The production on Hell Hath No Fury, the second album from Virginia-based rap duo Clipse, is sparing. Each song features one or two instruments along with a drum machine, and the same sounds are often sustained across multiple beats. The tracks are almost inaccessible, like an abstract painting with a few streaks of pigment arranged on an open canvas. Each has its own texture, its own feeling, and its own color.
Given that the album was produced entirely by the Neptunes – whose third album with the group N.E.R.D. was called Seeing Sounds – this should come as no surprise. The Neptunes often drift in directions that bare no relation to the rest rest of the music industry, and they seem especially uninhibited when working with Clipse. (Pharrell himself seems to acknowledge as much here.) In this case, the Neptunes have drifted in a minimalist direction, and their work here serves as a welcomed contrast to much of the over-produced music dominating radio waves today.
The beats on Hell Hath No Fury leave no place for an MC to hide, and the Clipse are up to the challenge. Younger brother Pusha T brings tremendous intensity to the microphone without ever losing control of his cadence. Older brother Malice, who on this album outshines his counterpart, is an ingenious wordsmith, an acerbic comedian, and a vivid storyteller. Both rap in perfect rhythm with the underlying beats, and neither tries to do too much. The hooks are all simple. The Clipse breathe space into their rhymes, allowing the texture of the Neptunes’s tracks to shine through. There is a true synergy between producer and rapper.
Here’s a track by track rundown of this remarkable album.
We Got it for Cheap. Along with album’s other bookend, Nightmares, this is the most accessible track on the album. The beat is simple – a bongo drum, a synthesized keyboard and, after the first few bars, a snare hit on beats two and four. That’s it – and yet the beat still manages to feel extremely rich. Malice’s verse, the second on the song, is one of the best on the album. He comes in with tremendous energy – “The wall’s removed and now I see; my leg was pulled, the joke’s on me” – and rides that energy throughout the rest of the song. Malice’s declaration, “Seems to me reparations are overdue,” fits in beautifully with the rhythm of the underlying percussion. Three minutes and forty seconds into the album, we’re off to an incredible start.
Momma I’m So Sorry. The dominant theme of Hell Hath No Fury – and, arguably, the dominant theme in all of hip hop – is drug dealing. In Momma I’m So Sorry, however, the Clipse focus on the moral and psychological toll exacted by such activities, and even attempt to repent. Pusha T begins the last verse with a prayer: “Sorry heavenly father, once again I hate to bother.” The chorus proclaims, “Momma I’m so sorry, my only accomplice [is] my conscience.” All of this happens on top of a sorry-sounding accordion sample, like some kind of maudlin travelling carnival. Again, producer and MC both complement each other exquisitely.
Mr. Me Too. The number three song on an album is frequently its biggest hit, like the number three hitter in a baseball lineup. The Clipse seem to thumb their nose at this convention, instead serving up Mr. Me Too, one of the strangest tracks on the album. The beat features a hypnotized sounding synthesizer and stoned-out vocal sample. It grinds to a halt ever few bars for a perfectly square drum fill. Pharrell adds a dazed verse. The whole song has the feel of a vaguely disturbing dream.
Wamp Wamp (What It Do). The tension runs high throughout Wamp Wamp, thanks in large part to a vintage Neptunes percussive arrangement. The sounds of the kettle drums ricochet from one ear to another. (It takes a good pair of headphones to fully appreciate this song.) Slim Thug is fantastic on the chorus, providing a hard edge on top of a soaring synthesized melody.
Ride Around Shining. The production on this song comes as close as any to complete stasis. The snare drum hits squarely on beats one, two, and the upbeat of three, and nothing else, before a fill in beat four. A single piano chord extends, disturbingly, for bars at a time. The Clipse’s lyrics on the drug game seem detached from reality, especially when the drums drop out around the 2:30 mark.
