Intro to the Intro: Here is yet another month of the World Famous EWA Monthly 25 list. The topics don't seem as interesting as past month, but I guarantee you, this is the most well written one yet. I would even go as far as saying I am proud of this and proud of everyone involved. PLUS! I finally figured out how to put multiple pics in a post (you figured that out if you read the post below), so now this time it includes pictures. On a serious note, we are looking for 1-3 more writers for this little project. This is a serious labor of love, and you don't get much recognition or money or anything, but if you enjoy writing, and people have told you you were funny in the past, and not the type of people who only laugh at dick and fart jokes, perhaps you'd be interested. Hit me up if this sounds like something you want to waste hours of your life on. As always, this can be found on the EWA blog as well. Here you go:
(WARNING: The first few entries are missing paragraph breaks because Blogger is forever fucking with me.)
JULY EXPERT WHITEBOY ANALYSIS TOP 25 THINGS HIP HOP RELATED (that term "related" used loosely)
Who we are:
Mike Dikk (MD): The views and opinions expressed on this website should not be taken seriously by anyone because the author(s) are completely full of shit. In fact, we have never seen a jew in real life and anything we do know about them, we learned from South Park and Borat. Also, I am really nine years old, and I have my mom type things out for me because I am not allowed to use the computer unsupervised.
Raven Mack (RM): My name is Raven Mack, I am an Aquarius, and I always masturbate in the woods during the new moon, for seventeen moon cycles straight now. I have achieved a full inch and a half growth plus a half inch of added circumference to my penis in this time. This method was taught to me by a Teton Sioux shaman on the rez when I was wandering through a few years back, trying to find myself in other cultures that had absolutely nothing to do with me. Turns out, I ended up just being a white dude who should write about dumb shit on computers.
Keenon Mobb (KM): This afternoon, I fell in love with a go-go band singing Ashlee Simpson. That shit was in my head for hours, no joke. Then, I had some dancehall shit on and remembered how this time last year I was sweating like a pig in Houston, getting drunk at Carnivale and eating a bunch of bomb-ass Caribbean food. That made me a little sad, no shark & bake or goat neckbones for Keenon this year. How the fuck did I turn into a semi-responsible adult all of a sudden?
John Dawson (JD): My name is John, and if my kid had some zombie disease, I would choke the fucker too.
1. Dizzee Rascal - Maths & English CDMD: Dizzee Rascal was this big buzz artist a few years back, according to supposedly hip magazines and websites. He was the flagbearer for "Grime" or "Garage" or "Two Step" or whatever the fuck it was called back then. I usually fall victim to hype like that and I grabbed his first record. I thought there were a few good songs on it, but it was mostly underwhelming, and (of course) way overhyped. Then his second disc hit and it was painfully mediocre. Around that time is when I think the Dizzee Rascal train left the states and the idea of him becoming a star in America was pretty much dead. Now his new ablum is out. Or at least it's internet out, and it's not really stealing, because it only internet out in the UK, and I don't even know if they will bother releasing it in the U.S., and if they do, it might not be for another year or something. Anyway, it's out, and it's so fucking good. It's not like mindblowing or anything if you've heard Dizzee or "Grime" before, but it's amazing in the way that the UK is light years ahead of us when it comes to "in da club" music. Our popular "Club" or "pop rap" music is all annoyingly limpwristed and fruity. I don't care how big 50 Cent gets his muscles, his songs are still really feminine. Dizzee Rascal on the other hand, can make a spot on perfect dance song and still retain his machismo. There is a song on here called "Pussyhole", which is an insult I haven't heard used since 3rd grade when kids would combine swear words because swearing was new and cool at the time. That "Pussyhole" song is the best use of that "Whooo... Yeah!" Rob Base chant since "It Takes Two", and you don't ever feel like a bitch listening to it. I don't expect everyone to like this CD, and I've come to the conclusion that what keeps Dizzee from being a star in America is his thick accent and weird muppet voice, but if you're like Raven, John and Keenon, and you like stuff like "Pop Lock and Drop It", then you should check this shit out, because you'll feel less embarrassed listening to it in public.
RM: For the most part, I have been staunchly anti-grime music. It just never spoke to me. I have had on too many occasions people be all like, "Yo Raven, you know what you would love? The Streets. It's like perfect for you." And then I listen to it and it's just some limey futbol jersey fuck talking faggy about a bunch of dumb shit I don't care about. But when poking around the down-south.com site a few weeks back, I dled the Dizzee Rascal song featuring U.G.K. and loved that track. So much so I decided to abandon my personal prejudice against stupid Brit rappers and steal this album from the internets. I am very glad I did, because it's good. I don't know if it's just the standard rap music nursery rhyme lyrics tinkerbell snap music beats that have driven me to lower my standards, or maybe I've been working in the 90 degree heat too much lately (the past two days, I have knocked off when I become nauseated, which is a great method of ridiculously working a manual labor job on top of roofs in the stupid heat - quitting about half an hour before your internal organs start malfunctioning), but this is one of the better CDs I've stolen in a while. Whereas Devin the Dude and Cilvaringz have both already fallen completely off my radar (past EWA Top 25 ballyhooed releases), there's enough songs on this CD that would stay in personal rotation to sort of force the CD to stay in my truck through the summer. The U.G.K. song, the "Whoo!... Yeah!" song Mike mentioned, plus "Excuse Me Please" and "World Outside" songs would all be shit I'd put on mixes if I was still the same type of dumbass I used to be who made a new mixtape at least every other week. The problem with this is it will trick me into thinking there's a whole necessary world of unexplored hip hop out there in foreigner countries I should try to sift through (I think I read about some Senegalese dude a few weeks back, and somehow I've got like five or six underground Senegalese hip hop tapes from like ten years ago; I think my wife studied some crazy hippie shit there at one point), which means I'll seek out all this foreigner shit, thinking it'll expand my inspiration and prove to me that hip hop is not at a stale point but just thriving in farther out more remote places where that hunger for rapid-fire linguistic creative expression combined with abrasive collage music still exists. But then I'll get a few things and it'll all suck, and somebody will try to convince me MC Solaar doesn't suck a dick, and I'll just get pissed off again and go back to pretty much just playing old Screw tapes and DJ Premier instrumentals in my truck again.
JD: I really wanted to like this, I did. But I could not get past Dizzee's voice. It is awful. I listened to the album a second time, hoping it would grow on me and I would be jocking it like Mike and Raven are, but it was like throwing grapes at a Sherman Tank. It sucks, and no offense to Mike and Raven, but this album is the sort of shit that every doofus hipster will be going around jocking, but they won't be playing it in their car or some shit. To be honest, I am suprised they like it as much as they do as I am usually the one telling the others to listen to some odd album. In conclusion, I would just like to wish Fragile X on Mike and Raven. Thank you.
RM: If my impending child ends up being born with the zombie disease, I'm coming to wherever your mennonite community in rural Pennsylvania is to beat your ass. Or at least if my car starts, I am.
2. Chris Benoit Benoit BenoitMD: I was trying to think of a way to spin this to make it hip hop related, but it’s simply not possible. I doubt Benoit even listened to any rap music. In fact, I’d pick him last out of the entire WWE roster if it came to guessing who was a fan of rap music. Even Dick Murdoch’s son could pass for someone who listens to Nelly in his pickup every once in a while. This is a hard thing even for me to joke around about. There really isn’t any humor in getting buck on your 7 year old son and wife, and then yourself, but I thought I’d write a little on it just because it was the biggest news story I paid attention to this month (besides Paris getting out of jail; a duh). Plus, Benoit played a big part in me transforming from a fair-weather wrestling dork into a full blown wrestling dork. I’m fortunately back to being a fair-weather dork, but I won’t shun those dark days where I’d wake up and eat a pizza and watch Japanese wrestling tapes by myself all day. Actually I should shun those. HARD. But yeah, that Benoit shit was fucked up. I won’t lie. Most wrestlers strike me as the type who would probably end up murdering their son, but I never got that vibe from Benoit. He idolized Dynamite Kid, so I figured he’d work and take steroids until he crippled himself, but the murder thing was totally left field. I guess the same could be said about OJ though, and just like OJ, I’m sure there will be a time where people joke around about this situation even though OJ’s situation was a lot more hilarious as it was going on. I mean, I doubt SNL is going to be doing a Benoit skit next week. I will say, the one funny thing to come out of this were the message board posts from all around the internet. Everyone turned into an Agent Mulder and Dick Tracy scouring websites looking for clues to explain why Benoit would do such a thing. Apparently, Benoit took part in a “review” of a WWE produced horror movie called See No Evil (I should mention the review was on the WWE website, so he was getting paid to like the movie). In the review, he more or less said the film was gory, and he liked gory stuff, and all the internerds found this “creepy” and “unsettling” for some reason. Those types are almost as bad as the types who no doubt rushed to Ebay to unload all their Benoit shit while it was still hot. Meanwhile, WWE has completely erased Benoit from their history which will drive up the prices on second hand Benoit merch even more. There is absolutely nothing like the World Wide Web when it comes to making a mockery of a pretty crazy incident as fast as possible.
RM: I freestyle constantly in my brain, what of it's left, and never remember any of it, even though I keep notebooks around to write shit down, which I never do. But every once in a while a line sticks in my head that I thunk up from wherever the part of my mind that thinks up retarded freestyle lyrics pulls that out. Today, I was sliding down shitty back roads home from painting a gay dude's big house (that's not a sexual euphemism, oddly enough), and I freestyled "crippler crossfacing the competition like Chris Benoit with seven year old children". So there, now it's hip hop related. Also, it should be noted, all of us expert whiteboys on this group thing have been wrestling nerds in the past. It's a shameful thing. Someone needs to make a Trekkie style documentary about wrestling fags on the internet, because even the cool ones are fucking creepy. I used to drink beer and "review" wrestling matches, which basically consisted of me getting drunk and writing whatever dumb shit came to mind with a wrestling match as the backdrop. Eventually, mad wrestling faggots got angry with me because I wasn't serious enough about dudes pretending to fight each other. If you have to analyze anything to find it's ultimate worth, fuck that thing. If I'm gonna spend time analyzing something, I'm gonna analyze all those cords clustered behind my DVD/VCR/second VCR/old school pre-RCA jacks TV to figure out why the fuck my RF Modulator from Big Lots five years ago ain't connecting correctly and causing those moree patterns on the screen while I'm trying to watch some motherfuckin' Deadwood.
JD: To relate this to hip hop for non-wrestling fans, Benoit jackin’ his family would be the equivalent of Masta Ace killing his wife and kid. Both have been around for a while in the game, seem mild-mannered, and you would never imagine either doing what Benoit did. Like Raven alluded to, we all were and to some degrees are wrestling nerds. Back in 1994, when I first got the internet, outside of trying to find girls to finger in the parking lot of the Giant Supermarket, wrestling was opened up to me. I found out they wrestled in Japan and Mexico and in other places than the WWF - then the path to the faggotry of being a wrestling fan began. So it was shocking to see someone who I probably still have tapes of in my mom’s attic all over CNN. What Benoit’s murder-death-kill rampage did was make the cream of the fag internet wrestling fan rise to the top. Fools who probably never felt the touch of a woman are saying he didn’t do it and how his death DESTROYED THEM AS A MAN and all other shit that if they saw in five years when they finally dig out of their parent’s basement, and get a promotion at the WAWA, they would be ashamed of. I don’t give one squirt of piss that Benoit killed his wife and kid. Not one drop. His wife was a bitch and his kid had mental problems. Fuck, that is understandable to bring some sort of stress on a dude who has to pump himself up with horse juice, sleep in Days Inns 300 days out of the year, consumes pills in order to function, and has to deal with the politics of being in the “business” in order to make any scratch. So he jacked the both of them, and then took himself. Sort of a pussy move killing yourself, but it is what it is. But leave the dude’s brain alone and stop saying how “bizarre” this whole deal was and let this story settle back to the nerds who will probably go on forever with RIP BENOIT sigs on message boards.
3. Rap IlluminatiRM: There’s all sorts of Illuminatis, not just the one that has two skull & bones dudes run for President in ’04, and then a Clinton possibly be President in ’08 so we have just Bushes and Clintons for 30 years in a row. You look at the NFL and the growth of the west coast offense, which basically came from Bill Walsh and his secret book for getting coach’s interviews that he only passed onto people he liked, which is why no negroes ever got hired for the longest. That’s the NFL illuminati, and black dudes had to bust up in there in recent years to quell NFLPA anger at the fact that like every player is a black dude but none of them were let into the NFLminati inner circle.
For rap music, the Illuminati is not old white people or jew managers or anything (though they most likely bankrolled the original start of the rap illuminati)… that shit starts with Dr. Dre. It’s like this, N.W.A. sold millions of records, mostly for Eazy-E and Jerry Heller’s benefit, and first Ice Cube rolled, but then Dre rolled. Cube’s first two records – easily he best two when it comes from an artistic attitude – didn’t sell like crazy. After Dre left and he and Dre made up, Cube was platinum, even with shitty crap like the Westside Connection records and all. Dre, of course, went super-platinum and shaped Death Row into Scrooge McDuck swimming pools full of gold coins. While associated with Dre, Suge Knight was living big. As was Tupac, who finally broke through to platinum status. Same with Snoop Dogg.
Then Dre leaves, hooks up Eminem, who is crazy multi-platinum. Even the fuckin’ piece of shit D12 went platinum. Bring in 50 Cent, who is the only person who’s made a successful record in the past ten years. And what kinda triggered this thinking in my head about rap illuminati was The Game. The Game is nothing special, and hardly able to shape a good song, yet he sold fuckin’ five million records. Five million records. DJ Khaled is running around happy as fuck because he sold 170,000, and The Game’s sold 5 million. And he’s in with Dre, who we don’t even see anymore. Motherfucker is disappeared, and shows up every now and then to make a cameo in a video for somebody, so we can all be reminded he’s still there, cosigning on platinum records, making money.
The reason all this is in my head is how much the music industry is hyping up how rap music isn’t selling anymore, and acting as if people stealing music is the problem. I mean, sure that helps, but if people put out actual worth a shit albums, that wouldn’t happen. Word of mouth would work faster than a wi-fi connect, and people would be buying that shit. But how does The Game sell five million copies? I don’t get it.
