The League Of Extraordinary Tracks 6: 2008 Poll!

My nomination was “I Ain’t Comin’ Home Tonight” by Lil Boosie, who today goes by the more grown-up name Boosie Badazz. Boosie is from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and he is a legend there, as beloved in the working class parts of town as he is on the Louisiana State University campus. (Or he was 10 to 15 years ago; I don’t know if his aging and increasingly out-of-touch self has found success with a younger generation.)

Boosie is an incredible rapper; his songs have the same passions and intensities that made 2Pac such a compelling artist. Both had the ability to be an extraordinary down-the-line party rapper or local storyteller, but imbued that with a sense that they were exposing more of themselves in their songs than was strictly necessary to fulfill that role.

In 2017, the New York Times produced a series of maps that showed the varying levels of enthusiasm that 50 different popular acts of the time found in different parts of the country. Some of these divides made plain sense to anyone who has spent some time looking at demographic maps of America: Black/white; east/west; urban/rural; old-industrial/sunbelt-immigrant. But in many of the maps, the Mississippi Delta stands as a musical ecosystem of its own, a place with tastes distinct from the rest of the nation. What is striking about that isn’t that it’s a new part of the story of American music, but a very old one.

Boosie’s “I Ain’t Coming Home Tonight,” more than anything, sounds to me like a Mississippi Delta song. In its structure and content, it could have been made by someone from his part of the country 30 or 50 or 80 years earlier. His lyric presents a series of freaky sex tales, but they’re not that freaky. He meets up with women he’s known in the past and finds they’ve still got a connection — but it’s a romantic one as well as a sexual one. The most evocative line is a coy allusion that ends in an ellipsis, like Boosie is closing the door on us: “I walked up in the room, the smell was the best/She had on a little red dress…”

There’s nothing particularly extraordinary about his hook-ups either; the most remarkable fantasy he can come up with is being on the same flight as an old flame. But hanging over the track — just as if it were an old blues song — is the dread of sin. “I know it ain’t right,” Boosie says — he’s cheating — but he succumbs to temptation again and again. He raps the song like he can feel the devil watching over him.

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I didn’t say anything about my nomination last week, which was Camp Cope’s cover of Sam Fender’s “Seventeen Going Under.” It seemed to find a positive reception, which was very pleasing! I like the Fender version a lot, but I nominated Camp Cope because I liked how, with some lyrical tweaks (“DWP” becomes Australian welfare monsters Centrelink; “the boy who kicked Tom’s head in” turns into “the boy who took that from me”) a very male and northern English song turns into something entirely Australian. The gender-switch is effective too; Fender does not like the “boys’ boys/Locker room talk and lads’ lads,” but Georgia Maq, with her talent for parodying the awfulness of awful men speaking, shows it as a real from which she is excluded entirely. As a cover-cum-cultural-translation, it reminds me of the way Frankie Goes to Hollywood found something queer and British in Springsteen’s “Born to Run.”