My favorite rap song of the moment is Young Thug’s “High,” which prominently samples Elton John’s “Rocket Man.”
https://soundcloud.com/inabundnce/young-thug-rocket-man-remix
I don’t exactly know what Young Thug’s lyrics are about. It sounds like the standard trap themes: bragging about his sexual prowess, criminal dangerousness, and drug world connections. I’m more interested in the rest of the track. It was produced by Stelios Phili, and it’s a beauty. Here’s some background on how it came to be.
The Elton John sample comes not from the chorus of “Rocket Man” like you’d expect, but from the first verse:
Phili sampled the acapella, which you can easily find online. Someone posted this video with the vocals in the left channel and the drums in the right.
The resemblance between “Rocket Man” and David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” is not a coincidence. Aside from their similar themes, both songs have the same producer, Gus Dudgeon. According to Bernie Taupin, “Rocket Man” is not about drugs; it’s a straightforward story about an astronaut who misses his family. Really, Bernie? Why is this astronaut already “high as a kite” before his 9 AM liftoff? Maybe it wasn’t intended to be about a junkie who gets high before work, but that’s how the song has been popularly received, and it’s the interpretation that Young Thug takes.
I can see why black musicians admire Elton John. Beyond his gift for inescapable earworms, he has a jazzier, more sophisticated rhythmic sensibility than your typical soft rocker. I didn’t transcribe the piano part under that verse in “Rocket Man,” but it’s deeply funky, with accents on weak beats throughout.
I attempted to transcribe the main groove of “High.” I didn’t try to write out all the little vocal samples, and notation doesn’t capture the timbre and space, which is where most of the musical interest lies. I include my transcription mostly to show how complex this kind of track is at the micro level, how much attention is being devoted to each sixteenth note.
Phili doesn’t just loop the line from “Rocket Man;” he flips it in a crafty way. The original Elton John phrase comes in the middle of the bar, with the word “high” landing on beat three. Phili places it at the end of the bar, leading you to expect the word “high” on the next downbeat. But Phili displaces “high” by one beat, and then cuts it off before the long melisma. Young Thug sings the melisma instead, with his Auto-Tuned warble.
Rap songs tend to have more happening rhythmically than harmonically, but the chords to “High” are pretty interesting. Elton John’s song begins in G minor, but by the time you get to the chorus, it’s clearly in B-flat major. By contrast, Young Thug’s track oscillates ambiguously between G minor and B-flat major. Even though “High” spends about twice as much time on the Bb chord as it does on the Gm, I would still pick G minor as the key in keeping with its generally melancholy atmosphere. The sense of ambiguity is helped by the strange harmonic rhythm, with chord changes falling a sixteenth note before beat two in each measure.
So far in this post, I’ve been calling “High” a rap song. The thing is, though, that Young Thug doesn’t actually rap on it–he sings throughout. He sings like a rapper, in short percussive phrases rather than in long arcs, but he’s still singing. If you want to hear someone actually rap on “Rocket Man,” listen to William Shatner’s indescribable performance from the 1978 Saturn Awards.
This performance, goofy though it may be, is musicologically useful. People commonly describe rap as “talking over music.” Shatner is talking over music, so he must be rapping, right? All joking aside, I wouldn’t describe it that way. But why isn’t this rap, then? The main thing is that Shatner isn’t following the beat. In fact, he’s deliberately avoiding it for theatrical effect. Rap is rhythmic above all else–that’s why it’s a form of singing, not talking. Even though Young Thug is singing and Shatner is speaking, Young Thug’s vocal sounds closer to rapping.
Another musicological question: what is the relationship between “High” and “Rocket Man”? The internet has been calling “High” a remix, but is that the right word? Usually you think of a remix as a version of something that is still recognizably the original thing. “High” contains a sample of “Rocket Man,” but it’s not a version of “Rocket Man.” it’s a completely different song. It has a different theme, a different melody, a different backing, and different lyrics. Young Thug does sing the phrase “I’m a rocket man”, but it’s in a different harmonic context. Elton John sings it on the II chord in the prechorus, and on the IV chord in the chorus, which are both “happy” chords. Young Thug sings the phrase on vi, the minor tonic chord. To my ears, “High” belongs to the transformative sample-flipping tradition of De La Soul or Public Enemy, not to the rap subgenre of taking a familiar hook and rhyming over it. We don’t yet have an established word for what this song is. “Remix” is better than nothing, but it isn’t quite right.
Contact me if you want to hear my mashup of all of the above tracks.