Also, lol at Jay-Z thinking he was rap illuminati, taking over Def Jam, and running it into the ground in record time. He was too busy flashing his camel face up in GQ and Esquire and Playboy trying to be Mr. Business Casual Super-success, and the whole time Dre was sitting back collecting royalties off of everything on earth. I mean fucking Scott Storch only hung out with Dr. Dre for a while pushing piano keys, and now he’s hooked up in the illuminati making supposedly hot tracks for all sorts of rappers even though he looks like a Red Lobster manager who sells just enough of every 8-ball he buys at bastardly rates to basically do coke for almost free. Fuckin’ Xzibit never blew up, but at least he got a cushy job on MTV still.
I didn’t really make a good point of what I was trying to say, but fuck it. The point is there’s all these platinum bullshit rap records that seem to spiral off of Dr. Dre. I’m not sure what he’s tapped into on the Mafioso bohemian grove end of the music industry, but he’s got shit in his grasp. And it probably won’t go away. I just got the satellite radio hooked back up in my ride, and easily the best station is Shade 45, which is named after Slim Shady or whatever, but they always play 50 Cent or Eminem or Lloyd Banks, and if you go to the classic rap jam station, there’s a lot more N.W.A. off of Efil4zaggin than I would ever expect normally. Shit is locked in, and with Clear Channel hooked up too, this means when a Dre-minati endorsed release comes out, it’s gonna get some strategic hype and marketing (which is what Def Jam people complain they don’t have anymore), and then the shit will be platinum too. It’s fucked up, but just business.
MD: Most of the time when we do these dumb monthly lists, Raven will write something that I know I can’t top with jokes so I let it linger around until someone else does the follow up blurb, but I don’t think it’s happening this time around, so I’m gonna go for dolo and do the best I can with this.
Raven is right about the Rap Illuminati shit, but he’s overlooking that it’s not so much Dre who’s running it from some Castle Greyskull-like mansion so far atop the mountains of California that any time you go up there to visit, the sky is black and grey and there’s constant thunder and lightning surrounding the building while the evil villain DUN DUN DUN music plays on a constant loop, and Dre is sitting in a dark room in the highest tower on a throne made of ivory and the flesh of young Asian women who have been specifically bred to be skinned in order to provide the world’s most influential and powerful men with the softest possible cushion to sit on. It’s actually Interscope doing all that evil shit. They basically own all of mainstream rap music at the moment. Interscope still answers to a higher being known as Universal Music, who owns 25% of all music on earth. Interscope is basically in charge, more or less, of Universal’s Rap Tentacle.
Any musician will tell you candidly that payola still exists. They’ve just figured out a legal loophole so as to not get busted doing it. Payola plays a huge part in why all this garbage sells so many units, but at the same time, since Universal/Interscope/Geffen basically owns most rap music, and Dr. Dre is the Capo to Jimmy Iovine’s Godfather, so there’s a good god damn chance that anything successful that is also rap music is going to be somehow connected to Dr. Dre. He’s more of a Kevin Bacon than he is a Scrooge McDuck Skull & Bones type.
Of course, Interscope allows Dre to become this mythical figure that runs this rap shit, just like George Bush is most likely a figurehead for the Skull & Bones types (as long as you believe in that stuff, you could be a normal person and not think about this stuff though), but in actuality, Dre probably lives in a pretty nice mansion with a good view, but it looks like a speck of dust if you’re peering down on it from Jimmy Iovine’s Castle Greyskull ,and still, you can fit Jimmy’s entire Greyskull into one of the walk-in closets in Universal Music Group’s Evil Space Station.
4. Shop Boyz - Party Like A Rockstar songMD: I know this song is now a couple months old, but I'm putting it here now for a couple reasons. First off, my allegedly hetero writing partners disagreed with me a lot last month on really awful music, so this month, I will show them I too can like really awful music. Fuck those guys anyway.
Secondly, it took me a couple months just to figure out how I felt about this song. My immediate reaction was "Wow, this song sucks"; and don't get me wrong, it does, but there's a lot more to it than regular old sucking. The premise of the song is ridiculous for a myriad of reasons. The most obvious is that there really aren't any rock stars to party like in 2007. The closest thing to a rock star in the 21st century is a rapper, so already the song doesn't make any sense.
Also, these Shop Boyz guys use the same old antiquated image of white people into rock/metal that black kids had when I was in high school, which was now a full decade ago. I know it's all fun and shit to think every white person says shit like "T-T-Totally dude!" but for chrissake, please update your dumb fucking stereotypes. Oh, and that air guitar thing is real fucking cute too. Assholes.
On the more positive side of things though, I like when they show the A-bomb exploding and it makes the Universal Metal Sign. I also like that they think the idea of partying like a rock star is hanging out in shitty areas littered with garbage and moshing and breaking stuff. I have to give them a lot of credit for making the first successful rap metal song. Successful meaning, black people actually like it too. Awkward white dudes tried that shit all throughout the late '90s and could never get it right. Fred Dirk got close but now he's working at a Steak-n-Shake so fuck him.
RM: This song really confused me from the get-go because I sort of assumed it was a Lil Jon song, but that wouldn't make sense because this song is tailor-made to sell Rock Star energy drinks, and Lil Jon is owner of the Crunk juice rival. But then I don't think this song is actually produced by Lil Jon.
The rock star goofiness Mike mentions is dead-on, and struck me as strange as well. I mean, you never hear about dudes ODing anymore, and everybody was all, "OHMYGOD NO SHE DIDN'T! THAT'S AWESOME!" when stupid suckfaced Amy Winehouse had that "Rehab" song, so to be a retarded indulger of illicit things has become more of a novelty than something that totally awesome people do. I guess the War on Drugs was finally won by the squares.
Then again, more kids than ever are abusing pharmaceuticals nowadays, which kinda freaks me out too. Washing lines of cocaine down with swigs from bottles of Jack makes sense to me, even if both of those substances are processed, but to swallow little pills and trust you're not going to pass out breathless because you drank two tall cans of Sparks as well... I don't know, that's not my flavor of reckless. I'd rather get really drunk and see if I can refrain from wrecking my car while driving really fast.
If this song actually makes it so one little snot-nosed black kid flashes the devil horns at my longhaired ass when I drive by him, then the annoying overplaying of this song will totally be worth it, though.
MD: Regarding the comment about a little black kid flashing the devil horns: a couple of weekends ago, I went to see my friends' band play. The show was all hardcore/metal stuff, and I went outside to have a cigarette while one of the bands were playing, and a few little black girls walked by and heard the music and started yelling "oooooh party like a rock star!". It was at that moment that I knew this song "made it".
KM: It took every fiber of self-control not to just post a DO NOT WANT picture as my blurb for this song. I am most often going to be the one who's all accomodating and "It's not that bad" for like 90% of the music the rest of these crackers shit indignant e-turds on, but not this song. This song fucking sucks.
I also thought it was a Lil Jon song and so did pretty much everyone else because it's just like what happened with "Tipsy". I thought this song fucking sucked before I knew it wasn't Lil Jon, too. You can't even save it by throwing a pretty good Chamillionaire verse on the remix. The damage has already been done, fucking sucks die has already been cast. I wouldn't like this song unless every time I listened to it, I got a blow job and even then I would still say it fucking sucks.
5. This Month In DipsetMD: I was expecting this month to be THE month for Dipset where everything fell apart and I would get to hear subpar infighting Dipset dis tracks several times a day, but instead, lowly Dipset member Stack Bundles got shot dead, which triggered (pun intended) a lot of people on the internet to pretend they knew who Stack Bundles was. A few days later, the dude who shot Stack Bundles got shot dead himself and the authorities say there’s a chance it was in retaliation, which is some good detective work if you ask me.
Outside of that, Jim Jones gave a cryptic (by “cryptic”, I mean he was really high) interview where he basically said Dipset will move forward and stay together but he still kinda hates Cam’ron, but business is business. I don’t really know what to think anymore. I was hoping this Dipset dissension would carry the EWA 25 lists through the end of the year, but it looks like it might be over before it even started. Let’s cross our fingers and hope it picks up next month. Actually, instead of crossing our fingers, we should all do the little “Ballin!” pantomime and throw some Dipset bird signs up in the air and hope it picks up next month.
RM: Was Jim Jones around when the Rap Bandit was talking about who the gay rapper was all the time? He seems like the most flamboyantly non-scary member of Dipset. Well, Cam'ron too. And Juelz Santana. But when you look at Freaky Zeke, he looks sort of like one of those brothers who's not quite all there and might accidentally rape somebody one night. And whoever the fuck Stack Bundles was (I think I have him on a mixtape doing a few songs, and I think I probably hated him, or perhaps unintelligently analyzed him as too simplistic), he musta been gully enough to have his murder avenged so quickly. Seems like the Dipset power pyramid breaks down like this: a couple of closet fag rappers at the top who are probably mad at each other for not being on the down low tip together as much as they'd like with their personal music successes pulling them in different directions (hard for Jones to answer Cam's text messages when he's in the booth doing guest rapper whore spots every two days), and then they're surrounded by friendly thugs from their youth, who give them street credibility. People have suggested Cam'ron's Lambo getting shot up in D.C. last year was staged, so who's to say that Stack Bundles being a minor pawn in the Dipset Chess game was just shot by someone they hired, so they could kill the hired gun, and make Dipset seem hard after all this Cam vs. Jim Jones bullshit? Not that anybody cared about it, and I doubt you'll hear too many "I want a moment of silence for my nigga Stack Bundles" at rap shows in the coming months. (Speaking of which, fuck, didn't J. Dilla die like two years ago or some shit; why is every motherfucker who uses four syllable words in his raps still rest in peaceing that dude at shows?)
6. Baseball Hating Black DudesJD: This was my nomination and I think I might be throwing up a big softball for everyone else to bash on this because I would guess out of us, I am probably the only baseball "fan". But this subject came to mind after the comments by both Gary Sheffield and Tori Hunter about the state of black dudes in baseball. The Cliff Note verison of what was said by each is Sheffield thinks the number of black people in baseball are dwindling because latin players are easier to "tame" than black dudes. Hunter said there won't be any black players within ten years because a talented black baseball player will ask for too much money to sign, and latin players will take anything to play ball.
I am not sure which comments are more retarded, but let's start with Sheffield. The idea of "taming" any person is a pretty big insult to that race, and the human race as a whole. I think he didn't want to say that, according to him, black dudes do not like to listen to their coaches and will do whatever they want to. But as a baseball fan, I do not care who listens to their coach as long as they produce on the field.
On to Tori Hunter, again, he really hid behind the analogy of the "kid from Compton wanting a $10 mil signing bonus and the kid from the Dominican taking $2,000 and playing wherever the team said," and he just should have said it was a matter of greed and not race. By the way, Hunter is in a contract year and has said in the baseball media he is willing to jump from Minnesota, the team he has played his entire career with, for the highest bidder. Again, as a baseball fan, I don't care if the dude on my team is named Reyes or Hunter, as long as they do what they should on the field.
Being somewhat of a life-long and current sports nerd, I wasn't sure why these comments even made a blip on the baseball radar other than the fact black guys made the comments, because I don't think not having any black players in the MLB is such a crisis, to baseball or the black community. If some kid grows up wanting to have a 60,000 square foot house like Shaq and therefore decides to play basketball rather than baseball, I totally understand that. I think the reason truly why the number of black baseball players is dwindling is because black kids don't have a figure that transcends race, media, and cultures to look up to like there are in basketball, so they have no motivation to play the sport. Also, the "old boy network" culture of baseball won't let someone who can relate to the little black kid succeed. Take Lastings Millich, the outfielder in the Mets organization. Dude put out a hip hop record that probably fifteen people heard, but he talked about bitches and money, so some crusty sportswriter got hold of it and made him out to be some thug. AI did the same shit, and the Philly media talked about it, but it wasn't a big deal. Barry Bonds is most likely the only black guy in baseball that has the potential to be that dude, but he comes off like an asshole and is booed everywhere he goes, so he isn't a positive role model. The only other black guy that has been getting any press is Elijah Dukes, and I will leave that meatball for Raven to attack.
RM: Elijah Dukes, for those who don't know, is a Tampa Bay Devil Rays player who does stupid criminal-ish things, and impregnates women as if he were Ol Dirty Bastard Jr.. However, even Dukes is only hilarious because he's a baseball player, and relatively speaking, some chump ass who text messages his pregnant cum dumpster sixth grade-level physical threats is some off-the-wall behavior for a baseball player.
This is why there will be no black players in baseball in ten years, and it has nothing to do with all that nonsense Gary Sheffield was talking... baseball is boring. Basically, as a player, you stand around twenty minutes for every one minutes of exciting athletic activity you take part in, except for pitching or catching. As kids playing little league, you go through any small town that has black people in it, and there's tons of black kids playing, because as a kid it's awesome, and chances are if you're halfway athletic, you'll get to pitch or catch, or at worst play in the infield, and then put all the halfwits, retards, uncoordinated fuckers, and girls who signed up for baseball rather than softball in the outfield (third base is your first non-outfielder scrub though).
The thing is, by you the time you get to pony league level, 75% of the kids who played have quit playing, most of them because they entered adolescence and can think of a thousand things better to do with their time than stand around in the sun waiting for something to happen in their direction. At this point, it's mostly all white dudes, except for a couple of black kid holdouts who get to play prominent pitcher positions and hit home runs, because if you're not gonna get to throw a ball real hard or hit a ball real far all day long, why the fuck would you stand around like baseball players do? You wouldn't.
This means, by the time you get through high school, there's very few black dudes who haven't realized that vagina is better than curveballs, and to be fair, there's very few white dudes left who realize that, when you take it as a percentage of chump ass white kids playing little league. So mostly you get left with dumb hicks and those random super-negroes who kept at it for the accolades, both of whom tend to have a middle schooler's stunted mental growth. Seriously. Baseball players are retarded. If you've ever met them or watched them in practice at a minor league game, they are dolts with thick legs.
And this is why latin players have made such in-roads into the game... because a Dominican kid who knows poverty to levels that a Compton kid couldn't even understand is more than willing to do anything to make a fat paycheck, which might be skinnier than a superstar-obsessed American kid might sign for, but also with maybe a functional understanding of thirty English words, your average Third World shortstop is on the same mental level as most white and black baseball players, just he can't make "that chick I fucked last night was really fat"jokes using as many words.
