The Greatness of Ether's Hook: A Formal Rebuttal to Rap Genius' Interpretation

About three weeks ago I began contributing to RapGenius.com. If you've never been there, despite the fact that it's one of the recommended sites on this blog (tsk! tsk!), I suggest you go. It helps people understand rap lyrics by giving detailed, line-by-line explanations. If you see a lyric that's highlighted in orange, you can click on it to view an explanation. If all the stars align, you might even laugh.

Being a massive Wu-Tang fan, I decided to first sink my teeth into Ol' Dirty Bastard's Dog Shit. Not only is it a great song, but it's rife with Ol' Dirtyisms that need 'splainin. Please take a minute to check it out. I think you'll find it worth your time.

Soon after I began work on the site, I noticed that an exegesis of Nas' Ether had gone up. Being a big Nas fan, and a big fan of this song in particular, I was eager to see what my fellow contributors did with it.

After reading the song's description, however, I began to understand that the folks over at Rap Genius don't hold it in as high esteem as I do. This confused me. Isn't it universally acknowledged that Nas won this particular beef, thought I. Don't most rap heads agree that between Ether and The Takeover, Ether is the superior song, I pondered.

With those questions swimming through my head, I began to dig into the explanations, to see what Rap Genius found objectionable. The first thing I came across was a less than flattering appraisal of the hook. Isn't the hook one of the most famous parts of this song, my interior monologue reflected. What's wrong with it? 

Let's look a little closer. Here's the hook, as it appears on Rap Genius:

(I) Fuck with your soul like ether
(Will) Teach you - the king - you know you
(Not) "God's son" across the belly
(Lose) I prove you lost already

If you click on each of the links in the lyrics reproduced above, you'll be taken to Rap Genius' take on that particular line.

What struck me most was that Rap Genius pretty much dismisses the main conceit of this song, that Nas will fuck with Jay-Z's soul like ether. They say it makes no sense. Hmm, I thought to myself. Better keep reading. Perhaps they're onto something I never considered. Then I read that they thought the second line trailed off, failing to make any sort of cohesive point. This made no sense to me, so I said so in the comments section. I wrote that I had always thought this line bled into the third one, so that Nas is saying, I will teach you who the king is, you know you God's son (Nas = God, Jay = His son), and oh, by the way, I have "God's Son" tatooed across my belly because I am the second coming, Jesus, etc.

The main exegizer of the song, who also happens to be the main exegizer of the site (by volume! I think you guys are all great!), replied to me that he disagreed. He thought that I was taking liberties with the line breaks, and that I was adding too much parenthetical content (extrapolating "Teach you the king you know you" to mean "teach you [who] the king [is], you know you...") and while I saw his points, and agreed with them to some extent, I couldn't get past a cherished memory of mine that wouldn't allow me to completely capitulate.

One afternoon when I was a junior in college, I was driving around campus, high off my ass, listening to a mix CD (HOW OLD AM I???) of rap songs that I borrowed from a friend. He was a big Nas fan himself, so he included Ether. I always liked Ether, but I didn't exactly love it. I didn't really see what all the fuss was about. What's with the whole ether thing? Why is that supposed to be hard? But while I was driving that day, the spring wind whipping through my hair, cannabinoids altering my brain chemistry, I had an epiphany: the hook is a work of genius.

As I sat on my couch years later, I knew incontrovertibly that I was right, but as I tried to formulate a rebuttal to this particular exegizer, I couldn't remember why I had come to that conclusion. I knew that the lines connected to each other, I just knew it, but I couldn't shake the feeling that the explanation I had written in the comments section wasn't quite right. I hadn't made my case correctly, never mind persuasively.

Days passed, lovers came and went, natural disasters ravaged the Earth, but still I was at a loss. What was the secret? Why had I proven to myself, beyond any reasonable doubt, that this hook was genius, yet couldn't remember the reasons why? I started to doubt my memory. God knows it's faulty. Had I dreamt the whole thing?

