftermath training facility where 50 Cent ran on a treadmill for the "In the Club" vid? It was no accident; 50 was the king at playing with this "I love you like a fat kid love cake" / "I swear man there's something really wrong with these ho's" dichotomy, trying to come off tougher and more mechanized, but crooning to the ladies to show them that underneath that steel hull there is a warm soul, and the muscles and guns are for your protection, baby. Robot on the outside, human on the inside. Bishop from ALIENS.
Rappers fool us into believing they can't be hurt by anyone, but especially by bitches - even that they hate everyone, especially bitches. Sometimes, though, a man slips up, lets his guard down, and shows his power to love. The more unintentional it is, the more it reveals that all those other lines about "ho's" are really just macho posturing. This is the territory T-Pain hits on especially well in "Shawty Snappin'," because the entire lyrical content has "Let's Get Drunk / Forget What We Did" written all over it. But form doesn't mirror content, and in the hook's anguished whining we get at what might be the little unloved orphan underneath rap's purported "misogyny."
The question worth asking about the whole woman-hating thing is: Which is worse, a passionate man who feels so deeply about his lady that, yeah, sometimes he gets angry and has to say mean things about her, gets frustrated and wants to have promiscuous sex doggie style - or a pervy dude who if he were midaged and white would have a ponytail, who slinks into bed with girls who consent only because he has appeared so harmless so far? Maybe the question is unaswerable given the most objectionable of rap's woman-hating lines (including Cam'ron's too-frequent shit about rape), but at least the passionate angry rapper is honest.
A hip-hopper can transcend Snoop-Dre, hard-edged automaton gangsta "We don't love them ho's" by acting like he can seduce women but with this girl he's really just a lonely (let's not forget poetic) dork who actually always wants to take ladies out on picnics, share deodorant when his runs out, go to Brunch, even go paddleboating sometimes. With the hook to "Shawty Snappin," T-Pain is getting at the club-casualty double-agent romanticism that draws people to R&B-rap collabos and illustrates why they work so well.
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