And I think Elijah Dukes, if he wasn't such a baseball fag, would be the type of guy to get more black kids into baseball, if they realized that basically you get paid very little money for like four or five years to play baseball, but usually they set you up in some house with a host family of some sorts, which is nine times out of ten a middle-aged white couple acting out cuckold fantasies. So you get a paycheck, but no room or board, and get given food as well, AND get to fuck a white lady at her home. Not to mention all the creepy baseball groupies that exist in the minor leagues. It's a win situation from the get-go.
On top of that, if you do end up being talented enough to make it to The Show, then even if you make shitty latin dude money, you're a millionaire. I think explaining this possibility to black kids would do far more to make them think baseball was cool than Dontrelle Willis wearing his hat all flat-brimmed and slightly askew ever could.
7. Kanye West - Can't Tell Me Nothing MixtapeMD: My interest in this CD has settled down since I nominated it. Meaning, I haven’t listened to it in a while because I have an ipod with 58 million songs on it and I can’t keep track of everything on there. Anyway, I remember thinking the stuff on here wasn’t close to as masturbatory as most of Kanye’s stuff is, so I am kinda sorta looking forward to his new CD, but I can’t say that out loud or else I will be kicked off of the internet and all of my friends (my real life friends) will make fun of me because I’m sure sometime in the past I said I hated Kanye West. Though, I do like most of his first CD. His second one is real shitty still. Even the Common song on here sounded good too, so I might actually look into getting that CD when it comes out. Wow, all the stuff I just wrote was really boring. It’s like I’m turning into everyone else who has a blog. No offense to you people with blogs who read this. I didn’t mean you. I meant all the other people out there with blogs who don’t read this, which judging by my website statistics is 99.999999% of the internet. So yeah, all those people suck and don’t write things good. You guys are cool though.
RM: Man fuck a Kanye West. Fuck a motherfucker wrecking a car and acting like he got his intestines torn apart by rabid alligators while be dragged behind racist redneck's pick-up truck by logging chains. Dude wrecked a car and broke his jaw. And made beats with annoying ass sped up vocal samples. He dresses and gets his hair cut like he's grazed at Erykah Badu's hairy pussy on the regular, and his lyrical stylings are pretty goddamned simple for people to be jocking him like he's some sort of genius. Seriously, when there's shit like "Kanye is straight genius" memes going through the internet, like it has, I realize I probably shouldn't have the internet because it's obviously controlled by fucking retards.
Okay, so with all that personal bias out the way, that "Can't Tell Me Nothin'" song has been all over the radio. You know what? It's not that great a song. Very catchy beat and hook, so it's a good pop song, but what the fuck? Is that what hip hop is now, you can be a good version of Kelly Clarkson or Ashlee Simpson except you speak in rappish patterns of the most simplest styles, and you're a genius? "I ain't a Cosby I didn't go to Hillman," is a fucking stupid lyric, and I don't mean stupid like cold gettin' stupid, but stupid as in why bother even saying shit like that? And Kanye does that regularly, and always has. Except everybody loves him.
I sometimes think that there's an aural AIDS virus nobody knows about yet and shit like Lil Wayne and Kanye West being this great shit you HAVE TO HEAR RIGHT NOW BECAUSE NOTHING IS EVEN CLOSE TO TEARING UP THE GAME LIKE THEY ARE is a secret trick to kill a bunch of us off since the upper echelon of our financial elite have been making money grabs for the last ten years off military contracts and oil prices and shit, to thin out western society while the Chinese and Indians and shit have their century of running shit. I need to start getting into some of that weird Hindi dance party bullshit while I still have a chance, for self-preservation. (For real, one time me and a few friends went to this apartment party and it was like 100 people and all of them Hindus with the head wraps and smudges on the forehead and shit, dancing like fools to old school mixes, and one white dude who came over to ask us what the fuck we were doing there. We answered pretty much just looking for a good time. The funny thing is, none of the Hindus people gave a shit, and I even did some bumping and grinding with a couple hot ass Savalarafas, who if the internet has taught me anything, I be they had mad hairy pussies, like Jo-Jo the Dogfaced Boy's oldest daughter hairy pussy, and only the token white guy gave us a hard time. That's kinda telling, because white people are always protecting other cultures and shit, which is demeaning itself because it's suggesting them other motherfuckers can't protect for themselves. That's also why we call this shit Expert Whiteboy Analysis, because we are whiteboys, which means we automatically know more about hip hop than anybody else on the internets. And fuck what Mike said, that means you to, with your dumbass bullshit blog uploading some stupid ass 12-inch from 1993 that nobody gave a shit about then and shouldn't give a fuck about now. Like somebody's all, "OH SHIT! Tha Mercedes Benz Boyz "Striking Like Tyson" 12-inch!")
8. Talib Kweli & UGK - Country Cousins songRM: Talib Kweli is the rap equivalent of a second round NFL draft pick who never really does shit, even though every now and then he'll pick off a pass and run it 80 yards for a touchdown, doing just enough to get someone to keep him around, but not really ever living up to his potential. I was a Rawkus dork the first time around, not really on purpose but because they were putting out much better shit. The Reflection Eternal "Fortified Live" 12-inch is still a piece of vinyl I hold in high regard, and that made me a Talib fan. And I dug the "Definition" song he and MosDef did well enough, but Talib is someone I cannot stomach a whole bunch of.
First off, he suffers from whisper rapper disease, where instead of sounding hype as shit, he sounds like some dude rhythmically talking two rows behind you at the movie theater, all quietly. A lot of nerd rap fans seem to like MCs who suffer from the whisper rapper disease, but it usually just makes me want to stab people with busted up Boone's Farm bottles.
All that being said, I was stoked to see this on the bootlegger's table the other day. I had bought a Father Bentley dancehall mix that didn't play at all, which is normal for a burned bootleg mix CD, so I had a free CD coming to me since bootleg man was out of the dancehall joint (my introduction to Mavado will have to wait). And there was Eardrum, grainy thrice-copied color cover in a slim case with the track listing stapled to the back side of the cover.
Man does that CD suck though. It's like people consider themselves clever to have a theme to a song rather than just write random lyrics like most MCs. You still have to write some clever shit, not just do shitty lyrics about the same thing through a three minute beat.
However, this "Country Cousins" song is awesome, and not just because of UGK (who do rule it, by the way), but because it's probably the only song on the CD where Talib sounds inspired as opposed to tired and just rapping into a mic while he waits for his sister to pick him up from the Barnes & Noble where he's been reading The Secret because his aunt told him about it after she saw it on Oprah. It also makes me wish there was a big giant North vs. South rap civil war that this song would be squashing. Like, shit had gotten mad out of control and both Jim Jones and Young Jeezy were both dead from gunshot murders, and things were getting hectic, but then this song comes out and everybody from the south is like, "Oh shit, UGK!" and everybody from the north is like, "That's fucked up them motherfuckers killed Jim Jones... what's all that whispering and shit?" It's a great ass song. It also made me think of two things to address...
First off, people (including my fellow expert whiteboyz, and myself at times) condemn rap music as being THA SHITTIEST ever right now because of the crappy southern shit that's all over MTV TRL countdowns, but fuck, pop rap has always been shitty. I can't be for sure (and ain't bothering to look it up), but when Wu's 36 Chambers was blowing up hip hop heads all over, I bet some dumb shit like Heavy D & The Boyz was the greatest shit ever on the rap single charts. It just so happens that NYC rappers have seemed to have lost their magic touch at making shitty pop rap songs, or just nursery rhyme hooks and tinkerbell beats surpassed bubblegum Brooklyn dance rappers. There's good shit out there, I guess, somewhere.
Secondly, I got to thinking about how UGK, specifically Bun B, have been destroying guest spots pretty regularly here recently. And we hyped up Andre 3000 for doing that a month or two back, but he was on some oddball space age shit in doing so. Chances are, if you are a shitty popular rap song today, and the your jew agent tells you that they're gonna remix you to squeeze a few more spins out of you on pay-per-play radio, Lil Wayne or Jim Jones is gonna be one of the first two guys who shows up on you. The thing is, both of those guys pretty much just show up with whatever they already have written (or had written for them) and maybe add a pair of lines at the front or back end of a page of their rhymebook to throw down on your track. Every guest spot I've heard with UGK recently is tailor-made for the song they're on, conceptually, and yet the lyrics don't suck. I think if Bun B weren't such an older chubby black dude and Lil Wayne wasn't such a sexable little negro muppet for white America's teenage bedrooms (both genders, because dudes be worshipping guns like girls worship dicks), Bun B would have the world riding his jock right about now.
MD: Unlike Raven, I do enjoy most of Talib Kweli’s new CD, but he is right when it comes to sounding motivated. This is the only song where he does sound like he gives a shit, but I can understand not wanting to be shown up by southerners who smoke angel dust.
I’d like to know if Talib sought out UGK to work with or if this was some kind of random happening put together by the record label. I do know at this point that UGK has had more exposure than Tera Patrick’s vagina (that was kind of a hack joke, so please don’t humor me by laughing at it; you should expect more from me), so if their record doesn’t sell at least 13 million copies, it will definitely be looked at as a huge failure and you will be hearing more guest appearances from UGK with the random people sharing the unemployment line with them than on actual major label records.
KM: Back when "The Game Belongs To Me" was on this list, I fucked up. I thought it was this other UGK song that Jazzie Phe did and I didn't like that one, so I thought I didn't like the other one. Turns out I was wrong, that song was fucking sweet and I could have rambled on for a while about it. As a result, this month I stopped to listen to all three (a novel idea, I know). "Country Cousins" is just a passable song; a large part of the problem is Talib Kweli has used up all of his currency with me. I used to be a huge Black Star jockrider, swore up and down that Talib was going to be the next God MC in no time. Going back and finding those old MOOD songs made me believe it even more. With each subsequent album, my faith in him dwindled. That first Reflection Eternal was still good, but he was treading water. Quality was still good, but he wasn't making any mindblowing moves. The Beautiful Struggle was Quality 2.0 and I regretted buying it. Now, he just pops up on guest spots and maybe a mixtape cut, throwing some fire (or just sounding better than he has in the last five years) and almost makes me forget why I stopped believing he's Rakim 2k. But I haven't forgotten, Talib Kweli.
I hope this song is part of some kind of ongoing NYC/South diplomacy where dudes who rock will eventually get on tracks together. UGK pulled Big Daddy Kane & Kool G Rap for their album, which is good. I look forward to the day when I get to hear UGK do shit with Method Man & Redman, that would probably make my brain melt if everyone brought their A game. Guess what? They already did a joint with Keith Murray. And it was gooooooooood.
9. Crack VibeRM: I've been blowing off work a lot lately, just riding around doing nothing, wasting time. My man Boogie Brown just found like five or six tapes of old beats he made like 12 years ago at least, back during the boom bap days. He had an EPS 16-Plus, which is the same machine RZA used for his best shit; the machine has a real grimy sound and you could flip samples around and change their pitch or speed and all, but it still sounded raw and heavy like a keyboard sampler and not all digitized and homoerotic like a lot of the beats done on computers with programs.
Well, we just finished a second Prolo CD, which is more back roads drunken retard hip hop, but Brown wanted to do a side project with these lost beats, so I started getting back into my tweaked out mindframe about world conspiracies and evil men tricking me to happily do their bidding or just bide (meaning waste) my life away, happy in my own ignorant shit. So I'd been riding around listening to these old beats and reading fucked up books by guys like William Cooper or Jim Keith or Adam Parfrey, getting my mind in warped speed to come correct with the old boom bap beat project, which we decided to call Tentacles of the Beast.
Anyways, while riding around Richmond's Church Hill district one day, I remembered how awesomely perfect all those old grimy Wu beats were when I was living in Richmond and usually pretty zoned out on drugs and alcohol and city living where heroin addicts inhabited the alleys and DO NOT CROSS tape was strung up by the police within walking distance more often than I ever really felt comfortable feeling comfortable about. A while back, during one job I had working for some yankee construction company, we had renovated a whole crack block on 30th Street. Of course, it was still a crack block, but people always think you're a cop when you roll through for the first time. But I figured I'd blow the $10 I had on some crack to get high in the park, get all tweaked out in my truck, listening to Brown's old beats, and get myself in a good zone to write some warped lyrics. I'd only done crack once, years ago in high school, and knew it to not be what you'd call a fun drug; but it definitely puts that gritty industrial feel into your bones, albeit quickly, which I guess is what some folks get addicted to. I never really understood that. I wouldn't want to keep that feeling around all the time. I guess it becomes habit. But after getting laughed at a couple of stops, I hit one of them spots where you give the one dude your money, do a U-turn at the end of the block, and another guy comes out the alley to toss your shit in your window at you on your way back through.
Anyways, that first time, it was alright, but when I was sitting in Chimborazo Park getting high, it was all sunny and bright out and there was a nice view of the city's shittiness off the hill and it just didn't give me a grimy enough feel to get tweaked out just right. I ended up back there a week or so later though, and got $20 worth, closer to twilight, but I didn't want to hang out in shitty Church Hill as the sun went down, for self-preservation reasons. Smoking crack in a shitty neighborhood at night, even if it is just for leisure purposes, is a sure-fire way to get yourself fucked up. So I rode towards home and sat by the river under some trees that got grown over with kudzu, in my truck bumping beats, getting zoned out. It was alright again I guess, but nothing I'd want to seek out too often. But you can feel how crack is definitely the drug of hip hop, like the music has the same grittiness as your joints get with crack. It got me to thinking about how heroin has become so popular in ghettos everywhere, and how much pharmaceuticals like codeine and ecstacy have made in-roads into black drug culture, and how that's probably got something to do with how hip hop music has changed aurally in the past fifteen years. Crack blew up in the '80s, as did hip hop. When you hear Enter the 36 Chambers or The Chronic or even Illmatic, that's crack music. I can't think of a single CD I've gotten in the past ten years I'd consider crack music like that. It made me sorta sad. First, we get stuck with heroin-free rock music, and now we're getting screwed with crack-free rap music. I guess I'll start having to listen to jazz fusion or some shit.
MD: I'll keep my secondary opinion brief. Exactly what flavor of crack did you buy?