Then, just the other day, while listening to the song for the thousandth time in a month, this time after a big, fat blunt, it came back to me. Holy shit! I thought to myself. Of course! I yelled to nobody in particular. Maybe it was returning to the same state of mind in which I first made the discovery. Maybe it was God tapping my shoulder and saying, Hey, remember this? Or maybe I'm just a crackhead, and you'll disagree with what I'm about to say, but either way, the memory came back. I had rescued it from the void.

What had returned thrilled me. It turns out that the linchpin to my argument is the fact that, as Rap Genius notes, Nas intersperses one of Jay's catch phrases, "I will not lose" into the hook. But he does it in an interesting way. Rather than beginning or ending the hook with this line in its complete form, Nas begins each line of the hook with a word from Jay's phrase, then ends it with one of his own thoughts.

I believe that Nas is not just inserting Jay's motto into the background as a sonic device, but rather is using it to begin his thoughts. The phrase stands apart by way of spacing, but is fully integrated into each line, becoming a key component of the lyrics. In this way, Nas is taking a Jay line, inserting himself into it, and fundamentally altering its meaning to something that belittles Jay, much like ether would enter one's body, alter one's brain chemistry through chemical reactions, then put its victim to sleep. In this way, the structure of the verse mirrors Nas' claim that he can inhabit Jay-Z's very being and destroy him from the inside. Picture Neo jumping into Agent Smith and blowing him up at the end of The Matrix.

Pretty gully, right? For all intents and purposes, Nas is weaving himself into Jay's lyrics, changing their DNA, perverting them, and turning them against Jay.

With this in mind, here is how I interpret the hook for Ether:

Line 1: I fuck with your soul like ether

           Nas is saying that he can do with Jay's soul, with his very being, whatever he likes. He can put him
           to sleep, draw a cock and balls on his forehead, parade him around like Bernie Lomax. Whatever.
           And, as Nas famously rapped in New York State of Mind, sleep is the cousin of death. It is your most
           vulnerable state. If Nas can fuck with Jay's soul like either, he can pretty much do whatever he wants.
           In addition, the phrase, "vanish into the ether" is often used to describe the passing of a person or thing
           from this world into the next.

Line 2/3: Will teach you [who] the king [is], you know you not "God's Son" across the belly

           I group these two lines together because I think that line 2 bleeds into line 3, but let's first address the
           fact that Rap Genius thinks I am adding too much parenthetical to line 2, with the [who] and the [is]. I
           respectfully disagree. On The Takeover, Jay-Z raps, "You niggas gonna learn how to respect the
           king." This is Nas' direct rebuttal. He is saying, "I will teach you who the king is." The "not" that
           bridges lines 2 and 3 both completes the thought that Jay-Z is not the king (you know you not), and
           starts a new thought that points out that in addition to not being the King, Jay-Z is also not God's Son,
           which, by the way, happens to be tattooed across Nas' belly. This drives home the point that Jay is not
           the king of New York, the Rap Game, or the Comos/Heavens.

Line 4: Lose - I prove you lost already
           Nas is telling Jay-Z to lose, then saying, "actually, you know what, I'm about to show you that you lost
           already." It's the weakest use of weaving Nas' lyrics into Jay's, but I don't think that disproves my
           point. Rapping is hard! Plus, let's not forget that this is music. The words have to fit into a certain
           rhythm, within a finite number of beats, and this was the best way Nas could see to do that.

So there you go. I Will Not Lose doesn't just drop in and out of the hook, it is the backbone of the hook. The words are inseparable from what comes before and after them. This can all be a little bit difficult to digest without listening to the lyrics in question, so I suggest you give it another spin to see for yourself whether or not you agree with me.

Is Nas a better rapper than Jay-Z? I'm not saying that. While I do think that Illmatic is a better album than Reasonable Doubt, which I consider Jay-Z's best work, Nas had a notable, undeniable dip in quality afterwards. He put out some great songs, and some pretty good albums, but nothing that reached the soaring heights of Illmatic. So yes, Jay-Z had a better career, but when it comes to The Takeover vs Ether, I think Nas won. He had a more artistic approach, used a more abstract concept, and showed, however temporarily, that he was The King.