Top 25 things springing from the fertile yet strip-mined crescent moon soil of that thing known as hip hop, not necessarily in a necessary order. Who we are:
RM: My name is Raven Mack and I'm an internet superstar. Every other week, I purchase a brand new vehicle. I already own twenty, and that would normally be considered more than enough, yet still I desire even more. One time, I rode a Honda Scooter and enjoyed it, so I now own seventy-four of them. I possess the material wealth to fulfill my relative necessities. I own beachfront property in the West Indies, including a small island that is entirely mine. I have a pet frog in a terrarium, plus a Jack Russell terrier with a solid gold bone. I have a jew to account for all the money I've spent. I have a treaty between me and Tahiti because I have an army brigade. Mashed potato alligator soufflé. Dun doo-noont... doo-noont.
MD: I'm Mike. When I was young, I was very stupid. Someone in my family bought me one of those Peanuts Encyclopedia sets they used to sell at the Waldbaum's back in the day. This was when I was around 5 or 6, when I COULD technically read, but I had no interest in doing so. Instead, I would just look at the pictures in the books and make up my own stories. There was this one section on killer bees, and for some reason, the picture was of a giant bee the size of a car. Since I didn't read anything, I just assumed that's how big killer bees were, and when they finally reached America, we were all fucked. Anytime I heard a loud buzzing, whether it be from someone's air conditioner, or of unknown origins, I would run inside of my house as fast as I could to avoid the oncoming killer bee attack. I lived my life like this for around two years before someone finally told me bees don't ever grow to the size of a car.
KM: You motherfuckers know who I am; however this month I will be channeling the style of various mixtape DJs whenever I remember to do so. The fun will be in trying to figure out who's talking! This may pan out after the first couple blurbs, don't worry.
JD: It has been a really fucked up week. My two best friends and I are having a sausage fest this weekend in New York going to a couple of Yankee games, then hitting the town Saturday night, so I have been preoccupied wrangling three lax dudes to get shit done. I got in some sort of beef at work with the little bitch who I share a cubicle with over an off-color joke I made, I have been sleeping alot, and it is hot as balls, so all I want to do all afternoon is sleep in my air-conditioned bedroom. But one thing was sorta cool. I went to the full-serve gas station because it is cheaper than the self-serve and I felt horrible, so I got out to pump the gas. As I was standing the kid who works there came over to me and said, "I am having trouble reaching into my pockets". I looked at him and asked why, and the kid proceeds to hold up his thumb and I legit dry heaved. This kid had what appeared to be a tiny snowman sticking off his finger. He told me it was a wart on top of a cyst, and laughed as I turned my head away and gagged. That sorta snapped me back into things.
1. MICHAEL VICK'S DOGFIGHTING CHARGESRM: I feel bad for Michael Vick, who is one of the best pure athletes we've seen in a number of years. He is still a legend at Virginia Tech down the road and helped put them on the map as not just a school with a good footbal team for a few years but a football powerhouse. But Michael Vick's ran up a steady string of semi-bad looking things.
First there was the herpes shit, where he used the name Ron Mexico to go get treated, which just went to show how ghetto Vick is. I mean, it seems to me the mainstream consensus is he was retarded for using such a stupid fake name, but maybe he did that shit as a joke with his boys. You would think a Michael Vick could go to a doctor and say, "Here's something extra, let's keep my dick sores private," and all would be fine. But using the name Ron Mexico... that's the greatest shit one could do in that situation, to make light of a bad situation. Of course, the No Fun League made it so you couldn't buy overpriced custom #7 Falcons jerseys with the name MEXICO on the back.
Then he had that water bottle secret compartment shit, but whatever. If a dude doesn't want to throw away something he bought at Spencer's Gifts, I ain't gonna fault a man for that. I still have one of those weird things with the pins that you push on one side and it leaves the other side encased in plastic for some trip art, so I can't judge dude on that.