10. David Banner & UGK - Suicide Doors songMD: I was outside on my porch the other night having a cigarette when a car drove by blaring a moderately annoying southern rap song. I didn’t take notice until I heard the line “And my nuts got a Myspace page,” then I was like “wait whaaaaaaaaaaaat?” After some internetting, I found out the song was David Banner’s “Suicide Doors” featuring UGK. This is only the 16th or 17th song to feature UGK this month, but I never expected David Banner to go the way of all southern rappers and make garbage music. Actually, I don’t know what to expect from David Banner, because I’m really not that familiar with him, but I thought he was some guy who made thoughtful music, but now I’m confused.
The song itself kind of sucks, but Pimp C’s verse is pretty hilarious. Buying his dick a necklace and signing up his nuts for Myspace and all. It’s the kind of stuff you would expect from late '90s Kool Keith. I do know Pimp C has a history of doing PCP, and I guess you could write up the verse as the product of being wet, but I don’t know. I’ve done PCP before and all it really does is make you super paranoid. At most, you will entertain yourself for a couple of hours by doing something dumb like listening to a Walkman with no tape in it or vibing out to a ceiling fan. I couldn’t even imagine trying to write or rap while smoking dust, but maybe Pimp C is such a career shermhead that he’s able to do such a thing and he needs to get wet just to stay regular, and by regular, I mean walking into a mall in the hot ass Houston summer wearing a fur coat with nothing on underneath while waving round an automatic weapon.
KM: Don't let David Banner's very tangible work in the community fool you. Don't be thrown because you heard the half-dozen songs where he's all conscious and pointing out how fucking fucked up it still is to be poor and black (but mostly poor) in the USA. David Banner can throw down with some awesome ig'nant ass music when it counts. "Suicide Doors" is just not a very good example. Banner doesn't bring any kind of fire, Bun throws a standard Bun guest, and the beat's not very good in the first place. The Pimp C verse on this would be one of those times where he's going off on his own shit, it's funny but it's also a little... bad. Keep in mind, Pimp C probably made what I make working 80 hours a week for half a year with that verse about his nuts having a Myspace page. Go add them already, you know you want to do it.
RM: Yeah, I heard this song and when the radio whore said "David Banner's new song," I was like, "FUCK YEAH!" You see, "Cadillac on 22s" is one of those songs that I wish there was a whole genre of music like that - weird introspective street gospel rap with mellow guitars and roller skating rink anthem bells rocking throughout. So when I actually heard this song and what a piece of shit it was, I was bummed, because now when people remember I jock David Banner (like Mike probably did), they're gonna be like, "Damn, Raven's smoking crack or some shit."
I couldn't really get beyond the stupid idea of the song. I mean, putting dubs on a Cadillac makes sense to me, that's a fine accessorization of a car. But suicide doors? That's just some stupid shit. And if you were gonna waste the money on that type of bullshit, why wouldn't you just get a lambo door kit instead? Suicide doors just don't make sense, having to climb in the seat from the front, bumping the steering wheel and shit, scuffing up the wood grain on it. Just doesn't make sense. Lambo doors is some back-to-the-future type shit.
11. Beastie Boys New Mix Shit
JD: I am not going to hate on the group as a whole. I do understand their place in whiteboy hip hop history and respect that. After all, isn't Paul's Botique the best album ever?
The group started as a punk band and as a faithful Beasties fan, have heard some of the stuff on Greatest Hits albums and snippets on some of their later stuff. Later stuff. Important thing right there because at first the Beasties were out to do everything possible to get the cred that was necessary in a genre that a whiteboy could never crack, and once they got that cred, theY flipped back to being white boys.
This new shit is, from what I gather, some sort of jam album in which Mike D plays a riff on the drums over and over again while one of the other dudes plucks away at a guitar at random times. It really does suck. It reminds me of the shit my friends back in the day would play all the time. Your man here was the only one of his group of friends that was really into hip hop. My boys were all hippies, and every party would be full of some "rare" Grateful Dead concert or some faggot-ass Phish stuff, and I would hurt inside. I remember one party where we had a boombox at the dock and my friends were playing all that shit that sounded like the new Beastie's shit, and I wanted to put in my Let the Rhythm Hit 'Em. After about five hours of listening to that jam band shit, they let me pop in the tape, and dealt with the title track, but about two bars into "No Omega" they took the tape out. I think that is why I have this subconscious hatred of that jammish shit, and it hurts more coming from a hip hop group.
RM: I'm not even sure if anybody thinks the Beastie Boys are still relevant. I mean, I wasn't sure if they were relevant ten years ago, so now? Playing some nickel and dime jam band shit, when jam band music has blown up into a nicely supported market with target demographics and shit, so that people actually think bullshit like String Cheese Incident or Disco Biscuits is something more than a piece of shit cover band full of kind bud stoners doodling away but with electronic influences. Fuck that shit. And fuck the Beastie Boys for not only being irrelevant, but deciding to be a really half-assed shitty jam band. I mean, what's next? A jazz album where they pretend they can play a Hammond organ, tenor saxophone, and acoustic bass?
I kinda like to just think the Beastie Boys are "Paul Revere" and the beat to "Slow and Low". If I keep it to that, they're still awesome. That one 7-inch single off the License to Ill tape, with "Fight For Your Right to Party" on one side and "Paul's Revere" on the other side, that was a serious multi-cultural jam. If you ever hear a DJ do an old school mix for more than an hour, he's gonna bust out "Paul Revere". And if you ever hang out with well-off people reminiscing drunkenly with an '80s mix motif in the background while they sip cabernet sauvignon and grill wild salmon steaks on the gas grill, "Fight For Your Right to Party" is gonna show up. But now? Fuckin' Buddhists. Nothing great ever comes from a white Buddhist. Nothing.
12. Kimbo SliceMD: I am a sad individual, so I usually have my finger on the pulse of the internet. I probably catch 99% of all the internet phenomenons as they’re happening, but a few things always slip by. Like when I found out Donkeylips from Salute Your Shorts tried to become a rapper. I found out two years later than the rest of the internet. Same thing with Reh Dog. Kimbo Slice is my new lost internet gem.
I found out about Kimbo Slice literally five days ago, and since then, I’ve heard his name mentioned about fifty times. I checked his Youtube clips, which all seem to be overdubbed with Tupac songs, and I figured I’d throw him on the list, because Tupac is hip hop.
This Kimbo Slice character is pretty scary looking. He voluntarily rocks the bald head with bushy beard look and his middle name is Abdullah. He just beat senior citizen Ray Mercer in some kind of MMA league that looks like a carnier version of UFC. The rumor mill is saying he will be fighting Tank Abbot next, which may very well end up being the sloppiest telecast fight since the early days of UFC when Tank Abbot was actually revered as a tough cookie. That was ten years ago, and I bet his training consists of eating chicken wings and drinking a case of beer a night, so I imagine he will be in stupendous shape for the fight.
I like how MMA is now blossoming into something where the dregs of the MMA/boxing scene will now compete against each other in knockoff versions of UFC. It’s like UFC is G.I. Joe and everything else (I believe the Kimbo/Mercer match took place in the CFFCCWWF or something almost as ridiculous) is the G.I. Corps dolls I’d buy from McRory’s when I was 9. They look the same, but the knockoff brands have a little more soul to them because they can fall apart at any second which creates a much more spontaneous playtime environment. If Kimbo beats Abbott (and I imagine he will, since he used a rear naked choke to beat Mercer, so he must be getting some kind of formal MMA training between the fights he has in his backyard against local neighborhood toughs), I imagine it will either lead up to Kimbo vs. Kimo (ex-UFC cult favorite who carried a crucifix on his back to the octagon, but kind of sucked at actual fighting) or the big money match, Kimbo vs. Butterbean. If he makes it to that level, the rumors will start flying that Mike Tyson will want to fight him, and if my prayers are answered, he will also take on Tommy “I Beat AIDS” Morrison and fuck his face up more than Mercer did (WHAT A COINCIDENCE!) back in the day. Here’s to Kimbo Slice. The modern day G.I. Corps action figure.
RM: You know, I want to like MMA since every dork and his best friend is rolling around on the back deck practicing guard on each other nowadays before the bi-weekly UFC PPV comes on the satellite machine, but I just don't like this nowadays shit as much as early UFC. I don't care about sport and fucks training for three months and crap like that. Fuck that noise. Just fight.
That's why Kimbo Slice is awesome. He is a big scary black dude. I have worked with two or three Kimbo Slices in my life. There was Big Curtis in Richmond, who called me Ruben since we worked with Mexicans and they were too poor to afford the right phonetics to say Raven. Me and one of my college pals were riding through a scummy part of town one day, and there was Big Curtis, so I yell out, "YO CURTIS!" and he hollers back "HEY! RUBEN!" and my white buddy was visibly shook by this, me getting called by an alias by some big giant bearded scary negro dude. I also worked with another Kimbo Slice a couple years back, though he worked for some little weasel dude and I worked for some other guy, but we were alone at the same jobsite. It was awesome; he was a former 5% due to him being a former resident of the New York penal system, and told me his 5% name was Bigheaded Scientist or some shit, and we shared terrorist philosophies with each other while not working but getting paid by weasels who didn't know we weren't working. It was good fun.
The point is, Kimbo Slice is everywhere. The for-real Kimbo Slice is out of Miami, and used to be bodyguard to some porn dudes or something, but there's a dude like that in every city. That's why I can't stand the new UFC bullshit, with ballyhooed bouts and training and promotional interviews and all that shit. Fuck that. Take eight dudes who are bad asses and have a tournament, one-on-one single elimination, until one super Kimbo Slice is left. Shit, Mike just named a good start for one of these things. If someone told me if I paid fifty bucks there'd be a one night tournament on my TV screen with Kimbo Slice and Butterbean and Tank Abbot and... I don't know... that dude with the fucked-up face and big chest tattoo from the Desperado movies and like Danzig or Henry Rollins and a big bareknuckle boxer truck driver racist from Colorado and a few others, I'd buy that shit twice. But UFC? Fuck that. When something that was originally about ass kicking turns into a pseudo-sport where dudes analyze the shit, that means homos have taken over the watching of it from regular people. And when I say regular people, I mean alcoholic degenerates like myself. But let's face it, I'm part of a pretty huge demographic.
KM: I don't really watch a whole lot of MMA, but every once in a while I catch interest enough to watch some shit for free on the internet. At one point, I thought Bob Sapp was awesome. Giant black man going apeshit in Japan, scaring people and beating smaller MMA dudes over the head. His fighting style reminded me of that interview where Muhammad Ali is making fun of Joe Frazier's fighting style by swinging around like a gorilla. Then, I saw Cro Cop bust Sapp's eye socket and after that, I saw Sapp playing with MMA stuffed dolls (which was funny) and THEN I saw the video and album cover for "Sapp Time". After all that, Bob Sapp is not a terrifying man. He's funny, but he lost the aura. Around the same time, I saw some bootleg fights where Kimbo Slice was fighting in like backyards and basements. Even on the one he lost, he still beat the ever-loving shit out of that kid. Everything about Kimbo screams "run away and throw your wallet behind you." That fucker doesn't just look like he'd pull your arms out and play a drum solo with them; he looks like he'd pull one arm out and do his best Rick Allen impression. I saw that porn page where they were paying people to take full-on punches from Kimbo and I gotta tell you, they don't take enough cash. A Tank Abbot/Kimbo fight would be something I'd pay to see - even if it's over in a minute or two this would be watching two extreme caricatures (giant, scary biker trash vs giant, scary black man) try to murder one another. Hopefully.
13. Mike Jones InfectiousnessRM: So let me be upfront here… I am a white dude who has a college degree, and though I have dabbled in smoking rock cocaine the past couple months, for the most part my only serious vice is drinking too much beer (not even liquor). I hardly smoke weed more than once or twice a week, and am mostly dedicated towards providing financial security to my wife and two daughters, as well as the impending third child due to arrive with the turning of the calendar early next year. I am a registered voter and own my own home, with five acres of land. When it comes to rap music, I don’t glorify the blissful perfection of ignorance, nor do I do some sort of vicarious wet dreaming through gangsta nonsense, to compensate for any white guilt or white boredom I may have. In fact, I don’t really have either; I like myself and my life, and even though my upbringing wasn’t the greatest, who the fuck did have a good upbringing? So why the fuck would I complain? It made me what I is, and I don’t mind that. My dick’s big enough to make babies that are half-me, my bank’s thick enough to keep the lights on, and my bed’s big enough to sleep comfortably, with two pillows even, which is some shit I never had as a kid.
So when it comes to the rap music, I love the creative, the far-out, the ingenious, the cutting edge, but the soulful. And I can even get into retarded shit so long as it’s different. Thus, there’s absolutely no reason I should like even twenty-nine seconds of Mike Jones. Yet, ever since I first heard “Still Tippin’”, I can’t help but want more. He’s probably in the third echelon of Houston rappers, with the worst rap name in the history of rap, and his style is literally more repetitive than anything probably before it. He’s a non-exciting looking dude with a mole on his nose that looks like he pierced his nostril with skin cancer. Yet somehow, I’m drawn to it. I loved the “Mr. Jones” single when it came out, and my main complaint with the new “My 64” song is the fact that so much of that awesome retro-working of the “Boyz-N-tha-Hood” beat is wasted on Bun B and Snoop Dogg. He’s like hip hop monosodium glutamate for me. And you can tell he’s total beta version Screwed music, because he actually repeats his lines himself, ignoring normal two lines in a row rhyme method sometimes to just repeat things twice then move onto a different rhyme scheme. This is someone who listened to far too many Screwtapes, where Screw would dicker with repeating some vainglorious Too Short or Big Mike line six or seven times in a row, doodling like Dickey Betts with a mixer. Mike Jones, along with Paul Wall, is like the best representative on CD of the Screwtape dork. Other Houston youngsters like Slim Thug and Chamillionaire have sorta moved into pop rap status (hopefully not to end up sucking as bad as Lil Flip does though; man, whatever happened to the dude who did “Sunny Dayz”?), but Mike Jones and Paul Wall are clearly dorks. But Paul Wall, probably because he’s white so myspace-generation MTV kids were at ease with accepting him as a finger-fucking fantasy, has gotten rich and fat and it almost doesn’t matter what he does now. He’s more cartoon – that funny whiteboy rapper with the platinum teeth always talking about carats – than MC to be over-analyzed by some reefersmoked white dude on a faggot-ass blog. But Mike Jones, what the fuck? I mean, like really dude... what the fuck?
