Although I’m a fan of all types of music, specifically Rap and Hip-Hop, there’s just something so much more special about a song when you know how raw and personal the topics they’re discussing are. Songs about money, drugs, girls, and violence have polluted the genre for quite some time now and those songs can be great, so I won’t say anything bad about them of course. There’s just something so much more eye-catching and appealing about a song where the artist sort of puts it all out there and tells you about a story or experience of theirs that altered their life in one way or another. This is exactly what Rod Wave does on his latest song “Through the Wire”, which takes us on a journey of everything that happened after he got into a near-fatal car accident just last month.
The melody for the instrumental is built through a combination of touching guitar chords and tender piano keys that compliment Rod’s voice perfectly. As the beat drops and he begins to sing, thunderous 808s and insistent percussion begin as well, adding some aggression and tenseness to the track. While Rod sings, you can feel this passion behind every word he speaks. There’s a combination of pain and trouble behind the notes he sings, but there’s also a sense of sorrow that you can feel as if he’s just sad that the situation unfolded as it did. While he holds out some of the notes at the end of certain lines, his voice becomes raspy and harsh which helps to bring other emotional feelings out even more than ever before.
Although you can feel the pain behind this event in the song itself, it’s the outro where he stops singing and just flat out tells the story of what happened during that crash where you truly understand just how life-altering that experience was. In the song itself, he details the crash and his struggles prior to the accident that put him in that situation in the first place. During the outro, however, he talks about how he was either on lean or drunk while driving and ended up crashing into a cement pole at just about one hundred and two miles per hour. After this, he talks about how he had internal brain bleeding and had to stay in the hospital no matter how badly he wanted to leave. He also mentions how the people who love him told him how he needed to make a change because he just had kids and this experience is something he needs to learn from in order to make a change and turn his life around.
As far as the music video is concerned, there’s nothing overly flashy or loud about the setting or scenery on the surface, but there are much deeper themes that go into the clips that are used. As we see Rod for the first time, he clearly looks like he’s distressed and troubled about the life-altering event that occurred just last month. When he begins to sing, he can be seen leaning on the hood of the brand-new Corvette he purchased this year, but the only difference is the fact that this was the exact car that he got into the accident with. The entire front right side of the car is totaled, and after looking at it from the multiple different angles that were shown, it truly is a miracle that Rod was able to walk away from the crash, thankfully. There are certain animations that are used to show multiple clones of the singer at times while other effects slow down the clips and portray a sort of wooziness as if to say he was struggling with finding himself and remaining stable. This is pretty much the only scene that is used throughout the whole video, but as he recounts his story during the outro, certain still shots of the accident are shown before a clip of his fans screaming for him at a concert is shown as well.
It’s beyond evident from both the lyrics themselves and the passion within his voice that this event changed Rod and his perspective of life. He clearly learned from this experience and it shows without a doubt, but it’s just unfortunate that he had to go through something so serious in order to receive the wake-up call that he seemed to desperately need. I’m also a big fan of the way he pays homage to Kanye with the title of this song considering Ye went through a similarly impactful car accident earlier on in his career which prompted him to create one of his best songs ever, in my opinion. Rod Wave is clearly abundantly talented and he belongs on this Earth so I’m so very thankful that the accident didn’t end differently, and I’m glad that he’s still here and is able to use his story as a lesson to not only himself but his fans as well. “Through the Wire” is the name of Rod Wave’s intense new song about one of the most eye-opening experiences in his life, so make sure you give it a listen as soon as you get a moment.