James: How does he breathe?
Umu: Now you're reacting to the rapper BewhY, and two songs from his 2019 album called 'The Movie Star'.
First you'll be reacting to
'Gottasadae', which is
the honorific form of the verb to say. It is most commonly used in the Bible, when quoting the word of God. In the lyrics, BewhY describes himself
almost like a messiah, and the phrase "BewhY says" runs throughout the song. Some fans believe this is
BewhY declaring his rights to the hip-hop throne in Korea.
Aaron: King of Kings. Three, two, one.
Aaron: Is that a....Oh, okay, I literally was like, they're tuning the orchestra. Okay. And that's an A, yeah. Nick: That's a familiar sound.
Aaron: I was like (singing)
BewhY.
Owen: Weird.
Elizabeth: Bass trombone. Ahhhh!! Owen: The trombone....right?
Henry: Ahhhhh!!!!!
Cloud: Oh, my God, that's so cool! Henry: Ahhhh!!!!
Cloud: That's so unsettling.
Elizabeth: This is so strange. Owen: I dont understand. Elizabeth: There's people in the horse stalls. Owen: Um-hmm.
Elizabeth: There's a whole-ass choir singing downbeats.
Henry: This is awesome! Cloud: I want to close my mouth, but I can't yet.
James: He's fire. F*ck! Melissa: I wonder if it's....
James: How does he breathe?
Daniel: I love how he's...It's like a 12/8 kind of thing,
but then he sneaks in like a, Fiona: (singing) Daniel: duple uhhh subdivisions
Elizabeth: I feel like I want to say more things because there's things to say, but I'm just like, shell shocked.
Owen: That was a pretty cool rap.
Elizabeth: Oh, no, he can rap. Owen: That was awesome. Elizaneth: He can rap. Owen: That was
super cool.
Kevin: I think it references an aria by English composer Henry Purcell.
I don't know the name of the aria, but the whole (singing)...
Nick: (singing)....Thing the background, it just like brings it together because the focus is so clearly on his
incredible rapping, and then they don't obscure that too much. Aaron: What? Nick: It's still going, isn't it?
Henry: Oh, I wonder what they're sampling here?
Seiji: And then you've got the classic film score outro, that's nice. Stephen: It sounds like Stranger Things,
so I'm just waiting for a portal to the upside down to open, and a demogorgon to eat his face.
Aaron: I wonder what burning the white flag means.
Cuz in Christianity, white has a lot of different symbolic meaning. Nick: Or it could be like burning a white flag, like no surrendering.
Aaron: That too.
Stephen: Can we all just take a second to
appreciate the fact that he chose very specific themes, and then he just stuck with them?
It wasn't a whole lot of like, hey,
we're gonna be here, and now we're gonna go here, then we're gonna...he just like stuck with a couple of simple motifs, and
it sounded great, it felt really good, made me want to dance, and it was a very convincing,
catchy song. Seiji: But I think there's a point. Yeah, I mean, developing little ideas,
sticking with it. It doesn't have to be all over the place.
Stephen: It's just really nice, cuz then it just really sounds like you're telling a story.
James: Those noises, wow.
Okay. Melissa: It sounds like they're almost saying like, it sounds like Sanctus,
but it's not the Sanctus text. Maybe it's like Cum Sancto Spiritu, or something like from the Gloria.
I don't know. James: I live for this kind of sh*t that like blends things that you wouldn't necessarily think would go together,
but makes a new sound. Melissa: Yeah. James: I love that. There's a lot of interesting stuff going on in the background...woomp, woomp!
And it was like, they sounded like against whatever harmonies were underneath, it sounded like tritones and stuff.
It was really interesting. And then their use of the choral, like, oh, what's the word? Like plain chant, like vocals, sort of?
Whatever, Melissa, you know more about it than I do,
okay, but that's sort of what it reminded me of a little bit, that monophonic,
they were al... Melissa: Homophonic.
James: Whatever! Okay, Melissa knows more than I do. This is Melissa's specialty. Melissa: No, it's just very specific, Gregorian chant. James: Yeah.
Melissa: That wasn't chant, that was more like chords together,
you know? That was like, it was very like, it sounds like it could be in the Romantic era. Umu: Cuz other reactors called it Gregorian chant-esque,
so would you murder me if I said it? Melissa: This? Not at all.
Tell them they're wrong.