MD: I’ll tell you exactly what the appeal to Mike Jones is. His music is a lot more sincere than his peers. If you listen to all his songs repeatedly (like I did when his record first came out; I’d even go as far as saying that was the best record to come out that year, whatever year that was), you begin to notice he doesn’t do a lot of things that make rappers like him horrible.
The first Mike Jones song I remember hearing was “Back Then”. As soon as I heard it, I knew it was going to be a hit. I got his CD shortly after, and I was incredibly surprised by how good it was. Despite how remedial his style is, Mike Jones has enough sense to rap about every day shit he’s familiar with. He almost exclusively raps about riding around in cars, getting rejected by women then fucking them, and doing drugs. Oh, and his grandmother. There are a couple instances where he offhandedly mentions selling drugs or a gun, but it’s never too descriptive.
Slim Thug’s CD came out a few months later and I expected that to be just as good as the Mike Jones CD. It definitely wasn’t. Dude comes out talking about being filthy rich and having all this shit, and it’s hard to relate to that when you’ve never heard of the guy. That’s what makes that type of rap music so horrible. It’s all fantasy, and not in the cute way Special Ed’s “I Got it Made” was fantasy. It’s all meant to be taken seriously and literally and it’s so fucking dumb that the only people that don’t see through it are teenagers.
You see, Mike Jones never really dives into that realm. Outside of descriptions of fancy cars, the only time Mike Jones mentions anything relatively fantastical and out of the average persons’ reach is when he mentions “Princess Cut Diamonds” which isn’t even a rich people thing. It just a style of diamond any person can buy, but it sounds fancy, kind of like when Special Ed said he had 74 Honda Scooters. Honda Scooters aren’t at all fancy, but in his realm of thought, owning that many would seem like a really cool thing to do if he was rich.
I mean, his whole gimmick is centered around being an everyday guy, to the point where he gave out his real telephone number on a record released by a major label. He’s like Southern Bling Rap’s Dusty Rhodes. Son of a plumber, rapping for the common folks out there.
Now I’m sure on this next Mike Jones record, he’ll be more about the money, since he actually has some now. So if I end up liking his new record as much as I did the last, my entire theory will be blown to shit and I will be exposed as just another everyday retard who sits in line at the corner store waiting to play the lotto, hoping to buy some princess cut diamonds someday.
14. Lil' MamaMD: First, I'd like to say I don't really like what I've heard of Lil Mama. Her "Lip Gloss" song is a lot of simulated clapping and simulated stomping and not much else, and if you listen close enough, it's really that commercial from a couple years back where the people rhythmically bounce a basketball and make a stomp song out of it. One of the Scary Movie sequels spoofed it, so maybe it was more than a couple years ago. Well, this is that song with some of that "Milkshake" song thrown in for good measure.
What I like about Lil Mama is that she's supposed to be 12 or something and if you look at her, she looks to be about 26. She's like one of those gymnast broads that only grow to be four and a half feet due to too much stretching and flipping or some shit. I am anxiously waiting for her secret to be exposed and instead of being some teeny bopper sensation, she'll be some creepy old lady who will probably end up marrying R. Kelly because it just makes sense. I've also recently heard a remix she did with her white alter-ego, Avril Lavigne, who is another little person that I think is supposed to be 14, but I truly believe she's around 32. I think my grandfather was right and all those crazy outer space microwave beams really radiated everyone and we're all fucking mutants now. Fuck me.
RM: Growth hormones injected into cows who give us dairy products, that's what's caused 13 to be the new 21. I mean, on one hand it's kinda neat because chicks grow large tits much easier nowadays, but on the other hand I always feel like the type of dude who has tiki parties and wears old fedora hats and collects true crime magazines from the '50s when I realize some girl I'm ogling is like 13 (the aforementioned description is how I stereotype child molesters, in case you were wondering what the fuck I was talking about). It makes me wonder if in time menopause will start kicking in earlier as well so that it'll be suprising to see a woman like age 32 pregnant. At the same time, I could give a fuck less.
I am a parent of two little girls, and we homeschool, and the more I interact with the world, the more I realize how much I have in common with retarded Christian fundamentalist freaks, except for all that god bullshit. I mean, my oldest is 8 now and has friends who go to private school as well as public school, and most of the ones schooled in for-real schools already have entered some stage of slutty behavior. My daughter still plays with dolls. Were she in school, she'd only be like four years removed from being the same age as "Lip Gloss" girl, and would probably already be coming home from school doing pole dances she learned in health class and asking me if I could give her an extra five bucks because they'd be doling out herpes immunizations on Friday. What the fuck?
Mostly though, I thought this "Lip Gloss" song was stupid as fuck, yet something about it intrigued me. Then Mike mentioned "Milkshake" and I realized this is basically the pedophile version of that Kelis song. I really dug that song because it was a euphemism for big titties in my mouth. This song, however, is a euphemism for a little girl's lips on my dick. I know this is the internet and chances are most of you degenerate graphic novel shut-ins reading this probably are down with that, but I'm not.
15. Retarded is the New GeniusRM: I got a hold of one of this week’s five Lil Wayne mixtapes, and I know he’s got the internet goin’ nutz, but I just don’t understand it. I mean, I see what he’s doing, and it’s not like a shitty Mims track, that’s for sure. But for everybody to be hyping this dude as GREATEST RAPPER EVER! (at least right now version), I just can’t buy into that. First of all, he’s basically the black Eminem, and I don’t mean that in an ultra-hard diss way, but just they have the same type of style: kinda weird voice, very prolific in that they seemingly do nothing but sit around and write rhymes, but a good 95% of their rhymes are basically linguistical free writes where you repeat the same string of sounds with minor fluctuations throughout the “song”, which works to sound awesome as fuck, but never really says anything. I mean, Eminem has a lot of songs that lyrically are far better than a lot of shit out there, but it’s hard to differentiate one song of his from another. A couple of times, he’s got it together and had actual concepts that staked his lyrical meandering down to a single idea to make for a good song, but usually he’s just all over the place in amusing and entertaining ways. Lil Wayne is the same ilk, except his nonsense meandering is even more nonsensical, breaking down to single syllable clusters of shit that just doesn’t even make sense. Except I’ve heard people hyping this style up as sign of Weezy’s brilliance. Hunh?
I think what it comes down to is we’ve all confused ourselves about hipster doofuses. I mean, we can all agree that the hipster doofus was all about some Kool Keith as the greatest most-Wesley Willis-ish non-threatening black MC ever, all trippin’ out with his porn and Elvis wigs and alien autopsies and shit. And eventually the type of dude who wears an ironic trucker hat, drinks PBRs for lunch on Saturdays, and plays bass in a “retro” metal band that doesn’t have a singer nor want one thought Kool Keith was the greatest rapper alive. And the pop culture mentality is that this type of guy is the hipster doofus; except he’s not. The real hipster doofus is contrarian and feels blessed for staying ahead of the curve always, and that fake metalhead thrift store t-shirt dude didn’t understand real rap, with his Mastodon bullshit. So the hipster doofus started getting into retarded rap that had more street cred. This was when Dipset blew up, because that shit is mad retarded. Except there was no lack of nerd dudes trying to explain how Dipset was the greatest shit ever goonie goo goo no homo. This led to football players emulating Jim Jones after sacking the quarterback, and black dudes wearing a lot more purple clothes (but not pink, because even after the Cam’ron campaign, people knew that shit’s still for fags).
And then along comes Lil Wayne, who takes the Dipset lyrical model into his frame of obsessive compulsions, and tosses in a good amount of hyperactivity as well, and starts releasing a proliferation of mixtapes, almost monthly. And everyone is riding his jock like crazy, which only will further blow up his ego and greatest rapper ever complex. Which will be funny. I mean he’s already getting into Marley mode, thinking he’s this great voice, even playing his guitar onstage during shows, and he’s already passed Wyclef levels in talent, but let’s not forget how everybody thought Fugees was the greatest shit ever at one point too. And now Wyclef’s a joke.
Lil Wayne’s for-real CD, which now is not even supposed to be released until 2008, and will most likely lack any Mannie Fresh beats, is going to be the real test of his awesomeness. But I think that CD is gonna be too normal, with a slew of guest rappers of moderate immediate import, as well as a discombobulated assortment of high-priced laptop beatmakers, and with him releasing a stupid mixtape every odd-numbered day on the calendar, his actual CD is gonna have to be super-retarded, like Wesley Willis and Hasil Adkins raping Helen Keller to make twin girls, then raping both of them to make a boy and a girl, who then in-breed to make Lil Wayne’s lyrics. I don’t think he’ll be that retarded in 2008. I think he’ll be playing acoustic guitar and think it cute to feature whatever homo lite rock singer is hot at that moment. And Lil Wayne and Nicole Ritchie will be dating. And also, I bet no matter how many “haha, he referenced something obscure that only me and nineteen other people understand” lines he drops, there won’t be more than one good song on that CD.
(Of course, by dismissing all this Lil Wayne hype, I guess that makes me the ultimate hipster doofus, shaking my Banksy-designed fedora at all you stupid fucks who don’t realize that Too Short is the greatest, creating anarchy through his minimalism. Too bad he’s not still with Ant Banks though.)
JD: It is funny reading what Raven said because for all intents and purposes, I was that guy. I remember getting into Kool Keith before hip hop was nerded out over the internet and my friends were all playing bongos in the woods, smoking bowls listening to Rusted Root, just wanting to spew about Dr. Octagon and Dr. Doom. After 1996 or so when the NYC rush died down, the path of the retarded seemed to be the only path that was out there because there was nothing to grasp a hold of. I would find all this stupid, obscure stuff like King Jus and just be drooling over the CD listening to "HASSAN CHOP" over and over again thinking I was the only one who was down with this. It seemed the dumber shit was, the better it was. If I was knee deep in internet bullshit back then, like I am now, I would be all over message boards bragging about how I have the new Big Noyd album and how dope it is. Not dope because the CD was actually good, but dope because I thought I was on some shit that no one else was on. I do not think that part of me has gone yet though. I think I am at a point where I realize what is retarded, but I am still the first dude in the Clubhouse telling Raven, Mike, Keenon, and everyone else to DL this dope album. So maybe that shit never left my bones? Maybe I have become the ultimate “hipster doofus”? At age 32 being a hip hop fan, I think that is one of the few avenues you can travel. At this age, you are either a hip hop artist, think you are, listen to shit on the radio because you were always a trained monkey who did that shit, or you are like me. You have this love/hate for hip hop and you are just grasping at straws to try to get other people to like what you only sort of like. But I don’t fucking care. Fuck Lil Wayne and the brainless plebes who go around jocking him. I will continue to listen to Clutchy Hopkins while driving my family sedan with the music cranked up real loud so I can be cool in an ironic way.
16. Nabo Rawk - Mount Olympus Steeze CDMD: Nabo Rawk was the rapper for the hardly remembered rap group Porn Theatre Ushers. I’m sure some people remember them, since they were around all of four years ago, but they never blew up or anything, always floating around in the serious rap underground where you have to be a stereotypical underground rap asshole who goes to scribble jam every year and buys Dunks and Graffiti magazines just because that’s what underground rap folks do. I’m not saying I’m one of those people, but no normal people ever remember them, and it’s a fucking shame man. I thought they were really awesome.
This new Nabo Rawk CD is pretty good. I mean it’s not going to give you a hard-on or anything, but it’s refreshing to hear a dude cut a record and just rap. There are no pretensions or gimmicks. Just some dude rapping over dusty, weird sounding beats. PTU had some great beats, and the dude handling Nabo’s solo stuff is doing a good job of keeping the same kind of sound alive, but at the same time he’s dabbling into fellow Boston native Edan’s bag of tricks and throwing in some off the wall shit here and there. Edan’s on here too, and I wish Edan and Nabo would get together and make a CD, since I am a fan of Nabo’s rapping, and Edan’s beats are amazing. If he was a better rapper, his Beauty and The Beat CD would have probably made it onto my Best Rap Records of the Decade shortlist. I’m still waiting for a new Edan CD to drop, but this Nabo CD made a good appetizer. I don’t know much about Boston underground rap, but if it all sounds like something in between Porn Theatre Ushers and Edan, I need to do some digging in that area. Oh yeah, Nabo also sounds like the main character from A Bronx Tale, expect with a Bahstuhn accent instead of a New Yawk one. All in all, you should peep this CD if you’re into stuff and junk.
RM: I slept on Mike's Joell Ortiz recommendation a month or so back, and have been digging on that shit lately, so I took his stupid obscure suggestions seriously this month and actually took the time to allow my internet welfare dial-up connection the nineteen hours to steal a copy of this. I'd say it was most definitely worth it. I'm not gonna be some hipster rap blog fag and be like "This is THE shit you need to hear!" since nobody's heard it and it makes me look like Mr. Homo-Genius, but it's pretty good. The beats are fucking awesome as fuck, and it's good to hear that old raw grimy sound as opposed to all the blip-bloop shit that's popular not just in southern rap but in all that Kanye West style beats and Neptunes beats and pretty much everywhere. Fucking robots. And Nabo Rawk is good on this CD, without resorting to 37 guest appearances and shit. I mean, no one's gonna mistake him for the new Rakim or anything, but there's a certain feel-good Intoxicated Demons style feel to it all, which is good. Everybody nowadays plays big thug, corporate boss of cocaine empires in imaginary neighborhoods and shit, and it's nice to just hear some nice simple low level gully shit, because there are far more dudes you know who have bad tattoos and get involved in various stupid misdemeanors and the occasional felony because they're just local legend good-timing delinquents. Everybody needs a guy like that around so when you feel like going out and getting into some stupid shit, you've already got a boy tapped into that pulse.
17. Organic Wholesomeness of Hip HopRM: Organic is such a faggy word, conjuring up images of furry-browed Zen Buddhist college professors picking through organic fruit, so that's not what I'm really trying to say. I mean organic more in the shit that just happens naturally type way. Wild would be a better term, but when you say wild, people tend to think of ignorant shit like dudes who shoot each other or women who get drunk and show their tits to strangers. So since most of you think ignorant shit is wild, I have to use the really gay word organic in place of wild, to talk about hip hop, which is happening wild all over.
Hip hop is probably at one of its low watermarks commercially, with a lot of the shit labels are putting their brand names behind big ole' slabs of crap more than two-thirds of the time. But dig beneath the surface (and I don't mean internerd underground indie rap) and you'll find homegrown hip hop is everywhere. Every fuckin' where. If you go in a record store with a large section of vinyl and there's more than three dudes digging through that shit, I guarantee you one of them makes beats. If you go to a party and there's more than seventeen dudes under the age of 35, I guarantee you that you can get a freestyle circle going. And any cluster of apartment buildings you pass, there's rappers in there, making homemade CDs.
