''I watch how the moon sits in the sky on a dark night, shining with the light of the sun, the sun doesn't give a light to the moon assuming the moon's gonna owe it one, it makes me think of how you act to me, you do favours then rapidly just turn around and start asking me about, the things that you want back from me'' That's a metaphorical rap, ''So I don't run the track no, I make the track run'' isn't. I take Papercut as an example of what he should sound like. He sounded quiet, with psycho lyrics.. On songs like Burn It Down, it's a nice verse, nice lyrics, but it's like he's yelling at the microphone. I just don't like that. He was amazing on the older tracks like ''Part Of Me''. The whole swagger thing, not LP style, and I think that the LGM verses are not that good, and neither is LITE until the breakdown.
I just wonder where people get the ideas of the rappers yelling. Back when Recovery by Eminem came out, I noticed nothing. When a joined KTT, a Kanye rap forum, people were always complaining about him yelling. I never noticed it until people pointed it out. Same with Mike, I don't think he is yelling at all, sure some of the raps may not be as quiet (same with Eminem) but they sure aren't yelling or yelling much IMO
That's different. Eminem isn't yelling on Recovery, it's his most calm and personal album. Listen to The Slim Shady LP, The Marshall Mathers LP, Encore and Relapse and you'll see how much more personal this album is. Kanye yelling? In which track would that be? In the making of Burn It Down Mike says ''I'm gonna get really fucking caucasian (however you spell that...) with this shit..'' and start yelling at the microphone. That's where I got the idea.
To me, when he rapped in his early LP days, he was the introverted voice of your inner-most thoughts. Almost passive aggressive, and then Chester would just crack it and scream bloody murder, symbolizing the outer showing of anger.
Rather than argue with the rest of your post, I'm just going to point out what really irritated me. You say Lies Greed Misery has no metaphors? Well... *Looks at Mike's first line in the song* "Imma be that nail in your coffin" Facepalm. That is all.
I love people on this forum. They are all like Mike used to rap better... Yeah man he used to be so much better. Then people ask why and which songs they are refereeing too, then they all say they were deeper and used metaphors. They then all use the same four songs as an example: Part of Me, APFMH, Forgotten and High Voltage And while i do believe these songs have awesome rapping, he wasn't "better" at rapping back then cause there are just as much bad/average rapping on their old songs. Burn it down rap = Terrible Until it Breaks = Amazing Lies Greed Misery = Average Victimized/LITE= Amazing and good So really stop complaining
Good point. Mikes had his highs & lows ever since he began rapping with the band. Those songs you mentioned are still easily some of best work so far. But like you say not every single song (specifically meteora for example) was that good. Like his new style or not, but Mike has improved with his lyrics & wordflow. Of course not every new song is a classic like "Dedicated" but you can see he is evolving. I personally hope to see the continue of Mikes rapping on the next album
I was never complaining, I posted my opinion. I simply said in my first post that I didn't really like the whole ''swagger'' thing on songs like LGM (still an awesome song, tho). And, yes, Part of Me, APFMH and so on are his best verses. He has ups and downs in one song, example, Part of Me: In one verse he's awesome: ''Cut myself free, willingly stop just whats killing me'' while on the other verse his first line goes ''Freedom can be frightning if you've never felt it'' which to me, sounds terrible. I like the rapping, I just pointed out what could be better, in my opinion.
No trouble at all, pal. Since I obviously have to spell it out, the point was to show what a real long song sounds like, rather than what Little Things is: a 3-minute song stretched over three more minutes. Also I wanted to show that six minutes isn't all that long as it is; 12 minutes, rather more ambitious, is what I would love to see them try.
Don't be silly. 12 minutes? Pfff, that's not a real long song. This is. 20 minutes, much more ambitious. Seriously though, it's all relative and in LP's relative bubble, and pop music in general, 6:30mins is a long song. Of course, if you throw LP into the prog world TLTGYA is on the short side of things. But they aren't in that world so it's neither here nor there. I would like to see them continue with the spirit of songwriting that was in ATS & TLTGYA though, nothing crazy long, but just generally freer in composition. Not nailed down to writing 3 minute songs all the time.
+1 And I say WB got their nose in, and influenced half of the album... look at BID, IBG, P... and then look at UIB, RU and even CoG, which can be commercial but it's an experiment
Understood. I just think it's weird to bring in a much longer song from a different band to prove a point that one of Linkin Park's songs is bad. I'd think it make more sense to take another one of Linkin Park's longer song (e.g. "The Catalyst") to say, "Hey, here's a good lengthy song that uses up its time."
Well as long as we're competing... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBhCqmjneEI I couldn't find the full studio version online, but its actual runtime is 49:33 (it's not the longest song I have but it's one of my all-time favorites). It's a single song that comprises one full album and it's definitely not how far LP should shoot; I used a 12-minute song because I thought that was much more in the range of their ambitions. p.s. Opeth = Oh, yeah, the fact that I hate Little Things was just a side-note, totally irrespective of the other point I was trying to make about length. But yeah, that's the gist of it pretty much.
The only album where Mike even rapped like most of you are saying, was Hybrid Theory and some of the b-sides the band did. Meteora's lyrics were pretty much mostly mediocre (Meteocre) and MTM/ATS/LT's raps were a totally different style. The "nerd rap" as I call it (with the extensive use of metaphors, brainy words, and references to akira, anime etc) hasn't been in existence on a record for a pretty long time.
It would be nice to see the return of that though; maybe not the Akira and anime stuff, but using words like "infer."
It's not just A Place For My Head (which I think sucks balls and Esaúl is 10x better) and the others, it's also And One, it's Step Up, it's Dedicated, it's Reading My Eyes, Stick 'N Move and Fuse too. It's Super Xero's lines "sunlight burns the skin of sleeping men". Mike is getting back into it but it stops being "lyrical stomping" and more "imma put a bullet in you" stomping nowadays. Well, contrary to your opinion, "cut myself free" sounds like he's going to fucking suicide and go all Crawling video on us but the Freedom line actually is quite deep and something that sparks up the imagination.