92. David Banner - Cadillac On 22s (Universal/SRC. 2003. From the LP Mississippi: The Album)
Mike Dikk: This was one of Raven’s Executive Decision picks, so I’m sure this song has some kind of emotional relevance to him, and his section of the write up will be way more entertaining, eloquent and soulful. I wish he was starting this one off so I could make some sense of it and pretend like I know what I’m talking about.
What you get here is David Banner emoting over some acoustic folk sample with a nice little hook and scattered beat. I will say that David Banner is kind of underrated in the way that he’s a southern rapper, but actually has things to say in his lyrics instead of the same old bullshit that’s going on in every single song on the radio. Of course, it’s hard for me to prove that point when the name of the god damn song is “Cadillac on 22’s”, but maybe it’s a metaphor or something, or maybe southern people really just love Cadillacs and need to talk about them every other minute of the day.
This is a good song though, and chances are if you are one of my more suburban friends, you’ve never heard it before, so you should take a listen to it and maybe you’ll get super into it and this list will have actually made a positive effect on your life and you will thank me in real life and possibly give me some money later on in life when you are successful and I’m still sitting in my room making lists about songs half the earth forgot about or never heard in the first place.
Raven Mack: Yeah, I guess this would be the best place to give a half-assed explanation of how this project worked. Basically, all six fucks involved came up with a stupendously ridiculous list of every single we could think of, and the only criteria really was that in order for it to be a bonafide HOT JAM it had to have been a single of some sort (though I think there's a couple of things that slipped through that criteria). And we also wanted to temper it with a little bit of thought to hip hop at large, meaning the list shouldn't just be like 12 old school jams and 88 undiscovered gems, or else it would be like every other bullshit list like this where you just try to show how smart and obscure you are. We preferred to shoot for a more mainstream bullshit list.
Then we argued and lobbied and ranked shit from the entire list, coming up with sets of ten at a time, starting with the top ten of course, and working our way down. The last ten was where we each listed a couple of songs we thought had to be included and then we sort of forced ourselves to put those in order. This was one song I was all for being on the list, as it's one of my favorite songs ever, though I never even tried to start hyping it up to others on the Rapologist EWA panel until well after the top fifty or sixty, because I know, even though it was a single and the first time I saw it was on MTV, it's not like it's "Juicy" or "C.R.E.A.M." or something that everybody who ever listened to hip hop ever would recognize right away. But for me, this is one of those rare songs that makes you wish there was like a whole sub-genre of music along these lines... strangely mellow beat but punctuated by that Memphis club drum track with the old school bells that I love so much for some odd reason. Maybe it's because I never could skate that well at the roller skating shit, only pushing off with my left foot, so when slow dances with the romantic bells and shit from old jams of yesteryear came on, chicks wouldn't want to skate with my left-pushing dumbass. Actually, that's not it, but it sounds funny, but I only went roller skating one time and it was at this chick's birthday party and she and me were in kindergarten together and then she grew up and ended up like one of those top-shelf white sluts (she even fucked NBA players, well, at least one that I know of - Jerome Kersey - allegedly), and I was probably mostly playing pinball at her party and getting hit on by this girl who got mad disrespect in middle school because somebody said she ate her lipstick one time or something. This of course meant that she was "hongry" and I think this accusation probably haunted her well into high school, where she probably settled down with some FFA redneck afterwards and I've probably been checked out by her at the Rite-Aid back home four times and never even knew it was her. But as usual, I digress...
Another thing about this song that I love is that it's about spirituality, but not bullshit positive Christian rap. I mean, the song is about God and shit, but Banner says nobody will listen unless he mentions "22s on the 'Lac", which is why the hook is what it is, even though he never actually raps about a Cadillac and it's rims more than like half a line in the song outside of the hook (chorus, refrain, whatever... hook is such a stupid-ass term). I mean, we all have spirituality, whether it's the normal stupid-assed spiritualities like religion, or it's new-fangled "we're not spirituality" types of spiritualities like science or internet-era-lollerizm. But nobody really likes to talk about their spirituality because we all know that what we believe, no matter how true and well it works for us, is gonna be bullshit to 99% of anybody else who hears about it. This is because it's the nature of spiritual motherfuckers to get all hung up on the specifics of the shit and mock others, beat down others, or blow others up for not believing the same dumb shit we may believe. I feel that having spirituality and idiotic beliefs is a great way to occupy your stupid mind most days, even if all you believe is "I'm gonna get up and make at least $150 today," which has been my latest belief system to go by, seven days a week. It's simple, it's stupid, it makes no sense to most people, but it fulfills my life right now. That's spirituality/religion/pseudo-science/whatever.
Seriously, this is like not only one of my favorite hip hop jams, but maybe one of my favorite songs ever. In a perfect world where all my retarded tendencies were fully massaged and brought out, I would at my funeral just have the instrumental to this played on loop while people stood around, passing a mic, and telling stories about the stupidest shit they ever saw me do, and then everybody could be sad because nobody was ever gonna be stupid in the special ways I was stupid to them. David Banner is an underrated dude from the South, but most of his shit is that normal pimpin' and grindin' shit that everybody does. I have searched very half-assedly, and the closest thing I've come by him to this song is the instrumental version of Trick Daddy's "Thug Holiday", which Banner produced, that I play fairly often as well since I found that shit in the dollar bin at the indie record store where dorks who look like Eastern European hipsters stand around looking like stereotypes, talking about how awesome one of their dumb shit friend's dumb shit's band new 7-inch on some dumb shit named record label is.
Download - David Banner - Cadillac on 22's
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