I went to this record store on Richmond's southside the other weekend - BK Music - and it was a great experience. First of all, they have all these used CDs marked down to like two bucks that they figure nobody will ever buy, and I guess some west coast rap nerd must've just got addicted to heroin or something, because I got a ton of shit like Mykah 9 and Project Blowed and all sorts of other nerd shit like that for hella cheap. And I love this shit sometimes. It's like Ornette Coleman for me, in that I can't exactly rock it every day, but there are moments where that crazy Mykah 9 linguistical "dibbydibbydibbydibbydibby atical" style is about the most perfect shit ever.
Also though, BK Music had a local artist section with at least 30 CD release, of varying quality (slimline cases and no cover all the way to actual full cases and shrinkwrapped) with dudes being intelligent or prophetic or gangsta or fresh-dipped or whatever. All these obscure nobodies, just in Richmond, making music. I'm sure a lot of it is derivative, but fuck, this is 2007 with the info superhighway plowing through everybody's fucking airspace constantly anyways, so pretty much everything on earth is derivative of something else if you only go by it already existing.
The point is there's all this music for consumption to cover every mood, and I can get into a lot of different stupid shit... I think the other day my CD order in the truck on a long ride was the aforementioned Mykah 9, then a Lil Boosie mixtape, and then Hip Hop Lives, which probably led to me just listening to some old school NYC instead. And beyond that, there's a million dudes making music, and a lot of it will never get heard by hardly anybody. Hell, I do this. But the point is, it's a music form that's still there for people to take part in, still there for anybody who thinks he can put words together to put them together, or for anybody who thinks his folks had the best record collection to siphon off them great snippets to collage together into something new.
I like this. We are far removed from the days where some dipshit with a guitar can sit around a bonfire and entertain you. I bet there's an awesome MC or beatmaker within five miles of anyone reading this, that you'll never hear. Hopefully all that shit will ferment and congeal and eventually commercial hip hop won't be so shitty, but even if it doesn't, it's nice to know the music hasn't been completely taken away from the everyday person. Like kids don't grow up thinking they have to pay some ponytailed black dude with a hemp necklace for rhyming lessons in the back space of some strip mall yet, but I'd bet we're not more than twenty years away from that. So regardless of how shitty the hip hop you can purchase (meaning steal) is right now, remember that when you go to a show, all those dudes clustered up by the bathroom are freestyling. Or go to whatever beauty supply shop in the bad part of your local city also sells mixtapes and "water pipes" and buy up whatever mixes are done by local DJs, because although it'll have a bunch of the same crap you always hear on the radio, it'll probably have a few of his boys getting down at the end of it or in the middle somewhere. And shit, there's always dudes outside of shows handing out their CDs or trying to sell them for two bucks. All of these things can really really really suck when they suck, but at the same time, it means the music still belongs to us regular dumbfucks.
JD: The picture Raven paints is really good, but let me take you to the flipside of it. I live in the middle of nowhere. I live in that county where people who live in the city make fun of. So I don’t think if you went to a party, you would find people who could freestyle, or there is hip hop or beat-makers in the apartment complex. I am a good hour from the “city” so I am very disconnected with that grass roots shit of finding mix CDs or local artists in the record bin. But I do feel what Raven is saying. In my case I find hip hop around me because I am the one supplying it. I go for runs at the local state park and luckily have an iPod, so I can put in a Cunninlyngiusts album and just vibe out to the mixture of the southern underground music and the trees and birds and shit. I know that sounded mad fag, but that is organic to me. The feeling I get to match how I am feeling and where I am to what I want to listen to is fucking organic. I like to put on Kool Keith while driving to the post office just to freak out the old dude, who sits in front of the post office all day, and it was never a pre-conceived thing; it is just what came over me. I think it is also the same way when you walk around all day and a verse just pops in your head. I have days when my brain is like a jukebox with lines, verses, and whole songs just flashing through my brain in a hip hop flashback of the past 20-some years. I think that organic nature of hip hop really comes from inside of you. You are drawn to it, you pick it out over a loud jumble of music while driving through the “city”, and you hum it in your head all day. It is a beautiful thing my friends. No homo.
18. Rihanna & Jay-Z - Umbrella songMD: Remember all those Beyonce songs with Jay-Z? Well this is one of them except without Beyonce and a younger broad takes her place. What sets this apart from all of those songs (besides the fact Beyonce isn't in the song) is that I'd always hear people complain about how they were sick to death of whatever Beyonce/Jay-Z song was popular that month. They secretly liked the song though, and knew all the words just like everyone else. Despite how morally offensive those songs personally were to you, they were all pretty much catchy as fuck. Now "Umbrella" is really missing that catchiness factor, so it really is an awful song that is getting way overplayed. Plus Jay-Z is very noticably older than the Rihanna chick in the video. So much so, it looks like Jay-Z is her dad and Chris Hanson is about to pop out of the rain any second and ask Jay-Z if he brought condoms with him, and show the viewers the chat logs between Jay-Z and Rihanna. Then Jay-Z will say he just came to visit a friend and he wasn't going to do nothing, except warn Rihanna about child predators and how they're bad, but his raging boner would be telling a different story. Fuck child predators like Jay-Z. Who does he think he is? R. Kelly?
RM: I haven't consciously heard this song, which means I've probably heard it a million times but never registered. However, I did pick up a mixtape at the bootleg spot the other day that had the "Rehab" remix featuring Jay-Z. Now I've never been much of a Jay-Z fan, finding him to be more self-hype and borrowed styles than the freshest shit on the set, but even with that personal bias, I felt sad for him hearing the Amy Winehouse song. I mean, the Ghostface remixes to her other song actually add something to it, and Ghost writes something that has to do with the song itself as it stands. Jay-Z seemed to think that pretending he was in rehab for awesome music addiction was all the clever he needed to be. And beyond that, his pop culture references have gotten worse and worse. I mean, that "Girls, Girls, Girls" song or whatever where he mentioned Deuce Bigalow a few years back was the first blip I noticed on that front. I mean, I'm a white dude who at least grew up around some black people, but I would imagine even the most whitey of white dudes from Iowa who's only seen black dudes when watching college basketball games would know that referencing a shitty Rob Schneider movie in a rhyme is a wack-ass move. Nowadays, it seems Jay-Z is referring to shitty TV shows and movies, and I guess that's success. He's not on the block anymore, he's in the cul-de-sac sitting on his leather recliner with the embedded remote control watching The Sopranos on Tivo. And I'm not one to say someone sold out by becoming successful, because that's all of our dream, to be paid beyond imagination for what we love to do. But you have to try to hold onto passion and not just be sitting there mailing it in. That's what separates artists from shysters.
It sucks because I've come to really enjoy that Amy Winehouse CD, and the Ghostface remixes are pretty great as well, and there's like 7000 emcees who could've done something halfway worthwhile with the rehab song, but instead Mr. CEO Jay-Z takes the glamour spot and misses a breakaway slam dunk attempt. He's really out of touch, not with hip hop, but with his own passion. He's just a shitty dude who makes money now selling people useless shit they don't really need like a hundred thousand other soulless executives on this earth.
19. DJ KhaledRM: Keenon nominated this shit, but he always disappears off to mulatto jail this time of the month when we tell ourselves we're supposed to write this shit. He says he just has to work like 80 hours a week, which I guess is mulatto jail, because a straight up whiteboy like myself, shit, I work like 25 hours a week and even if I don't get paid quite right to take care of all my bills and shit, I can get credit. So I guess while Keenon is spinning CDs like new-fangled DJs do, probably that goddamned "So Crispy" song that's already annoyed the fuck out of me, for fratboys who sculpt those crewcut length beards into geometric bullshit, I guess I'll have to start this goddamned blurb.
I almost bought this the other day. I got like three or four of the songs on a mixtape, and they were uneventful but didn't annoy me. I mean, I guess that "Brown Paper Bag" song isn't THAT bad, even though it's your standard "let's jock Young Jeezy's popularity" track. And I was at the bootleg spot and you can get three bootlegs for ten bucks (four if that one chubby chick with the retarded gap-tooth smile is working, she don't get many whiteboys flirting with her, or so she said), and I had two but just couldn't find a third. I looked at the Khaled bootleg like two or three times, thinking about getting it, but just couldn't. First off, he's a DJ, but not even like a super world scratch transforming style DJ, but more of a Clear Channel "THE (insert city name)'S HOME OF HIP HOP AND R AND B! - now with Steve Harvey every morning and the home of 48 commercial free songs in a row so long as you ignore the fact we actually play commercials" type DJ. So he makes some very reactionary to popular trends beats on his protools equipped laptop, hires a bunch of flavor of the month MCs to drop scrap verses and someone comes up with a rhythmic hook and throw it at the radio and hope it sticks, depending on how sticky the promotional payola is. So I didn't even get the DJ Khaled, even though I knew I should listen to it so I could make a more educated reaction to Keenon's jocking of this. Instead, for my third bootleg/mixtape, I think I got a Father Bentley's Bounty Killa megamix. I am a white guy with dreadlocks, so it's sorta important that I ride around in my work truck bumping ragga music until the tweeters fizzle so that I can look like a complete chump ass to random onlookers from time to time.
The one thing I can say for DJ Khaled is he's done good for himself in hip hop considering he's an Al-Qaeda. That's sort of the greatest thing about hip hop - how anyone can be accepted, and it's not so much because hip hop is this magnaminous open-minded culture so much as the fact that Puerto Ricans having a long-time stake in it makes it so that pretty much anybody can get a crewcut and wear a New Era hat slightly off kilter, and with the right facial hair, you could be Puerto Rican. Like Dru Ha, the white dude who was go-between for Boot Camp and the Zionist overlords of the music industry, said in his token verse on Enta Da Stage's posse cut "Who Got Da Props", "I always get the pussy 'cause I tell them that I'm spanish." I think that's great, because it's 2007, and the way we judge people shouldn't be by their ethnic heritage or cultural background so much as how fly a baseball hat they rock or if they got those new Air Force 25s in a rare color. Know what I'm saying?
MD: Yeah, working 80 hours is bullshit. I’m lucky if I get 37 in by the end of the work week. Anything more than that and I’d have to take naps like Dagwood Bumstead, all eating sandwiches made out of full honey glazed hams and doughnuts and shit.
Anyway, there’s no way I’d ever voluntarily listen to the DJ Khaled CD, if he even has a CD. I know he has this one video I’ve seen on BET around 700 times. It features a bunch of rappers who are kind of popular right now, and I couldn’t tell you much else. I have this habit of completely zoning out when something comes on the TV that I don’t like. It’s why I can watch seven hours of commercials without noticing. See, when something comes on TV that I don’t approve of, my mind goes into fantasy mode and I start imagining things that aren’t actually going on. It’s probably from doing a good amount of hallucinogens over the years. One time I had a real acid flashback during work, and I don’t know why people bug out over those, because it was pretty fucking awesome if you ask me, but I digress.
So yeah, this is how DJ Khaled’s video for some song I don’t know the name of looks in my head when it comes on BET:
- Song starts with Akon singing under a highway underpass.
- Scene cuts to a bunch of men jerking off in a circle with another naked man in the middle, bukkake style. At some points, he is helping the other men by jerking them off and spitting on their dicks.
- Scene cuts to Fat Joe rapping on a speedboat while wearing a Mexican rug as a shirt.
- Scene cuts back to the circle jerk scene, except now they are vomiting all over the man in the middle and he is loving every minute of it, rubbing the vomit into the generous amount of chest hair covering his torso, like the vomit was pumpkin scented shower gel purchased from Bath & Bodyworks, on sale.
- Lil Wayne is in a church rapping about how he is in love with some dude who pretends to be his father, except that is some kind of gay dom/sub shit I do not understand because I’m not gay.
- Video ends with all the circle jerk men lying around in vomit and cum twirling their fingers through each others hair with big Kool-Aid grins. Some are even smoking cigarettes.
Speaking of gay porn, has anyone seen a gay porn? Not ones where it’s just gay dudes fucking. I mean, do they make gay porns with storylines? I always imagine its two gay dudes going shopping and then one gay dude is like “Jesthus chritht, you look tho fucking hot in that top” and then they start fucking. If someone could confirm this for me (don’t worry, I wont tell on you), it would solve a long going mystery for me. Thanks.
KM: Motherfucker, I work what I do because I have to pay child support on my seven kids. I pulled a George Foreman with seven women and now I have a bunch of runts with names like sequels that will some day make me a fuckton of money when they go pro. Keenon 2, Keenon 3 and Keenon 6 are going first round in the 2018 NBA Draft, don't sleep. Keenonita may not go to the NBA, but that lil girl is gonna do something big. Hopefully not Kimbo Slice. Seriously, I don't have any fucking kids so don't go trying to run my name through a child support database. Or do, and come up empty-handed.
Anyway, back to the real issue at hand. I don't really have strong feelings about DJ Khaled, but he's popped off with two songs I've heard in the last year or so that I thought were pretty good summerjam radio singles. If Ozone Magazine is to be believed, there is a tangible MIA movement and DJ Khaled's kinda like the Mr. Hooper of South Beach Sesame Street. Well, maybe not because Luther Campbell would be more like Mr. Hooper what with being there in the beginning and then dying (or falling off the map). Or maybe Disco Rick. Anyway, if you stretch the analogy thinner, you wind up with Akon playing Elmo and Lil Wayne as Big Bird with his made-up imaginary friend Baby/Snuffalupagus. See, you thought I was gonna go the easy route with the Birdman but fuck no. Maybe they'd be better as Bert & Ernie? Fat Joe, may be the Count but I have a hard time caring about anything Fat Joe ever does. You're Puerto Rican, stop talking about nigga this and nigga that, you fat piece of shit. Just because you had some black up in you doesn't mean you're black. TI can be Kermit. Rick Ross is like the Cookie Monster or something.
What was the point of all this? Yeah, "We Takin' Over" is a good summer song that I'm gonna wind up mixing with other shit that hovers around 115 bpm and it will sound cool to me and ten other people. I didn't have the LSD homoerotic visual extravaganza when I watched, it just looked like someone had spliced a bunch of Biggie videos together. And Rick Ross looked really goddamn stupid.