The dogfighting thing to me, though, brings up mixed feelings, but not like most people. My mixed feelings of bad are why would a dude in his position bother being attached to this? I understand trying to hook your boys up with some steady business, but just give them a loan rather than be part of the business. There are no dog kennel owners on the Forbes list of richest motherfuckers alive, so it was gonna blow his net worth up in any way.
Aside from that, whatever. I didn't expect a dogfighting scandal to turn even relatively macho people into 14-year-old vegetarian girls, but it certainly has. All sorts of folks are all like, "Oh my god, that's fucked up, I hope he dies a thousand deaths," as if Michael Vick is Hitler for enjoying the spectacle of some dogs trying to kill each other.
I have seen dogfights before, and they're pretty goddamned cool, until you get to the creepy part at the end like sometimes happens where a dude goes in with a prybar to open the jaws of one of the dogs off of the nape of the other one who's all fucked up and not even left with the wherewithal to whimper anymore. That part sucks, but the initial dog-to-dog anybody-could-win combat and anticipation is some adrenaline-inducing bullshit. And let's face it, pit bulls suck anyways. Sure, there's always that one dude you know who's like, "Man, it's not pit bulls but the people who own them, because my pit's the sweetest thing and will lick your face if you sleep on the couch and cuddle up with you," and then the dog's name will be Noriega or Capone or something. But for the most part, most people who have pit bulls know they're retardedly vicious inbred animals. And once the euphoria of knowing you could scare away fake thieves wears off, what else is there to do with retardedly vicious inbred animals but let them fight other retardedly vicious inbred animals, and maybe bet money on the outcome? Seriously. We eat baby cows and make grill-worthy cylinders from the assorted scraps of the weekly pig holocaust at the slaughterhouse, but it's supposed to be ultra-evil to watch dogs fight each other? That's bullshit. I'd rather watch the dogfights than eat a bologna sandwich, to be honest. Unless it's thick cut bologna and it's fried and put on a hamburger bun with mayonnaise and a fried egg - in that case, I'd rather eat the sandwich. But still, if I could eat that particular sandwich while watching some dogs fighting... that'd be straight up a great afternoon.
I guess the one thing about all this indictment bullshit that's hard to defend is the drowing and slamming of alleged electrocution of dogs that didn't fight well enough. But I have two questions about that though? If a stupid ass dog just cost you $7500, wouldn't you slam his stupid ass down too? And also, pit bulls trained to fight to the death... if someone's crazy enough to hold one of them under water and drown it or electrocute it, then that's a crazier man than I. In fact, I would bet the electrocution came directly from a failed drowning. I've killed dogs before, with a knife even (not for some perverse joy but because it had killed one of my goats, and everybody knows goats are higher than dogs on the awesome animal chain, because goats aren't retarded enough to let themselves be trained to kill each other, although the idea of goatfights is intriguing to me), and even a medium-sized dog can be hard to subdue and take the life from, so I can't imagine what a well-trained in the canine samurai arts pit bull would be like. So I can only assume the only reason a dog got electrocuted was because it was too hard to hold him underwater, and folks was getting their Ecko gear all splashed on and shit, so someone had the bright idea to throw a boombox in there with the dog. A situation like that is far different than what most people are envisioning when they hear "electrocuted a dog" where they think there's wires attached to switches and little leather straps and it's this giant pre-meditated affair to kill a fucking stupid dog. Come on. Everybody needs to stop being such a hippie chick on Earth Day about this whole thing.
MD: I agree with all of Raven's (and Clinton Portis's) extreme viewpoints. Especially the one about pit bulls being useless killing machines. It's pretty ridiculous that pit bulls are allowed as pets and people buy them and support that whole "It's the people who are evil, not the dog" aesthetic, up until the pit accidentally eats their baby because he thought it was a big bowl of soft fleshy Chuck Wagon. Did you know a fucking pit bull RAPED a two-year-old boy the other day? That's not even some kind of cute bending of the truth to make this humorous. That's the for-real truth right there. I mean, there are plenty of other vicious, yet easily trainable dogs on the market, what's the point of a fucking pit bull?
