Blasphemous rap at your door: Nikki Jean and Ab-Soul

Blasphemous rap at your door: Nikki Jean and Ab-Soul - Champagne Water What a perfect mess, so that I quote another Nikki Jean song. Another lovely work of art, this Nikki Jean delivers us. The song is called 'Champagne Water'. Jesus lovers need to keep an open mind when listening to this song. Turning Jesus into some party starter isn't your average allegorical make-over. It takes some expertise, some Bible knowledge, some guts and some balls. At least the last two things I can tell you this song has. It's iconoclastic to the bone.

First verse: black girl (we can presume that much, otherwise, why would she specifically say 'white boy' in the next line?) goes to a rave(we may be talking of a swinger's party, The Ravers, anybody?), and gets knocked up(the words are dangerously blasphemous, being slang and everything) by a white boy with long hair. When she's asked who the daddy is, she answers 'I swear it's Jesus Christ'. Mary has a baby, everybody.

Second verse: is lying with a good purpose still a lie? in other words, does the end justify the means when it comes to some some innocent pleasures? Nikki seems to think so, as she tells the preacher in the confessional that she slipped a white lie to another girl, just so she can have head. She confessed to the lie, people, the lesbianism was a side thing! One sin at a time!

The Hook: although I didn't get all the words right, I fear she was inviting us to say Jesus's name as plenty as we can, Jesus Jesus Jesus, say it when you feel something, say it in vain.

Ab-Soul's verse: he keeps saying 'aye man', but it's meant to be ambiguous. You can easily read it Amen. Lavish lifestyles, parties, a bit of everything, ladies dressed in pink bunny outfits on Easter(that must involve sex, just saying), when he's speaking of the Jesus juice(I'm inclined to take what might be a sexual reference way too far) he also makes a pun about an Easter Egg (I really think there's a hidden message somewhere around here), AB reaps what others sow(that's a fun way of saying he's grinding and trapping), bitin' and eating are forbidden, but he doesn't mean gluttony, he really means... well, you know what he means. In the ending, he shuns Jesus lovers for being too far from what Jesus really is: 'For all my niggas with Jesus pieces that need a piece of Jesus'. That line is a masterpiece, I'm telling you.

I couldn't get a bigger picture of the album artwork, but it's a spark of genius that goes along with the rest of the song. Again, people, we need to understand the modernity, even the post-modernity, if I may, of the re-cycling of the New Testament. Artwise, Nikki and Ab-Soul didn't do anything wrong, because art isn't amendable, like a day-to-day blasphemy is. First of all, there is no book, if we're to take literature's example, in which the author fully identifies with his characters and his work. That's why most novels have narrators, the substance of a book requires a double, a sentient soul that replicates himself in order to better perceive the world and all its facettes. Almost every time. The same goes here. Art isn't amendable by the same dialogical, hegelian right-wrong dichotomy, if we remember Nietzsche in 'Between good and evil'. The artwork, so I can rewind my original thought, has something of that arabesque that ravers clothes have. A mix of raver-hippy color theme, alongside with an African-American female crucified in the middle.

Hope you don't misunderstand this song, because, taken in it's pure, 'art pour l'art' form, it's a grand piece of iconoclastic art. That's what rap is all about, right? Disobeying the rules. Peace!