20. Graffiti Spray PaintRM: I’ve seen ads in some of the artfag magazines I get for graffiti paint, like cans of spray paint especially designed for your budding little graffiti artist. And I understand that hardcore graff dudes have sometimes taken to mixing up their own mixes of paint, to get that deep soaked in look that’s near impossible to pressure wash off a porous surface. But still, this strikes me as weird, being one of the main points of pride for a graff artist was his ability (or someone he was down with) to steal as much paint as needed for his creative vandalism purposes.
I guess that graffiti art aka street art aka the shit hip urban galleries are all ga-ga over once again has become mainstream enough and in the background of enough sneaker ads and hip hop videos that there are impressionable kids lost and trying to find an identity (making them a target demographic for consumerist urges) who are all like, “Hey, I think I’m gonna go do a piece behind the Big Lots! It’s gonna be awesome!” And the thrill of it probably catches some of these kids, to do a forbidden art form, and I’m sure some of these kids come from comfortable means, at least enough to make something stupid like specifically for graffiti paint to be manufactured. Then again, they’re probably not even kids and it’s college age dudes in art school buying this shit up. I don’t know. But the whole idea of trying to make money off a can of spray paint meant for doing graffiti seems like a bad business move to me. Then again, I guess you can’t buy this fancy shit in Home Depot or Ma & Pa’s True Value neither. So it’s probably locked behind some glass case where you have to use a Visa card just to look at it anyways, and the labeling is probably half the allure.
MD: If you think that’s bad, you’ve apparently never seen the magazine exclusively dedicated to stencil art. I’ve only seen one issue, but it came with pre-made stencils and everything. I don’t know if any self-respecting graf artist still does stencil art (besides Banksy, who designed a fedora for Raven) or if it’s reverted back to strictly a hippie activist thing, but I bet that magazine already tanked and it’s why I’ve never seen another issue.
I often wonder why things like ads for spray paint pop up. The same thing goes for stuff like sneakers magazines and magazines dedicated to Japanese Lego dolls that cost $200. That’s where my east coast bias (or ignorance) kicks in. I always forget places like Nebraska exist. All this shit, including the ads for spray paint exists for kids in Nebraska. They have no major city they can easily travel to so they have to live vicariously through print and the internet if they want to be hip.
It’s the same thing with music. Hip hop still hasn’t been too affected by people in the midwest, except for maybe Minnesota, and I don’t even know if that’s in the midwest because I suck at geography. Either way, if you listen to indie rock or even metal, there will always be a decent amount of great bands around major cities, but once every couple of years or so, some band will pop up from Bumfuck Shitsville, Iowa, and they will be completely amazing. People in areas like that have nothing but time to co-opt and perfect anything they get into. I’m sure there is some dork in Nebraska right now doing amazing graffiti on the inside of his Dad’s barn (do they have barns in Nebraska?) using spray paint he saw an ad for in a dork magazine and no one will ever see it because it’s inside of a barn in a state people dread even driving through. That’s how life works and I hate every second of it.
21. Return of Keith MurrayRM: I like that new Keith Murray song that's been inside the airwaves picked up on my metallic music transmittors lately, for a number of reasons. First off, I'm a sucker for any new rap song that sounds like it's actually from 1993. Secondly, it's hard not to enjoy Keith Murray. In fact, just hearing his voice made me long for Def Squad reunions. I mean, shit, Redman's record came out to no notice since Def Jam's idea of promoting shit nowadays seems to be ship it to stores and hope it doesn't get shipped back; and I had readed somewhere that Red's Red Gone Wild was actually done like the middle of last year, but camelface CEOs shelved it to push out that second Ghostface album right before the end of the year last year, hoping to capitalize on Ghost's critical successes of Fish Scale. So the shit wasn't even fresh for Redman.
Redman and Keith Murray just have that good-natured vibe to both of them, and in these times where apparently every black dude is selling kilos of cocaine even though there's not physically enough humans on the planet to support that much slanging, some good-natured lyrical bandying about would be much welcomed. And what the fuck is Erick Sermon doing anyways? I think he tried to kill himself by falling out a window (seriously) and I also heard he was actually the infamous gay rapper (allegedly), but I know he can dust off a couple more Roger Zapp samples to make a record.
You know, what the fuck happened to crews anyways? Everything's freelance and outsourced now, where you hire MCs to appear on tracks and have four or five producers per album. What happened to crews where the shit was all in-house and you saved up your best shit to make other crews look second rate? It was like being a sports team and you brought your best shit for actual releases, as opposed to now where anybody can hire anybody to make something flavor of the moment. Get Polow tha Don to make a beat, ship the protools files around online to get verses from Lil Wayne, Bun B, Jim Jones, and Andre 3000, throw your rapper on the end - and you win. It'd be like if every player in the NFL could just get hired to play for any team, from week to week. So you'd wake up and not be like, "Oh shit, my boys the Redskins are playing today! We're gonna fuck some shit up!" but you'd have to look in the paper and see who was playing on your team and the other team. "Fuck, the Cowboys got Ladainlian Tomlinson and Tom Brady this week. Why the fuck are we hiring Daunte Culpepper and Randy Moss again? We ain't ever gonna win with this shit." Crews built their shit up to make their mark. Nothing is like that nowadays, although I guess with the Kanye/Lupe/Pharrell menage-a-trois, the notion of SUPERGROUPS will start to come to the rapping musics, but that's gonna be some stupid shit. Slapping, for examples, Young Jeezy, Lil Wayne, and Slim Thug into a studio with Mannie Fresh for a one-time group effort is never gonna be like The Juice Crew or Wu-Tang. Come to think of it, that's probably why so many people have jocked Dipset in recent years, because that's about as close to an actual crew rap has seen in a long time.
So yeah, Keith Murray... that dude is all right.
JD: It is funny today I was bouncing all through my head about him and writing this blurb. See, I am in the midst of academia right now. Oddly enough after reading my Benoit blurb, I am in school to become a teacher and alot of shit that I do write is really technical, and this is my time to be free-form and non-restricted. But outside of that unnecessary look into my personal life, I did want to write about Keith Murray. Back in the day he always seemed like that dude who could never put it all together. The "Most Beautifullest Thing" joint was really dope and it hooked you into his vocal style and he was very much from the old school, and he ran with the Def Squad crew that as a teenager blew my mind. Although I am not the biggest EPMD fan, I dug Sermon's beats, you have to have Fragile X to not dig Redman, and Keith was like the little brother to both of their styles. But his first solo album was poop. Fifteen something years later I really have no faith in this album being more than poop. Sermon has dissapeared under a rock, Red seems to be preoccupied with his Gilla House Crew, and that left Keith with no one to latch on to. It is true that the crew is something that has been missing in hip-hop, but Def Squad is not that crew to bring that shit back to light.
22. UGK & Outkast - International Players Anthem songRM: Man, there’s been a ton of UGK shit I’ve been digging lately, but mostly just them guest shotting on other songs. This “International Players Anthem” is listed as their song, with Outkast making an appearance as a pair. You could think of it as a passing of the torch to the next great southern rap duo, but listening to the song, there’s no passing going on.
I’ll say from the get-go that UGK has got me geeked ever since Pimp C finally got free. Bun B has been my favorite rapper ever since I heard “Draped Up” on an OG Ron C Texas Money Boyz mixtape a couple summers back. But on this song, even with UGK being as good as they are, they are simply out-worked, out-classed, and shown up by Outkast. Dre is on fire in a weird staggered way like he’s been the past six months, and Big Boi seems to be getting into a zone with him in this zone. It’s got me way more geeked for another Outkast album than I ever thought I would be again in my life. I mean, that Speakerboxxx/Love Below album was a big fat piece of shit, fuck what anybody else says. And what little I heard of Idlewild, combined with the wack-ass premise and posters for that shit, was also pretty shitty. It’d be hard to ever convince me that any other group at the point in their career Outkast was at would be able to make a dramatic turn from pop-marketed crap to an actual awesome ass album, but I think I’m convinced. The real key is gonna be production. If they stick with Organized Noize and the beats are mailed in, then it won’t be that great. Nor will it work if it’s like seventeen hired gun hitmakers of the moment, with no cohesion. But if they can get into it with maybe two or three producers, who sort of lock into a unified groove, kinda like what Ghostface had happen on the Fish Scales CD, that shit might be a turn back to an actual great rap duo instead of just the shitty group that music critics spill menstrual blood all over each other to jock with long-winded explanations of how ahead of everybody else Outkast is.
MD: I just listened to this song/watched the video for the first time five minutes ago, but I’ve heard essentially the same beat used in an old Project Pat song that Three 6 Mafia hooked up several years back a few hundred times, so I’m more than qualified to speak on this.
Raven is right, Outkast is on fire here, and they make Pimp C sound like total shit. I think Bun holds his own, but they need to delete the Pimp C verse completely and add one of the Project Pat verses from his version of the song instead.
I also like how they don’t let the skittish drum pattern kick in until after Andre’s verse is over, but again, the Pimp C verse follows and it’s quite a let down. I’m going to cut this short because I feel like all I do with my time is fucking write about UGK and I don’t even like them all that much. Hopefully they won’t make as many songs next month so I can move on to writing about Lil Wayne or Papoose or some other gay shit.
KM: Wow, there's a lot of UGK on this. Out of the three songs this month, I dig the fuck out of this one a lot more than the others. Somewhere I read an interview with Three 6 where they mentioned in passing that they hooked up with Willie Hutch and I wanna say they did some shit together but I don't know where that would be. It's possible I'm misremembering shit too, but the idea of Willie Hutch singing for-real along with Paul and J is tremendous, so if it's true then I would presume Mike Dikk could tell me about it. I may be the UGK fanboy, but Mike is like the Hypnotize Minds' unofficial biographer or something. Given how much of the internet rapdom is devoted to stupid shit like Dipset or G-Unit, I can get down with the idea of a white guy from Bridgeport, CT throwing large chunks of his attention at some Memphis horrorcore tear-the-club-up shit.
Outkast and UGK did another song before, back when all four of them were younger and in some ways better (and more alike, yup). The beat on that one's more Stankonia than Dirty Souf, but fast forward to "International Players Anthem" and the foursome is... different. I read this article about how creative genius tends to track two ways - early or late in life. It makes sense when you look at Outkast, especially Andre 3000. They put out that brilliant shit out the gate and then started going downhill a little every time. I don't personally share either common stance on Outkast - I don't think they're the second coming of christ, but I don't think everything post-ATLiens is horrid shit either. There are gems all over. UGK is kind of an even split. Early Bun B is passable, but he didn't really hit his stride until later. Right now, he's a mic burner and would show 1992 Bun up without breaking a sweat. I am torn when it comes to Pimp C. I love that dude. He's just unapologetically himself and sometimes it comes off really badly but it's still genuine. Pimp was more of an early bloomer in a lot of ways. I cut him more slack because he's still got a good musical mind and he gives hilarious interviews.
The remix for this song has Three 6 doing a couple verses, I don't think it would be too hard to slide Project Pat in somewhere either. Andre's rambly marriage thing is awesome and on the "official" single his is first up so you're hearing this rambly marriage shit with no beat for like a minute. It's something that's appealing and also initially useless because nobody's going to want that almost-dead air at a club or whatever. Not until it gets played all the time, anyway. I'm really on a bad comparison tip, but you know what? This is kinda like those crossover things. "International Players Anthem" is like a rap version of the Jetsons meet the Flinstones. You have Bun and Big Boi, who are like the chill backbones of their respective duos and then Dre and Pimp do their own odd (but endearing) thing. Part of me is convinced the only reason people are wigging out over Andre's thing is A) he's on an actual rap song with people of or around his calibre and B) he's approaching a rap verse on said same song. They probably just let him go buckwild on the beatless part because it wouldn't have worked with bass and drums. It's still pretty sweet.
MD: In the beginning of the Project Pat song that uses the same beat (uncreatively titled "Choose U"), Willie Hutch does a little intro saying something like "Hi, this is Willie Hutch and I'm about to get down with Three 6 Mafia" and then the song begins, but instead of going straight into the "I choose Yoouuuu" chorus like the UGK version does, they sample some horn chops from "I Choose You" THEN go into the sample.
I am aware of the interview Keenon is talking about. I'm pretty certain it was from XXL, but I could be wrong. In the interview, they state they got Willie's blessing to use his music right before the release of "The Most Known Unknown" (and right before Willie died). Three 6 have been some Willie Hutch sampling motherfuckers for a while, and Project Pat's "Choose U" song with the Willie Hutch intro predates that record by 3 years, so I think Three 6 might have ingested a bit too much codeine and got their dates mixed up. I just wanted to clear all that up, being HCP's unofficial biographer and all.
23. Haji SpringerRM: So I've not really been able to discern personally whether HYPHY is actually something worth a shit or a goofy name put onto a bunch of half-assed music that's made to seem awesome because people act retarded with their vehicles. I've tried to give it a chance a number of times, because I find it hard to believe that a form of music based on semi-hallucinogenic drugs would not speak to me, at least on some level. But hyphy never has. I mean, thizz is a funny word, and Mac Dre seems like a nice enough guy, at least judging from the first fourteen pages of ads in Murder Dog magazine, but I guess E-40 is the great torchbearer of hyphy music, and for the most part E-40 has sounded to me like a dude somehow able to rhyme sounds while having an epileptic stroke. There is a record store in Richmond that has a $2 and less bin for CDs, and apparently there's weird west coast nerd rap fan collectors who came to Richmond to get addicted to heroin, because you can find a ton of good shit in there for like a dollar apiece. I got a couple of The Federation CDs that way (including the one with the "Hyphy" song featuring the aforementioned epileptic rapper E-fizzle fo thizzle sick wid it), and it was good shit. I mean I enjoyed it enough to not stick it under the passenger seat, so it still sits in the rotation on top of the passenger seat, until the stack gets too tall and I hit a hard left curve and some of the CDs slide against the door and then up under the seat, meaning I never dig them out unless I think, "Oh shit, I should listen to that The Federation CD!" and look for it.
