Sharply dressed late-night host and all-round chill dude Stephen Colbert sat down for a lengthy back-and-forth with Rolling Stone Senior Writer Brian Hiatt late last month, and the whole thing is up on their website today. Go right ahead and read it if you’ve got a spare half-hour; it goes pretty deep for an interview that starts with a note in praise of khakis.
Before you do that, though, watch Colbert’s breakdown of Chance The Rapper’s Childish Gambino-featuring Acid Rap cut, “Favorite Song.” He ties Chance’s second-verse flow to that of “I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General” from Gilbert and Sullivan’s H.M.S. Pinafore. He then fully nerds out and goes another step back in time, linking it all to the “Song of Eärendil” from J.R.R. Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings. I’m so transfixed by Colbert’s off-the-cuff rapping that I cannot fully analyze the argument, but I definitely felt convinced, by the end, that Chance owed Tolkein a nod. Go watch it over at Rolling Stone.
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