(t5!) Heroes Of The Zeroes Singles: #15: T.I. - What You Know (2006)

At the early to the middle part of the decade, rap producers made the hardest effort to make the most economical music the genre has ever scene. The Neptunes were as obsessed with the nothings in between their notes as the notes themselves; The Ying Yang Twins literally whispered their way to a hit; The rappers in the South were lazy with both their pacing and their layers, going as far as having only a slow, snapping drum beat as the foundations for their songs.
But one Atlanta rapper, T.I., didn’t want to buck the trend. He’s not unknown by any means—he and even got himself into an “O.C.” set with “Bring ‘Em Out”—but he’s not considered as one of the guys in the rap’s top tier. So he threw up his hands in 2006 and “fuck to all this, let’s make things big”. He teamed up with an aspiring beatmaker, DJ Toomp, to make the most muscle-flexing success of that year. Now that the decade is close to its completion, we haven’t yet seen another song that can rival with the voluminousness of T.I.’s “What You Know”.

Every time I hear “What You Know”, I associate it to a lavish hip-hop parade: monolithic, dawdling, and full of fanfare. If you don’t move out of its way, you’re going to get crushed. Toomp took the tempo of the South’s snap music and filled the gaps with ostentation. He burrowed flourishing synths, acute strings, and a faux-mellotron choir deep in the folds of the beat. This brand of hip-hop is not technically dance music (although kids, with all their leaning and snapping, have resourcefully come up with moves to cope with its stride); because of its slothfulness, it’s built for the bombast of car stereos and, in turn, ushered the “drive slow” era of hip-hop. If you go fast, you can’t show off the newly installed 24’s and the custom paint job on the Escalade. “What You Know”, however, not only allows you to put your ride on view, it also flaunts your booming audio system.

Riding on top of it all, as you would expect, is T.I., bobbing up and down wearing a baseball cap cocked to the side. Just like what the title of its parent album proclaims, he’s like a feared king up there, confidently snarling at both his followers and his naysayers. He spews like hot succinct couplets like a fire breathing dragon. Atlanta rapper Lil’ Flip, the person T.I. targeted his disdain on, never really did anything of importance pop culturally other than a couple of disposable hits in 2004. Who knew he’d be this productive as a muse? Don’t you know, Lil’ Flip, that T.I. “got key by the three” and “when [he] chirp, shawty chirp back”? Don’t you know, Lil’ Flip, that T.I. spent “50 on the pinky ring just to make [his] fist glow”? Don’t you know, Lil’ Flip that T.I. will “drag ya out that Bentley Coupe and take it to the chop shop”? I Bet you didn’t. But now you know.

Thanks to this bulldozing hit, the album King paved T.I.’s way to rap’s peak. In 2006, King was a mammoth of a record, debuting at #1 on Billboard and earning praise from the toughest critics. Then he gradually fell from the zenith he was residing on. The follow up, the battle between him and his own alter-ego T.I. vs. T.I.P., sorta proved that the only loser was us, the audience. Then, his swagger caught up on him: a member of his entourage was gunned down, and then was convicted with possession of a firearm, and was sentenced to one year in prison (not before releasing a formidable temporary swan song Paper Trail). Does he have a comeback strategy prepared when he comes out later this month? Only T.I. knows, but it’d be easier to plan another trip to the top if he has another beat as tyrannizing as “What You Know”.