I'm On One

I sometimes think of DJ Khaled as an executive assistant.  I mean that his considerable contributions to culture might have more to do with coordinated the schedules of treasured geniuses and yelling “We The Best” as a desperate plea to be included in the corporate “We” than a quantifiable contribution to the business concept. Anyway, there’s nothing to be mad at Khaled for, finally.  “We Takin' Over” was a terrific posse jam, and “Welcome to my Hood” wasn’t an unwelcome contribution to jams in 2011.  I mean, any jam where Plies is the most culturally conscious voice is remarkable on that count alone.  But it had nowhere near the cultural traction and temporal duration of “I’m On One,” with Drake, Rick Ross, and Wayne contributing verses complementing Drake’s hook.

That hook, which delivers the fundamental premise of “I’m On One,” collapses the three rapper’s individual accomplishments, concerns, anxieties, and boasts into one unanimous declaration, which is to be recklessly high and drunk.  Specifically, the hook considers competing sets of claims or questions on the rappers’ attentions. To iterate that “All I care about is money / and the city that I’m from” and reiterate “fuck it I’m on one” is to suggest that there are other sets of questions and concerns that might require consideration and action.  But not only will the rappers not give their time and energy to considering any problem not related to fiscal accumulation or local conflicts and resolutions, a surrogate decision is installed and affirmed, to wit: what color is the drink.  “It might be purple / it might be pink” is the sublimation of a kind of uncertainty as an apotropaic totem warding off more severe or less personal issues the rappers might have to confront.

Drake’s verse essentially rehearses many of the temporal vicissitudes and nuance of “Headlines.”  Drake even assumes the role of the wise elder, invoking a carpe diem inside of a carpsi diem verse: “But get it while you here boy / Cause all that hype don’t feel the same next year boy.”  Earlier  he asks rhetorically, “And what’s up with these new niggas / and they think it all comes so easy?” The resurgence elaborated in “Headlines” appears here as completed, preserving the melodramatic stretching out of a relatively short amount of time. What’s more, Drake ties the carpsi diem to the etymological activity belying the verb.  Rather than the labor-neutral English word “seize,” carpere is an agricultural verb meaning “to reap.”  So Drake’s specific sense of achievement is tied to a work ethic: “me and 40 back to work / but we still smell like a vacation.”  Even this work ethic is absorbed into the Drake’s unusual autobiographical narrative: “I ain’t work this hard since I was 18,” presumably referring to his decision to focus on rapping rather than acting.

Ross’s verse is typical of most of his work over the last year.  Color is absolutely critical to Ross’s lexicon, complicating the chromatic clichés of “flashing” and “shining.”  On Wayne’s “John,” he even compares the blood he sheds while murdering enemies to the paintings of Jean-Michel Basquiat.  In “I’m On One,” he opens with an evocation of the “purple flowers” that he’s burning.  From this ivory tower of stoned omnipotence, King Ross indexes a series of maneuvers and moves that he wills on other objects.  He buries cash, burns the rest, walks on clouds, moves the kids to the hills, bends shawty on the sink, kiss you on ya neck, runs with the same niggas til he dies, calls Marc Jacobs, and finally reiterates that he stays on one.

Wayne too delivers a standard issue Wayne-in-’11 performance.  I’d like to treat this in much greater detail a little later, but the essential tendency of Wayne’s verse is to drastically minimize the number of propositions and rhetorically maximalize the forms in which they’re expressed.  His verse in “I’m On One” is, it follows, less full of action than Drake’s and Rick’s.  Drake is, as we mentioned, obsessed with the amount of work he’s done (logically enabling him now to be on one), and Ross with the many troop moves and orchestrations he constructs (despite being on one).   Despite the fact that the opening phrase of Wayne’s verse, “I walk around the club,” describes an action, the rest of it is marked by the absolute stasis of linguistic celebration.  Almost everything he does is described in the negative or the anticipatory (“It’s a slim chance I fall / Olive Oyl,” “I’m about to go Andre the Giant”), or else is concerned with the play of paradoxical clauses in conjunction, as in the finale, “I’m killin’ these hoes / I swear I’m tryna stop the violence.”

Despite the various kinds of anticipations or messages concerning futurity in the text, essentially the jam describes a state of accomplished carefreeness in which the major domain of uncertainty is to what degree codeine cough syrup has been diluted with soda.  But such stakes are in striking contrast to other kinds of typical rap brags and anticipations.  Even in the diluted political arena of contemporary jams, the ambitions here are minimized.  And, therefore, the triumph has to be taken in that context.