As for Mike Vick's dilemma. At first I was on the side of Clinton Portis, who basically said it's part of Vick's upbringing. I still don't know why he got chastised for it. You can go to Puerto Rico (which is still a part of the U.S., I think) and watch two roosters fight to the death. You can go to Mexico and watch a donkey fuck a woman, and you can go to China and eat a dog. Even all of these pussy Americans who are now looking down on Vick's actions eat animals all day e'eryday like it's their job. To top it off, people from my part of the country look down on people from the south because they eat all parts of a pig, not just the least repulsive sections.
The thing that keeps me from being completely on Vick's side is basically the same reason Raven had. I don't give a shit what your upbringing is, when you are a multimillionaire in the public eye, you can't go building an underground dog fighting empire. Maybe buying one or two dogs and having them fight other people's dogs on a lark one day is okay by me, but once you are so deep into it that you've become the Dana White of Dog Fighting, you need to sign off on that shit, bro.
JD: I am going to take the role of the dude acting like a 14-year-old girl on this shit. It really makes my stomach turn that Vick did such ill shit like use the RAPE MACHINE and DEATH STICK to kill dogs. I think that 66 number is some bullshit, it is like when you ask a girl how many dudes she fucked and she says 3, which you know is something like 47. Making two dogs fight is like taking two retards and making them fight to the death in both are helpless and are just doing shit to get approval. Vick has to be a cold-hearted motherfucker to pile up bodies of dogs on his property and have gay code names for himself like Okie.
I really can't blame Raven for his thoughts because he is a southerner, and apparently this is a good excuse for thinking what Vick did was okay, and I can tell Mike is borderline on it, but this dude thinks Vick should rot. I can rattle off a good four thousand things I would rather do than watch a dogfight starting with being locked in a room with that Asian chick at Dumpin.fag, and having her tell me about hip-hop and whatever the fuck WoW is.
RM: First off, the rape machine is some breeding shit with pits too, not really for dogfighting purposes, because them bitches get mean. My aunt's boyfriend, when they lived in the trailer next to my dad (I really wish I could say that part of this sentence was made up, but it wasn't at all), he had some pits, including a female. We had a big great dane with unclipped ears and tails, so he was like this big dumb country Marmaduke dog running around being goofy like great danes will do. My aunt's boyfriend was adamant when one of this dogs went in heat that it was all good because she wouldn't let anybody fuck her because she was too mean, but the great dane got to her, because big unclipped goofy fuckers from the country are charming probably, and they had pit bull/great dane puppies. Those were probably the coolest puppies I've ever seen in my life, they were big but with pit bull shaped heads. We gave them all away except one we kept and my dad named Sebastian, which always struck me as odd since my dad only had a 7th grade education and tended to hate most things that stood no chance of ever being made fun of on Hee Haw.
Also, if someone within three states of me was running some shit where retarded people fought to the death, I'd so be up in there drinking Dr. Pepper and laying bets with my traveling partners. All this caring about humanity or dognamity or whatever is bullshit, because most people are assholes. I'm good to those that are good, but if I have to stifle the things that make that deep down inside internal caveman molecules that still float in us all to not think retard death fights aren't a great idea in some circumstances, then fuck you all. What's next? It's wrong to masturbate thinking about a woman other than the one you're involved with? Tofurkey for Christmas, where we sing "We wish you a merry solstice" instead of the real deal? Fucking homos. My wife is pregnant with our third, and I've got nothing but daughters, but if this one turns out to be a boy, I'm gonna make sure I take him to see dogfights, demolition derbies, and probably a freak show or two if any are still around by then, all by the time he's 13 and finally ready to develop into a real man.