Fiona: The vocals are really cool, like Gregorian chant, or like, I just say that. Chant music just like has this sacred
quality of it, and like
religion and like those deep ties to the past really make something
serious by borrowing that, so him borrowing that and it showing up throughout the song was pretty cool.
Henry: It's awesome. It's so cool. It's like art. Cloud: Dude, the chanting in the beginning? Henry: Yeah, it's art.
Cloud: Brah...
Henry: That's just art. Cloud: Half of me almost expected them to be doing the Dies Irae. Henry: Yeah, da-da-da...that would have been really cool. Cloud: Yeah, at one point.
Cloud: I would have had to leave. I wouldn't been like, I'm so freakin' scared right now. Henry: Yeah.
Henry: I don't know what that orchestra was at the end. Cloud: Cuz all the images and the dancing, and you have the very weird body movements,
and it feels like you're in an insane asylum or some kind of prison or something, Henry: Um-hmm, it was really culty vibes. Cloud: and it's just him, it's him in the middle
looking at you, and then everyone's back is to you, and like a circle around him...Dude, so creepy. Henry: Mm-hmm.
Umu: You'll be comparing 'Gottasadae' to his song 'Challan', released on the same exact album.
The song is a combination of dis rap, as the lyrics give commentary to the state of hip-hop in Korea and
recognition of the musicians who influenced BewhY, like John Williams and Pharrell Williams.
The song expresses who BewhY is as a person and as a rapper. The song is composed and written by him.
Melissa: Ooh, okay, so there's a low note, so we already like this song.
Henry: Sneak your way into my heart with just any kind of bass at the start of a song, and you're already in you're already with it. Cloud: They're just so dark. Henry: I love a bass intro.
Ahh!
Stephen: Yeah, man, his beats and grooves are just so nice.
You know what I'm saying?
You could tell he just,
he knows what he wants the song to sound like, feel-wise, and he doesn't, uh,
like he actually makes sure he does a really good, thorough job.
Daniel: I really like
the background sounds.
Fiona: Mm-hmm. Daniel: It's rhythmic, and yet at the same time it's a
cohesive groove that outlines his art.
Fiona: These are really cool settings he's filming in.
James: Damn. Melissa: I like how the brass is continuing his speech, almost.
Like you don't think he's breathing, cuz the brass just continues his sentence, like fills in the missing words.
Triplet, triplet.
Cloud: Oh man, still goin'!
Henry: Oh, man, that's so good!
Goes back in duple, while the triple's still rollin'.
James: He just keeps going!
Melissa: oh he breathd-breathed. He breathed. Yes. James: Yeah.
Melissa: Breathed again. James: Interesting. Melissa: But he makes the breathing more like punctuation, I mean, like a singer would do. James: When you feel the breath, it's intentional.
Melissa: Yeah.
Cloud: Oh, and now we're- Henry: Did he just go back into triple??!?!
He snuck into that.
Fiona: Such a smooth transition.
Yeah. Daniel: What's the meter, even?
He's rapping in three.
But you don't get an affirmative
meter grounding from any of the percussive elements.
Cloud: That bass is kind of zippery.
Kevin: Oh, that chord.
Whoa!
I like the open fifth and suspended chords by the strings. Very nice. Very neutral.
Aaron: I think it's interesting how they meld the voice and the technological sounds together.
Nick: Yeah.
That is really odd.
Daniel: Oh, this is lament bass. I was like, I've heard of this.
How interesting.
Seiji: It's cool how they're setting the downbeat of the bass line like, not necessarily on one. Stephen: Yeah.
That was sick.
Seiji: Cuz like, you can definitely feel the pull still going, but it's not like
it's not as obvious as a lot of other songs in this style, or in most styles.
So, pretty cool effect.
Umu: Right. So this one had a little bit more switching between feels. Did you feel it worked out solo, or...
Stephen: I feel like compared to the other song, the other song I liked because that would be a song in a club or in a
dancing setting that I would just want to dance to. This one, I feel like it's more complex
compositionally, and I think it just speaks to his level of artistry, to where he can absolutely make something
that's catchy, that people can dance to, right, in the first song. But the second song, I feel like, okay, because there was
significant metric modulations and things like that going on,
specifically using one patch, and using that to be sixteenth notes or eighth notes, and then right when he brought the chorus in
at the end, saying "Deja vu", that's where you hear pitch and stuff like that.