Anyways, the way it's been explained to me, hyphy means getting retarded and crazy, except it's always the same donuts in a car or the same shaking of short black dude stylized dreadlocks or the same wearing of giant alien eyeball sunglasses (man, if you could get some of those giant novelty sunglasses from amusement parks in 1982, you could make a killing in Oakland), but always the same shit. And none of that same shit ever comes across as that awesome. Like Mistah Fab, who's supposed to be one of the dudes who's gonna straight blow-up hyphy all over the world. Except he sucks.
Well, I poke around at the Nation of Thizzlam blog (which I think is run by Norwegians who live in Tijuana), to try and keep my mind open on this so-called hyphy movement, and there was a link to some shit by a dude called Haji Springer who has a new album out called The Hyphy Indian Rapper Stackin' Rupees. He is a towelhead rapper - not a simple towelhead like Middle Eastern, but intricate towel wrapping technique preferably with the glowing jewel like Johnny Quest's boy kicked it. And this song I downloaded, called "Haji Inferno", is no great song by any means. But it's the best hyphy bullshit I've heard, because it's retarded and stupid and makes me feel good inside, despite what a shitty world it is outside. I got so fired up I decided to ghostride my whip, but I didn't really want to stand on top of my truck so I took my old Volvo stationwagon out to ghostride, and it has a flat tire, but I didn't think that would matter if I was getting retarded, and it ended up pulling too hard left when I got on top and wrecking into a pear tree. The car's no worse than it already was... I mean, if you drive a car around the yard with a flat tire, it can't be that great; but the pear tree's probably lost. We never eat the pears anyways. Mostly the tree just stands there and collects stinging bugs when the fruit is ripe, and the pears fall on the ground, and then we have a cookout and all the kids end up having rotten pear wars and somebody gets hit in the eyeball and cries and then the whole "lying to your individual parents about what actually happened, thus ruining them getting high at the picnic table together discretely without you knowing" part of the evening kicks in.
MD: Does anyone remember that month last year when hyphy was supposed to take over the world? Yeah, I didn’t think so. I think DJ Shadow’s “hyphy” CD tanking beyond levels I could ever imagine was the last nail in the hyphy coffin, as far as it ever getting national recognition. I can enjoy a Mac Dre song here and there, but he’s dead now, and he was doing that hyphy shit a long time ago and I didn’t even realize it until he was dead. I also like The Federation’s “I Wear My Stunna Glasses At Night” because I am a big fan of Corey Hart’s “Sunglasses at Night” song, but outside of that, I’ve had my hyphy fill.
This Haji Springer song is not really a traditional hyphy song, if there is such a thing. He samples a normal disco beat. It sounds like that “Miss Broadway” song, but I could be wrong about that because a lot of disco shit sounds the same. There aren’t any wacky pops and buzzes and shit going on in the song, and it’s not 400 bpm, so I don’t see the connection between him and the rest of the hyphy stuff, outside of using the word here and there. I think it’s funny that his CD is called Hello Buddy, but he kind of reminds me of like an Indian Afro Man or something. I think Haji got on here as part of our mission to get a West Coast person on our panel of assholes, so hopefully it will work and we can all Thizz and Go Dumb together.
***Speaking of which. If you are on the west coast, and you are into thizzin and going dumb and listening to... umm... [insert come cool California Rapper Guy], and you can write worth a shit, please get a hold of me or Raven through e-mail or other internet routes.***
24. Trunk Boiz - Scraper Bike songJD: First it is pretty funny the group is called Trunk Boiz when their bikes don't have a trunk. Second, this is some really funny shit that serves to be very infectious. I have been humming the chorus all night because I haven't got shit to do. My future brother-in-law came over today and gave us his old/newer TV, and now the shit doesn't work, so I was bored after the attempted Amish Night flopped with the wife and listened to this track. For real, if I had to ride a bike instead of driving, I would try my damndest to come off as a cool motherfucker while riding it. I don't think I would write a rhyme and put a Casio keyboard beat behind it, and I probably wouldn't ghost ride it. Well... fuck it, riding a bike is for Lance Armstrong motherfuckers and kids. If you are over the age of 14 and find yourself on a bike, a song won't save you and make you look cool, even if you are riding on 24s and have an Oakland A's blanket on your bike.
RM: It got mentioned somewhere else how hyphy was this CAN'T MISS PHENOMENON that missed big-time. For me, as hyphy was explained to me by the mass media, this is what it should be about. I mean, spray painting strips of cardboard to pretend you have rims on a bicycle, that's quality ghetto fabulousness. And if hyphy is supposed to be music for crack babies, this probably fits that definition more than most anything else I've heard.
About the only thing that could make this better for me is if these dudes, even though they're 14 or whatever, were practicing reverse eugenics and trying to knock up local retarded girls so they could have a better chance at having retarded children who would grow up naturally getting dumb, and instead of those little dreads all those hyphy stereotype dudes shake, the retarded kids would have real nappy dreads like neglected children, with snot running down their nose and shit, but they would wear really nice alternate color away A's jerseys and be considered awesome. Because that's really what popular music is all about, making retarded shit seem awesome to kids who waste their parents' money so easily.
KM: Okay, so I watched this video on youtube and it made me laugh a little. I was hoping someone would ghostride a two-wheeler, which would have made them actual badasses instead of goofy fucks with too much free time. The white kids doing a parody with skateboards was pretty funny. Those bike rims look lame as fuck, almost like they're driving around shiny Big Wheel bikes. I only had one Big Wheel as a kid, a Knight Rider one. And I got that motherfucker just past the point when it was cool to have a Big Wheel (because everyone learned how to ride real bikes). My little sister had some serious fun on that thing after I stopped playing with it a month into owning it. I think some other white kids did another parody with Big Wheels, to take it back.
Around my town, there's this organization that like recruits kids at junior high and elementary schools, they show them how to build these lowrider gangsta bikes and they do shows. It's hard to explain, they're kinda like that bike Tyrese rides in Baby Boy only they look a lot cooler. I've seen some kids riding around in my own neighborhood with them, and the kids looked like little badass pimps rolling on a bike I'd have given my eye teeth for at age 10. If I saw some kids riding around on those scraper bikes, I would think they looked lame as fuck and I might roll down my window to laugh at them. What the fuck would they do? My car would crush their sparkly girl bikes. The only thing those things are missing are streamers, spokey-dokes and whatever else they saw on Pee Wee's Big Adventure. I doubt they're smart enough to put the Spy Hunter smokescreen and oil slick on it, much less the helicopter missiles. So what they're left with is some shit they'll never admit to riding the minute one of them gets a driver's license and the keys to their mama's Taurus station wagon. Well, maybe some of them will be so obsessed with the scraper biking that they'll be 30-year-old weirdos riding around Oakland on two wheels with aluminum spinners. A less dignified version of Radio Raheem.
25. The Human Beat BoxRM: I have an 8-year-old daughter, and the greatest thing about being a guy actively involved in your baby mama's children's lives is getting to teach them about all sorts of fucked up retarded shit the rest of the world woudn't see fit to impart them with. I had bought an old school mixtape that I've been bumping pretty regularly the last month or so (I never had heard that Masters of Ceremony pre-Brand Nubian Grand Puba Maxwell shit before, that crackhead song is hilarious), and me and the 8-year-old were riding around and I was bumping that bullshit in the background. Well, it came to the part of the mix where there was "Human Beat Box" and "Stick 'Em" by The Fat Boys. So I hit pause and explained to the kid about beat boxing and who the Human Beat Box was and all that shit, because we get so hung up on our instant message hyper-real world wide massive overload of information and shit, that it's pretty easy to forget there was a time on this earth where a dude rhythmically spitting into his cupped hands was considered some dope shit. She was into it and her wide-eyed childhood enthusiasm made me feel good to my heart. She asked me if I could beat box and I said no, not real good. This led to me telling her about my boy Boxhead who was good as shit at beat boxing, but oddly enough got his nickname not from beat boxing but from his penchant for taking LSD and walking around the streets of Richmond freestyling to whoever was within earshot while wearing a cardboard box with eyeholes cut out on his head. I didn't tell her all that crazy LSD wearing the box shit because she's only 8; her head's gonna twisted up fast enough, especially sharing a roof with me.
You know, I watched some of that American Idol this past year because my wife watches that shit, getting tricked by the shitty people episodes into investing her time into the whole affair, and I'm too lazy to get out the chair sometimes, even though I have to admit I was hoping for that Sanjaya dude to be elected the new dude nobody remembers next year. But they had that one faggot white dude with the sperm-spiked hair who would do some shitty beat boxing in the middle of whatever showtunes they had him singing each week, and this was supposed to a sign of his creative genius and ability to do shit his own way. And when those creepy judges would tell him this, he'd be standing there with his little cocksucker grin, and they'd flash to shots of his folks in the audience, and even his dad looked like he might munch a dick now and then in the handicap stall down at the Oddfellows Hall, and it made me sad. It made me sad because of this kid in school back in the day named Jerome.
Now dig it, Jerome was a fucked kid. He was a black kid in the public school I grew up in, which back in the '60s just shut down for five years rather than desegregate. So black kids were doomed pretty much unless they really rose to the top. But Jerome was a nerd, and not a blessed "my pops teaches African Studies at the local college" type of black kid nerd, but a straight up shitty part of town nobody smiling black kid nerd. Now, usually a nerd of more affluence in life gets his nerddom nurtured, so he gets good at dumb shit like chess or acting like renaissance fuckers or something, and then the nerd can go on to have a highly successful life on the fringes of regular society, sometimes so successful at a later age he can crossover to being a normal alright guy or girl, not even a nerd anymore. But Jerome didn't have that, so he was doomed to special ed classes with future felons and disability check cashers and 35-year-old grandmas. And even this was tough for Jerome because he was a high yellow black kid, the color of urine after eating a bunch of steamed asparagus, and on top of this Jerome had super-thick glasses, beyond Coke bottles, that type where when you looked at him straight on they made his eyeballs look three sizes bigger to you on the outside of his glasses. So he took some lumps.
The thing is, as we all grew up and went through middle school, it became common knowledge that Jerome had found his true calling - the perfect way to channel his small town ghetto nerddom into a penultimate talent - dude was crazy good at beat boxing. Like, we all thought he should be on the records, he was that good. So nobody really ever fucked with Jerome after that.
Seeing that little homo dude on American Idol do his sterile sperm-soaked garbling of brief beat boxing before launching into his closing oversung notes of an old Judy Garland song, it just filled me with sadness. Jerome's probably got a screwed life now, or maybe it's perfectly simple, but he never even had a chance to be on the records.
Also, it makes me sad that when people R.I.P. seven thousand dead rappers and DJs and shit on nostalgia records beat fading out moments, nobody ever shouts out The Human Beat Box. All he had, just like Jerome back home, was his fucking self, and nobody wasn't giving him anything else, and he said, "Fuck that shit world! I spit on your limitations, rhythmically, into my hands, and create music that gives us laughter to stifle our festering anger!" American Idol dude has no festering anger; he probably just thought that shit was cute to do. Fuck him.
MD: I was born and raised in a place called Bridgeport, CT. It’s one of the ten or so “cities” in CT that you really don’t ever want to visit, unless you’re like Raven and you enjoy smoking crack, or you need to buy a gun or something. Anyway, when The Fat Boys hit big, a copycat group from Bridgeport called The Skinny Boys popped up. That was par for the course back in those early days of rap music. Just like BDP wouldn’t have ever been heard of if MC Shan didn’t give them something to retaliate for no reason to. I don’t think The Skinny Boys and The Fat Boys ever had beef, and The Skinny Boys stuck around long enough to put out a few decent records and enjoy a moderate amount of success.
Their answer to The Human Beat Box was a guy named The Human Jock Box. He did the same shit, obviously, but I’d say overall, The Skinny Boys were more influenced by the Run D.M.C. style of rap than the comical styling of The Fat Boys. Outside of The Fat/Skinny Boys, and the Doug E. Fresh “The Show” 12”, I could easily go on record as saying I hate every form of beat boxing not connected to the two groups or that record. It’s always been a weird concept. It made more sense back in the very primitive days of music sampling, and it worked as an element to make up for rap music’s early shortcomings, but in this day and age, it’s just dumb.
Much like the American Idol Cum Glazed Hair guy, it seems the only people you will EVER see beatboxing are white dudes (and Bobby McFerrin) who look like they’ve never heard rap music before. A few years back, I was at one of those shows that feature a lot of those “bands” that consist of guitar/drum duos who play really bad instrumental indie rock. The crowd and band members all look the same at those types of things. It’s a bunch of skinny white kids who go to a college with a great Arts program and they all dress like a homeless version of Woody Allen (even the girls), except their parents most likely live in large houses in gated communities I’m not even allowed in.
Well, at one point one of the guitarists from one of the drum/guitar duo bands either broke a string or went horrendously out of tune or something (if you’re not familiar with these types of shows, this happens roughly every 45 seconds), and some jerkoff got on stage and started beat boxing, and the crowd, filled with the whitest white people you will ever see in a city setting, were in complete wonderment. There is no real logical explanation as to how beat boxing went from something poor rap groups did because they couldn’t afford anything else to make music with, to something people with seemingly no connection to rap music began doing for novelty purposes. I guess you can blame Bobby McFerrin, but not even trust fund jerkoffs listen to that asshole. R.I.P. Buffy. One Love.
KM: Beat boxing is more like a sideshow thing you catch once in a blue moon and remember you think it's cool. A whole lot of it is not very good, no. Rahzel is great when you hear him on The Wake-Up Show doing Wu-Tang beats for RZA and GZA to freestyle to, and he may have a couple good songs on his album, but chances are high he shouldn't have a whole 18 track album. My roommate bought that thing years ago, and I still haven't managed to listen to it all the way through. Doug E. Fresh is obviously the frontrunner due to "Ladi Dadi" and everything, but fuck some Fat Boys being right behind him because Biz Markie fucking trumps those guys. I think it'd be possible to make a hot-ass rap song with some big MC and a beat boxed beat, but it would be hard. Sad truth is it will likely remain a cute gimmick for white people to play with and amaze other white people. The blame rests squarely on Justin Timberlake's shoulders.
RM: Somewhere, probably in a crackhouse in D.C., the original DMX is sad. Well, he probably didn't read this, and if he did, he would probably just think, "Yo, you mean some dumbass white girls would trip out if I did some beat boxing again?" and he'd get Just-Ice to give him a ride to the Greyhound station, only to be stymied by the fact there was no bus station to go to in College Town, CT. Though maybe he'd think to say College Park, MD, and then he'd be in business.
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