Just figured I'd post my analysis of my first pick here...
2.08
Genre: Trip Hop
Artist: Dr. Octagon
Song: Blue Flowers
I come prepared with the white suit and stethoscope
Listen to your heartbeat delete beep beep beep
Your insurance is high, but my price is cheap…
Growing by the purple pond, in the purple pastures
Blue Flowers!
I’m going to admit I know little about trip hop, its origins, what makes a trip hop song a trip hop song, etc. But according to a lot of lists, I apparently love it. I’ll also never forget the day I heard this song downtown and saw the video while waiting for a show in 2008 on a Sunday night in New Haven, CT, a city where New England meets New York and just blends (no, I was not going to Yale). There he was, a hip hop artist using the imagery and symbolism of...German Romanticism (?!) set against the backdrop of an intergalactic, homicidal, psychopathic, time-traveling surgeon from Jupiter. Blue Flowers?! In case you’re wondering and reading, Wiki describes their literary use thusly.
Early use of the symbol:
German author Novalis used the symbol in his unfinished Bildungsroman, entitled Heinrich von Ofterdingen. After contemplating a meeting with a stranger, the young Heinrich von Ofterdingen dreams about a blue flower which calls to him and absorbs his attention.
Explanation of the symbol:
In the book Heinrich von Ofterdingen the blue flower symbolises the joining of human with nature and the spirit so the understanding of nature and relation to the self is growing. In the Romantic the meaning of human was a continuation from Humanism and the Age of Enlightenment, but the focus was on one's own emotions, not on abstract theory. Understanding and thinking rise in the comprehension of Romantic from one's own individual love. Feeling is based on the self, thinking is based on the self, and the development of the self leads and inspires the individual person. Also very important is contemplation. About the feeling, the thinking and contemplation personal inward cognition is possible. The process of cognition merges again with individual love. The self and nature are in this theory always linked.
Which sounds, of course, pretentious, but makes sense. Rapper “Kool” Keith Thornton and producer/turntablist Dan “The Automator” Nakamura and scratch specialist KutMasta Kurt teamed up to make this trippy, very abstract song in…1996? (Keep in mind Dr. Dre is the biggest thing in the world). I couldn’t believe it when I got home and looked it all up.
Shakespeare’s gone don’t even think about it
Yes, as I’m going to the park I see…Blue Flowers!
It’s raining green by the pond Blue Flowers!
It’s totally raining green, pouring Blue Flowers
I smell the bees and the birds Blue Flowers!
Different aspects of life, blue flowers
Is Kool Keith the Shakespeare of rap, harmonious with nature, his senses peaking, his imagery sharp, transcendental elements of rhyme and production in full bloom? Could be. Is the song one long battle rap braggadocio? Maybe. Or is the song a critique of German Romanticism and its potential excesses, especially turning inward towards one’s feeling to find truth? Well, our doctor is a psychotic, unattractive murderer with ”scalpels from the Holocaust.” Is it an artistic microcosm of the theory behind the blue flower? I’d like to think all four.
Or, okay, rock, is it just a drug trip?
Regardless, one critic said of the song and album “If you aren't laughing, you should be bugging. Kool Keith obviously doesn't care. You should, though, because like every other record Keith has ever been on, it will be hailed ten years from now as a classic." Well, these days, Allmusic gives it 5/5, Pitchfork a 9.2 out of 10. It increases in stature among most publications each year that passes. And while you still never may have heard of it, ten years from its release, there was another hip hop act, exploring psychosis and rohrshach tests on a concept album about insanity and the medical industry and murder. Gnarls Barkley, using a lot of themes and imagery from Dr. Octagon, sang at the Grammy awards in front of the entire damn country. And Keith, as not even our aforementioned critic likely predicted, twenty years later, is in the Wiki entry (unquestioned) among very few (Christopher Nolan and Batman also included) for literary use of the blue flower.
Anyway, enough. Here you go.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9VYzNUXGDA
"Let me show you somethin'"
"Let me show you somethin'"
Dr. Octagon paramedic fetus of the East
With priests I'm from the Church of the Operating Room
With the strike support scalpels since the holocaust
I do indeed in greed explore meet the patients
Back to brooms with the nurse with the voodoo curse
Holding up office lights standing at huge heights
Back and forth left wing swing to North
East and South with blood pouring down your mouth
I come prepared with the white suit and stethoscope
Listen to your heartbeat, delete beep beep BEEP
Your insurance is high, but my price is cheap
Look at the land... Blue Flowers!
Drawing by the purple pond, in the purple pastures Blue Flowers!
Drawing by the purple pond, yellow ink that flows Blue Flowers!
Drawing by the pond, look, it's raining yellow
Would you care to listen to me more? Thank you
Holding bags on down right from the hospital
It's a patient that's worth to keep the germs off the turf
Cybernetic microscopes and metal antidote
Two telescopes that magnify the size of a roach
Three computers to cup of coffee planted with my hand and
Astroplanets detached turn on rear foggers
Cut the light on the kid, and turn the bright on
Supersonic waves combine and burn as brainwaves
I see the mascot of Evil he's not Knievel
Shakespeare's gone don't even think about it
Yes, as I'm going to the park, I see... Blue Flowers!
It's raining green, by the pond Blue Flowers!
It's totally raining green, pouring Blue Flowers!
I smell the bees and the birds Blue Flowers!
Different aspects of life, blue flowers
"Let me show you something"
Hype…Hype…Hype…