2. BLU & EXILE'S "BELOW THE HEAVENS" CDJD: This album really shows the good and bad of underground hip-hop today. It isn’t bad at all, Blu is a decent enough MC, and the beats are good. They are heavy soul-music samples, much like the stuff I heard with Bayani last month, and that sort of organic shit I dig.
The problem I have is once you get past the first 4 tracks, the lyrics are blah and the beats overwhelm them. All of Blu’s lyrics are either about girls, growing up, or struggling in hip hop which seems to be the blueprint of every underground album that is popping up. Talib Kweli is a perfect example of constant rhymes about the same boring shit over and over again. But, when that is done right, I have zero problems with it, for example, the Tanya Morgan-Moonlighting album is really well done because the MC’s are better than Blu talking about the same subject matter that he is. But I did listen to this album a couple of times and it wore on me. I loved the first play, kinda liked the second, and by the third I was skipping tracks. Granted this may be something I pop in later on and really dig, but it isn’t good for being stuck in the deck for a week at a time.
MD: Saying the MCs of Tanya Morgan are better than Blu is fucking ridiculous. The entire appeal of this record is how great Blu is. I have estimated Blu is somewhere between 21 and 23 and he is already better than most of his peers at rapping. He has the charisma flow and wordplay that would take him far in rap music if you actually succeeded in rap music for such things.
I don’t know, maybe I haven’t listened to it enough, but the subject matter doesn’t seem that redundant coming from someone in their early 20s. I am not sure if John has a personal vendetta against Blu and Exile but it seems like it. I am not the type to throw empty praise around. In fact, I hate 99% of music. Even music that I say is good, I’m usually lying. I listen to Prince and The Cure basically all day, but I pretend to really like rap music a lot. Mainly because doing a site strictly based on listening to Prince and The Cure all day would get boring after 4 hours. Either way, I truly think Blu is a great rapper and he should become famous for rapping, but he won’t because of haters like John.
RM: I guess I will be the tiebreaker since I actually did DL this one... Unfortunately, the week I tried to listen to this was a hot one in which I was working on a roof most of the week, which invariably led me into summertime lowlife mindframe mode, meaning after work I'd want to drink a tall can from the country store on my way to the grocery store to buy an 18-pack and go to the river and fuck around lay around do or die for a few hours. Usually, the perfect music for this mindframe is gonna be - at least this time of year - Too Short. Later, when the dog days start to die down, I shift into DJ Screw mode. But right now, it's all about Short. I didn't find Blu & Exile to be bad, to the point I was like, "Fuck this shit," because Blu is a really clever MC and shit. And I'd probably dig the fuck out of this if it was already fall. But it's not. And "Life Is... Too Short" makes more sense to me right now. Which is an important realm of rap fan to hold onto in this rap dork blogosphere run by secret Scandinavian downloading societies, that don't exist in environments prone to conditioning one to fully understand the beauty of Too Short's minimalistic perfection.
3. COMMON'S "FINDING FOREVER" CDMD: I don't want anyone to get the wrong impression that I actually like this CD. I put it here because I'm amazed by how unabashedly bland it is. I don't think you could find another record in the history of rap music with less interesting things to say while simultaneously acting under the guise of being intellectual, sophisticated and soulful. Common has finally achieved his secret dream of becoming the Coldplay of rap music. He has become the extreme neutral that rap music was sorely lacking since Lauryn Hill went crazy. He's the rapper that not only people who don't listen to rap music can like, he's the rapper people who don't listen TO MUSIC AT ALL can like. You can play this in a dentist's office and even the lilliest of white people won't bat an eye. The lead single is the only thing on here that shows signs of a pulse, but after that, it's all non-eye catching beige tones, like Pottery Barn shopping.
A lot of credible journalists say shit about how rap music is a black rebellion from The Man and all that happy horse shit. I haven't bought into that in a while because I tend to think that the people who write stuff like that are trying to live out Mandingo fantasies through rap music, but want to publicly justify their interest in music about selling crack and being violent toward women. However, if you do buy into that Rebellion rhetoric, then Finding Forever means The Man has finally won.
