The skits create the dark, expansive universe of this album, but also pay homage to the past, with the old-school radio stylings and – a little jarring with the rest of the concept – Quincy Jones ruminating on how his childhood trauma affected his own parenting.
The skit can amplify nostalgia: the Weeknd frames his new album Dawn FM as broadcasts from an old radio station, with Jim Carrey playing host alongside intermittent adverts that emphasise that this station is playing in purgatory. Almost a decade later, the Irish rapper Kojaque used funny skits on debut album Town’s Dead to paint a picture of his own city, Dublin, repeatedly referencing the pizza chain Domino’s in what might have been a knowing nod to Lamar. Kendrick Lamar has long used them as a storytelling device, as on Good Kid, M.A.A.D City with his dad yelling about dominoes: intimacies from Kendrick’s personal life that also aligned him with classic hip-hop. This impulse actually dates back to when producer Prince Paul thought sketches would help bring structure to De La Soul’s debut album maybe some artists now do skits simply in acknowledgement of what has come before. But many of these moments are part of longer tracks – they’re more likely to be a way of cohering and curating the album format still so beloved by artists, albeit less so by listeners in the age of the playlist. The most cynical interpretation is that these extra tracks rack up more listens and, therefore, more money in a broken streaming system (Spotify counts anything over 30 seconds as a play). At their best, these reinvigorate the album form as not just an arbitrary collection of recent songs, but a space for social gatherings and storytelling.
In its various forms – sketches, spoken-word passages, vignettes, voicemails, voice notes – the skit has played a big role in the recent work of rappers such as Tyler, the Creator, Little Simz, Riz Ahmed, Knucks, Kojaque and Fly Anakin, and artists as varied as Adele, FKA twigs, the Weeknd, Lana Del Rey, Blood Orange, Solange, Frank Ocean, Jazmine Sullivan and Joy Crookes. At their best, skits reinvigorate the album form as not just an arbitrary collection of songs but a space for storytellingīut the death knell for skits hasn’t sounded – quite the opposite. That’s just one more way to annoy people unwilling to pay for Spotify Premium”, where you already suffer the interruption of advertising. Why would you stick a song on, say, a sexy playlist if it had a minute-long monologue from the artist’s grandma at the end? And if it was a separate track on the album, would you not just skip it? Indeed, in his 2015 article charting the history of the phenomenon in hip-hop, writer Jeff Weiss said: “In today’s streaming chaos, few things seem more anachronistic than including skits. Such interludes were not solely the preserve of rap, though: Meat Loaf’s You Took the Words Right Out of My Mouth opened with an attempted seduction on that hot summer night, Destiny’s Child recited lines from the Bible on the outro track to Survivor, and Britney had an ill-fated exchange with an earnest astronaut on Oops! … I Did It Again.īut as digital formats and curated playlists took over, many announced that the album was a dead format and that skits would die with them. Interspersed between songs, these comedy sketches or spoken-word interludes aimed to bring you deeper into the album, with records such as the Fugees’ The Score showing how poignant this could be (a child being shot at the end of Cowboys) or how puerile (the Chinese restaurant at the end of The Beast). There was once a time where skits like these, particularly in the age of tapes and CDs, were a staple of hip-hop. D e La Soul played a gameshow on 3 Feet High and Rising, kids discussed love on The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, Eminem faced his irate manager on The Marshall Mathers LP, Outkast parodied themselves at a record store on Aquemini, Biggie Smalls actually received fellatio on Ready to Die, and Eazy-E probably didn’t actually receive fellatio on Just Don’t Bite It.