In 2007, there was one day that would shift the trajectory of music, marking a major shift in the artists that would come after, the sounds, the lyrical themes, and more. On this day, two albums would be released, going head-to-head, battling for the future of hip-hop. Those albums were Curtis by 50 Cent and Graduation by Kanye West. But was this all just a marketing ploy, or did this actually change music? Well...
Yes and yes. And there is one song on graduation that encapsulates all of this perfectly. Not only the beef, however real or fake it might have been, but the shifting musical landscape and then the new era that came after.
So today we are diving into the song Good Life by Kanye West featuring T-Pain. We're going to break apart the samples, the production method, see how there are many different versions of this song that have never been released. And this song is a perfect summary for this fake beef and also a brand new era of hip-hop.
First, let's talk about what was at stake here. The beef. Steak.
Come on. 50 Cent represented New York gangster hip-hop. Part of his story is that he was shot nine times. But it's not just the image, but the sound too.
Let's take a listen to In The Club. Remember this one? Bakage represented something different. He had struggled to be taken seriously as a rapper and not just a producer. He's got some more emotional lyrics.
He's from Chicago. He's got a college-themed trilogy of albums. Actually, there was supposed to be a fourth college-themed album, but we'll talk about that later. But contrast the sound of In Da Club with this.
Uh, give me my Now I ain't saying she a gold digger. Obviously, Gold Digger leans a little more pop and it features Jamie Foxx, who had just starred in the movie Ray. And I'm not here to say that one of these are better than the other, just that they're very different.
Indie Club is very I pull up out front, you see the Benz on do. When I roll 20, keep it sum. Much darker sounding a little more minor whereas over here we have major chords going back and forth and not only that but lyrically speaking kanye is just a little more comical he's telling a story about Gold diggers, but then a lot of stuff in his verses is very funny.
This, of course, is not to say that none of these elements that we're seeing with Kanye existed in hip-hop or in music in general before. It's just, as far as what the mainstream idea of what hip-hop is, we have a couple competing ideas. And on September 11, 2007, both of these artists released a new album, 50 Cent with Curtis and Kanye. with Graduation. This event was hyped up by the media.
They did TV appearances together. They were on the cover of Rolling Stone with the title, Who Will Be the Next King of Hip Hop? 50 Cent said if Kanye sold more albums than he did, that he would retire.
And spoiler alert, Kanye did outsell him and he didn't retire. But this represents a huge shift in hip hop at the time. This is a shift away from this tougher gangster sound.
And closer to a softer, polo-wearing sound. You know what I mean. And Graduation is a landmark album because of this battle.
But there's one song on it, Good Life, that perfectly encapsulates this whole story. So production-wise on Graduation, and the song Good Life specifically, there are a lot more synths in it. It was produced by Kanye and Toomp with additional synths by Mike Dean, and additional drum programming by Timbaland. And there are many versions of Good Life that have never seen the light of day.
But here's the final beat, just as a reminder. There are a lot of synths in there, but it's built around a sample of PYT by Michael Jackson. And what I find interesting about this particular sampling technique is that a lot of Kanye's earlier stuff, it was called Chipmunk Soul, and that's because he would take a soul song and speed it up. Making the voice pitch up in the process.
And that is the original way of sampling, where you speed up the record and the speed and the pitch both speed up together. But now with digital tools you can separate those things. So for example, here's PYT.
I don't know if you can hear that, but that voice in there... That voice in there is already pitched up. So Kanye is not going to pitch up an already pitched up chipmunk sound.
Instead he pitches it down slightly and slows it down much further. So Check this out. I've pitched PYT down a half step and then slowed it down as far as I can go on the turntable, which is 20% so I'm at right around 100 BPM.
Here's Good Life. Good Life sits right around 85 BPM. So with these tools I have in front of me, I can't get to that tempo, but digitally you can stretch it even further. But really quickly, let me show you what this would sound like with the old school sampling technique. So by slowing it down, it's gonna conversely also pitch it down.
Here's what that sounds like. Compare that here. Doesn't quite sound right. Unwell.
This is a different approach for Kanye, not only sampling-wise, but also all of those synths in there. And Kanye was no stranger to experimentation. We saw a ton of orchestral sound on his previous album, Late Registration.
But PYT was on Michael Jackson's Thriller, which is a landmark album, marks a big shift for Michael, and also has a ton of incredible sounding synths in it. So this is Kanye's Thriller Moment. Lyrically, this song is just about living the good life. There's not really a big story here.
It came about because T-Pain was at dinner with Kanye one night. They're eating lobster and drinking Cristal. And T-Pain said, this is the good life. And then the song came about shortly thereafter.
Moving stuff, I know. But seriously, it's just about living life and having a good time. It's just a nice, feel-good song.
But there are several notable lyrical references in Good Life. Sure, we've got an interpolation or just a quote from the last poets. That was also sampled by Dr. Dre on The Chronic. But also, let me show you something. Let's go back to In The Club.