Dirty Money. This is probably the closest Hell Hath No Fury comes to a dance song – which is to say, not particularly close. And that’s just fine. On Dirty Money, an electric guitar plays a simple riff, and a standard drumbeat comes down hard on beats three and four every few measures. Malice discusses the high flying life of a rapper, both glorifying it and drawing attention to its superficiality. Speaking to a hypothetical groupie, he finds a clever way of indirectly extoling himself: “You done got you a rapper, I see your vision – and one of the best too, that’s ambition.” At the same time, Pusha suggests that something is important is lacking here: “You can tell me ’bout your day, I pretend I’ll listen; and you ain’t gotta love me, just be convincing.”
Hello New World. This is both the hardest song on the album and also a heartfelt tribute to one of the most dominant paradigms in rap: the hustler. The synthesizer surges like swells travelling through the ocean. Malice’s verse, the second, touches on a familiar theme in rap – self-promotion – but manages, remarkably, to do so at the expense of no one. “We can all shine, I want your wrist lit like mine / Neck and ears, I want it lit like mine / Foreign cars, stick shift, 6 gears like mine.” As in Dirty Money, Malice has found an indirect and creative way to extol himself. Pusha T extends this ingenious tactic through the track’s final verse, and an interlude from a local rapper from Virginia provides an interesting overtone of revolution.
Keys Open Doors. To borrow Pusha T’s first lyric in this song, Keys Open Doors “make[s] your skin crawl.” The Neptunes employ a ghostly choral sample that recollects some kind of haunted church. Appropriately, the Clipse’s lyrics employ religious imagery. First, there’s Pusha T: “Open the Frigidaire, 25 to life [worth of drugs] in here / So much white you might think the Holy Christ is near.” Then, there’s Malice: “Get it cross state with the grace of Maria.” The chorus, a simple repetition of the phrase “keys open doors,” was catchy enough to catch Jay-Z’s attention, who borrowed it for the first verse of Thank You on The Blueprint 3.
Ain’t Cha. Probably the catchiest song of the album (it was, after all, featured on the soundtrack of the Step Up movie), Ain’t Cha still does not sacrifice any of the musical integrity found on the rest of Hell Hath No Fury. The beat features a solid drum pattern along with two chime hits per measure. Somehow, the beat feels neither happy nor sad but simply present, much like N.E.R.D.’s Spaz from Seeing Sounds. Malice’s verse, the song’s third, makes repeated use of child-related imagery in a way that is both ingenious and hilarious. He is probably the only MC to have ever rapped about Blue’s Clues and Frere Jacque – let alone in the same verse. His final lyric – “If it seems the walls are closing in it’s only ’cause they are” – is said with a crescendo that fits in perfectly with the beat, thereby completing one of the finest verses on the Hell Hath No Fury.
Trill. Probably the most bizarre song on the album. The beat is vibrating with sound, like a swarm of insects.
Chinese New Year. A chilling retelling of a stick-up episode. Malice, the gunman, reassures the listener – and victim – with an icy coldness in the second verse: “Cooperate – escaping [is] useless / Trust me, I'm your friend, I will talk you through this.” Pharrell’s chorus – “Brrraaattt - brrraaattt, brrraaattt - brrraaattt, brrraaattt - brrraaattt, ka-ka-kat-kat” – gets the point across. Interestingly, the drum pattern recycles some of the rhythms the Neptunes used in N.E.R.D.’s hit Lapdance.
Nightmares. The beat is blissfully laid-back, and after Pharrell’s dreamy verse we are led to believe that the album is ebbing to its conclusion. Then Pusha T drops his finest, most intense verse of the album. In a few sentences, he describes the glories of success – “Everybody know me, it’s like I’m a movie star” – along with the paranoia such success can induce – “Still I creep low, thinking n****s trying to harm me / Hoping my karma ain’t coming back here to haunt me.” Perhaps a microcosm of the entire album, Pusha takes us from one feeling to another, each with its own texture and color, and somehow manages to unite those feelings into a unified – and masterful – whole.
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