Nelly and Christina Aguilera - Tilt Ya Head Back (Universal)
This new world collaboration, full of disco glimma and seething dancehall pheromone, doesn't simply redefine the grind-anthem, but challenges the basis of artistry itself, reaching out for a Burroughsian Third Mind and retreating with a fistful of originality and dissected form. If you've never heard Aguilera and Cornell Haynes Jr. (Nelly) perform to this ascension before, it's because they haven't.
Mistakenly seen by some areas of the music press to be a homie homage to cardiopulmonary resuscitation (and thus an indictment upon gang violence, similar to the one found in the song's tome-of-death repetition of “hustle for me”), the song lends itself more reliably to an interpretation whose boundaries are willing to include those post-modern bastilles previously occupied by Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition and Barthes' Mythologies. As Nelly howls the line "I jus wanna get to know ya", we can be in no doubt that he is transcending hip-hop's standard walkways and proving that through art, and particularly juddering, spunk-jazz, monolith pants-rap such as this, knowledge ceases to be an acceptable end in itself, and perhaps there is more to the subjective prison that Nelly calls "ma situation" than bitches.
Mistakenly seen by some areas of the music press to be a homie homage to cardiopulmonary resuscitation (and thus an indictment upon gang violence, similar to the one found in the song's tome-of-death repetition of “hustle for me”), the song lends itself more reliably to an interpretation whose boundaries are willing to include those post-modern bastilles previously occupied by Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition and Barthes' Mythologies. As Nelly howls the line "I jus wanna get to know ya", we can be in no doubt that he is transcending hip-hop's standard walkways and proving that through art, and particularly juddering, spunk-jazz, monolith pants-rap such as this, knowledge ceases to be an acceptable end in itself, and perhaps there is more to the subjective prison that Nelly calls "ma situation" than bitches.
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