Listen to the lyrics. He's a cat by the bar toasting to the good life. Okay, maybe that's not an intentional reference by Kanye, but this one absolutely is. Go ahead, switch the style up, and if they hate them, let them hate them, watch the money pile up.
Switching the style up is exactly what Kanye is doing, not only on this song, but in this beef and in hip-hop in general. And he is quoting 50 Cent back to him while he's beating him. Speaking of switching up the style, we gotta talk about T-Pain.
In 2007, T-Pain was enjoying success from songs like Bartender and Buy You a Drink. He is famous for his use of auto-tuned vocals, which are utilized as a creative choice rather than a crutch. It is well established by this point that the man can sing.
T-Pain says that this song, Good Life, took two months to record because Kanye kept changing stuff. Every time he would change something, he would call him back into the studio to re-record. T-Pain says he recorded five hooks for this song, and Kanye didn't use any of them.
Over these two months, he's in and out of the studio with Kanye, hearing different versions of this song. But when he showed up for the music video shoot, he said the song was completely different than anything he'd heard. All of a sudden, there's synths and drums.
John Legend and Ne-Yo are singing background vocals. And of course, instead of using any of the hooks that T-Pain gave him, Kanye just assembled something out of just sort of vocal scraps that he had sung. T-Pain says there are many different versions of this song, and I found one online that says it's a demo.
Of course, it could be, it could not be, I don't know. But there are several elements in it that make me think it's legit. And now I'm gonna play both of them side by side with some commentary.
If you're watching this on YouTube, it's gonna be chopped a little bit because of copyright issues. But over on Patreon, you can see the whole thing uninterrupted. Alright, so first off, here's the intro.
This is the same intro that's in the music video version. Welcome to the good life. Drums sound a little different. In the sky. The drums definitely don't hit as hard as they do on the final version.
Right here. Which kind of shatters my illusions. I was hoping that it was one guy whose voice just sounds like that, who Kanye brought in for that one part, but it's just Kanye's voice.
So let's keep going. Again, here's the album. Demo.
So specifically, the line asked in the models. That's a pitched voice, Kanye's pitched voice, in the final version. But in this demo, we just hear Kanye say that. That's something that leads me to believe that this demo might be a good idea.
be legit. Good Life is the perfect song encapsulating the scene at the time as well as this beef, however real or fake it will be. We're going to get back to that in just a second. But this is Kanye's thriller moment.
He's introducing synths in there. He's got a lot more interesting production happening, and it's leaning away from that New York gangsta sound. And then while on tour for this album, the Glow in the Dark tour, Kanye performed without T-Pain.
and would sing this hook himself with live auto-tune. And Jeff Basker says that doing this is what inspired him to make his next album, 808s and Heartbreak. Originally, Kanye's fourth album was supposed to be called Good Ass Job.
College dropout, late registration, graduation, good ass job. But after a series of devastating life events, Kanye's plans changed and he ended up releasing 808s and Heartbreak. This album continued further down the path that we see on Good Life.
And that album paved the way for many other artists, including Travis Scott, Drake, Future, and many more. And it's not only that auto-tuned sound, after all, T-Pain did it first. But it's the vibe shift, the vulnerability, the emotion.
But was this Kanye and 50 Cent beef real at all? Well, yes and no. 50 revealed in his book Hustle Harder, Hustle Smarter that this started out as a marketing ploy. I pitched Kanye on the concept of each of us dropping the same day.
Being an independent thinker himself, Kanye saw the value in my vision and agreed to move his release up. He understood we could collectively generate much more buzz by hyping our battle than being out on individual promo runs. The media loves a spectacle, and few things were more of a show than Kanye and me going head to head. We both played it for all it was worth, doing appearances together and adopting the role of two prize fighters before a big fight. To be clear, there was no actual beef between us.
Kanye had never expressed any discomfort about the success I'd had, and I respected him as an artist. It was truly just a case of two people being comfortable with the concept of competing against each other."So yes, it was a marketing ploy from the beginning. Both of their labels are under Universal Music Group. Fitty goes on to explain in the in the book that he was having tensions with his label, but even though Kanye technically won, 50 still sold a ton of albums. And this is hard to conceptualize now because we're in the streaming era, but Kanye sold almost a million albums in the first 50 cent by comparison, almost 700,000. So sure, Kanye won, won, but they really both won. They sold almost 1.7. million albums in a week. And of course, that's the point of the marketing. But the side effect was, with an album as incredible as Graduation is, as creative as it is, but it still has mass appeal to it, that was destined to change everything. This album set Kanye on a new path, hip-hop on a new path, and opened doors for not only him, but so many artists that came after. In the case of Good Life, Kanye did clear this Michael Jackson sample, and in fact, James Ingram, the primary writer of this song, said that he liked it, and it was such a short snippet of the song that if it was up to just him, he would have cleared it for free. But there's another Kanye song with a sample that he couldn't clear, and very last minute, he had to scramble to figure something out. This is a story of Kanye, Lauryn Hill, one guitar player, frantically trying to find the right nylon string guitar sound, because the album is due. any moment. And that story is all right here.