5ingles

The Fall
"Greenway"

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• Mark E. Smith
• Rachel Goodrich
• Jay-Z
• Hip-Hop and Rap
• Celebrity News

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Does Mark E. Smith keep a bull-dog barrister known as "Greenway" on 24-hour-a-day retainer or something? That's pretty much the only sense I can make of this song. Also: Smith should demand copious amounts of Ricola on his studio riders.

No doubt this walking Rastafarian hair-knot's got cousins out on the far side of the Milky Way who he hasn't seen in, like, millennia. Dude inhabits his own granola-rap reality, where hemp's for breakfast and dinner is whatever you caught in the ocean and cooked on a spit by your tent on the beach; he's onto something.

Miami quirk-pop mami sees no reason why long-extinct tyrannosauruses and triceratops couldn't be down with The Chronic or Goodfellas, telegraphs an anthropomorphic revisionist cornball/nonsense in tableau 39 seconds, upstages own entire catalogue on the sort of lark most aspiring singer-songwriters leave on the cutting-room floor. You'll never hear "Old MacDonald" in quite the same way.

You'll swear you're moon-walking in slow-motion toward some notion of personal nirvana in the dark corner of an ashram that has no name, but really, you're just downloading organic hummus recipes online in Oakland.

Turns out that "I Do" is the ghost of event-rap past rocking a new event-rap hoodie: a smidgen of "Excuse Me Miss," some "International Players' Anthem," loads of sampled/sweetened choir yowl. Simply being rap majesty isn't enough anymore; it's what you do with it.