Two songs you need to hear: Sean Michaels’s playlist of the week

Phife Dawg is and will ever be on point. One of the greatest who ever was, a rapper whose lines make your heart swell two times larger. The trick to Tribe is the transcendence of their groove – floating like butterflies, stinging like bees. A hip-hop of marauding jazz, smart and deep. But not too smart, not too deep. More than anyone else in modern music, Phife embodied the genius of the plainspoken. No encyclopedias, no pyrotechnics, no complications. Just rhymes – wonderful, charismatic rhymes. He was like a man skipping stones. Nothing but a throw, a throw, a throw. And your jaw is hanging in the air.

“Now here’s a funky introduction of how nice I am,” he begins. “Tell your mother, tell your father, send a telegram.” Like Dylan, Destroyer or Beyoncé, Phife had a gift for finding lyrics that are fun to repeat. Their awkwardness is a form of grace – the smudge in the brushwork, the flaw in the carpet. “I got styles upon styles upon styles upon styles,” he sang. “I float like gravity / never had a cavity.” It’s either stupid or it’s genius, but you hear him spit it and you know: the latter. “I love it when you wack MCs despise me / They get vexed / I roll next / Can’t none contest me.” You laugh and you nod and you nod and you laugh and you think: this is like a Ming vase, something to preserve forever. Rest in peace.

S.E. Rogie, from Sierra Leone, played a rosy form of folksong known as “palm-wine music.” Palm-wine was the drink of choice in Segbwema and Fish Town, but it also describes the quality of Rogie’s playing – sweet and a little sloshed, or maybe like eyesight that’s not quite doubling. I enjoy the singer most when he’s mischievous and sentimental. Within the bounds of a song, unlike in real life, no one ever gets hurt.

Rob Ford lived in real life. But the tallest tales deserve third acts, and the former mayor’s story seemed like it wanted one. Instead, not. Here was a man who was powerful, pitiable, generous, cruel and the butt of uncountable jokes. A father and a husband, a brother and a son, Ford harboured an intense loyalty to some and an absolute disregard for others. He seemed larger than life, tragicomic, the picaresque protagonist in a folk-country ballad. Usually these songs offer some kind of redemption. The racist, homophobic mayor or the wounded, prideful addict finds a way to turn it around, or at least to face his own mistakes. I don’t know if Ford ever got that. Some songs and stories don’t. They end abruptly.

Sean Michaels received the 2014 Scotiabank Giller Prize for his novel Us Conductors. He is the editor of the music blog Said the Gramophone.