I just thought it was very, very convincing, and just speaks to his high level of artistry. Seiji: Totally.
Seiji: I mean it wasn't super repetitive, right? Stephen: Hm-mmm. Seiji: So it makes it almost like a really open palette for you to convey something.
Stephen: Yeah. Seiji: Which is, I guess, something that like, I don't know who does it...
I guess Kendrick Lamar does that a lot. There were moments where it kind of felt like
unstable, right, just because it's not repetitive, too, and and because of the metric things.
Elizabeth: Okay, so, I believe that was through-composed, which basically means that there's no material that repeats.
So, usually in a pop song, you would have something like a chorus and a verse ,
and those two sections
repeat back and forth so that you have kind of places for your ear to grab on to in the song,
but through composed music just means that there's no repetition at all.
The musical material changes all the way through there's nothing that is repeated or that comes back, and I didn't hear anything I recognized
Owen: Neither did I. Elizabeth: through the whole thing. But I think if he's also trying to talk about himself and his journey,
I think it makes sense for him to just kind of like float. Like he flows through all the rooms, too,
of the space, like the theater and the
hotel, and so he kind of is wandering through the spaces as he's wandering through the different musical sections.
Kevin: I really like his flow. I think his flow is absolutely fire.
And he's always on time, which you'd be surprised--a lot of rappers,
they don't rap on time. There's these little discrepancies and they think oh, I'm so cool doing that,
I don't need to fix it. And I think the beat supports it very well, as well as offers a lot of
musical richness. Even from the beginning, the percussions feel
they pop just enough, but they don't overpower the rapper, and I really like that. Almost a bit of a jazz-rap
type of percussion, like A Tribe Called Quest type stuff. And yeah, this is like S tier rap for me.
Love it. Isaac: Something to notice when you listen to his solo parts, which is it primarily, I guess,
7/8ths of the song, and what's
nice is the transition from that to what I call the chorus at the end,
which sounds like a chorus, where everything sounds so far, it's not so concentrated, the focus not on him,
and then he fades to black, or
fades to the end of the screen. And I thought that was actually quite interesting, to go from this very close,
close audio focus and then all of a sudden you flush away into the background, and then that's it.
Henry: Challan was awesome,
and here's why it was awesome: Cuz he has, Bewhy has this uncanny ability
to switch between duple and triple in his rapping, regardless of Cloud: Listen to the thing in the background, it's going triplet, triplet.
Henry: Yeah. There's that one moment where he was sustaining
duple rhythm in his rapping over the click in the instrumentals,
like da-da-da-da in triple, and he kept it going for like...
Cloud: So long. Henry: Lie all... Cloud: You're out of breath.
Henry: I didn't listen to how many measures, like phrases he let it go, but I think I did in an extra one, right. Cloud: ????? didn't expect it to, yeah.
Henry: We were both kind of expecting, he's gonna drop and it's gonna be great, and he didn't, he kept it going,
which was even hyper. Cloud: Yeah! Henry: That was super awesome. Cloud: And when he did take it out, there wasn't a drop,
Cloud: like it was him that was picking up the triplets, yeah. Henry: No, it was him. and it came back into the triplets. And it was like, I don't know how
he like, Cloud: The instrumentals throughout the entire song were wild,
they were really cool, like the strings, cuz
they give you a little glimpse of the strings before they really brought 'em in, and they kind of like sample it first, and
then they brought in the strings with just chords, but man, that was cool.
Nick: It's just so weird because it kind of like blends the line between music and poetry.
But aside from that in the music, they combine his voice with the
instrumental behind him in a really interesting way, and it's not something that I've heard in a lot of American
rap music. I've not heard the voice really used as an instrument that can kind of sound like other
instruments and blend with them in the way that he does. That's really cool.
James: This song just gave me a whole,
whole different vibe. Even though it's electronic music, writing a song that's that
complex and that
slaps continuously throughout the whole
entirety of it, that's really hard to do. Even though there were a lot of
repeated motifs and he kept rapping in the same rhythm for long periods,
it didn't get predictable, which is also really hard to do.
Whether he was doing stuff with the bass or just the rhythm of his rap,
or putting in silence in certain spaces, he kept it going the whole time, and I was just kind of
overwhelmed. And usually that's a good thing when there are so many elements going on that you're just like, holy sh*t,
this is like ear candy the whole time. It's really impressive.