JD: I think Mike really summed it up perfectly. Common's album is hip hop muzak. I will give him credit though as he seems to have a formula down of only a few songs with zero filler so the album is over quick and painless and having like one good song. I was looking forward to this as I remember reading rumors months ago that this was supposed to be a tribute album to J. Dilla with Kanye doing a whole album of Dillia-ish beats. But Kanye made Kanye beats, and I could care less about this album.
RM: I haven't actually listened to this yet, though my internet welfare check (meaning the dude who gives me DVD data disks of all the shit he steals at work with the super-connect each week) comes through tomorrow, so I'll get to listen at it then. But Mike's review is basically what I had totally feared it would be, which is sad. Me and my boy Boogie Brown were talking this weekend about what a great record Resurrection is, and Brown brought up a good point... what the fuck happened to No I.D.? I was under the impression he hooked up a ton of those Resurrection beats, and really those things were better than any album of Kanye beats I've ever heard. I no No I.D. had a solo album that, judging from the couple singles I heard at that time, was a piece of shit, but still. Wasn't that Common's boy (no homo pun intended)? Seems to me like the formula for this one was Common furthering his Grandpa Huxtable's favorite rapper gimmick, but spicing it with that "Kanye is the new Premo" spice he got ripped off for at Whole Foods.
4. KANYE WEST'S "STRONGER" SONGRM: Although this song is obviously an overhyped piece of shit that shines in the murky and shallow creative waters of 2007 hip hop, I think it's important to make special note of it. Kanye, in all his producer brilliance, sampled some retarded ass Daft Punk, which since only like nineteen black people have ever listened to Daft Punk before, makes it the most creative shit ever done in rap production since Dre made The Chronic. But this is also the future, being most all old soul music has been picked pretty clean. Most good jazz fusion has been picked clean. Funk has been picked clean. That Ghana Sounds record nobody had heard of before seventeen months ago has been picked clean by now. So "clever" producers are going to start sampling retarded shit. Trust me. Within another 17 months, you will read an interview with some super-producer who will try to tell you Electric Light Orchestra is the greatest old school shit ever.
But even beyond the beat, the lyrics in this song are stupid even by Kanye standards. Having "since O.J. had Isotoners" in the hook? I mean, that would probably be a passable line buried in a verse, but to repeat it on purpose as part of what is supposed to be the catchy part of song? Fucking wack as shit. And I know I'm just an expert whiteboy, so me calling something wack has no bearing on anything, and will in fact make me seem wack for saying so, but seriously, that shit is pitiful. If Kanye tried half as hard to write some decent lyrics as he does at wasting money on stupid shit, he might be a third of the way as great as he thinks he is.
JD: Who is Daft Punk anyways? Regardless, this song sucks and will probably be followed by a whole album of sucky shit. I don't really get the Manga/Speed Racer vibe for the video mostly because I don't dress in bunny outfits and fuck some other dude in the ass dressed as a chipmunk and/or dress like a Japanese school girl and let like eight dudes in Darth Vader helmets give me a semen shower in some seedy motel room after a Comic-Con.
I think Raven hit the essense of Kanye right on the head. He isn't that great - as a matter of fact his rise to popularity is based on doing a song with his jaw wired shut. At this point it might be debatable that he even does his own beats or he has some DJ Qualis looking motherfucker strapped in the basement of his mansion gimp-style he lets out to play with the beat-making machines. Nevertheless, I think when his album comes out I will DL it, and see if he really has bought into Common calling him the new Primo bullshit or he will revert to that same narcissistic bullshit he has been doing since they took the wire off his jaw.
KM: I don't know how John made it through over two decades without hearing Daft Punk, but I would wager he actually has and just doesn't know that was what it was. See, they're this electronic act that at one point before 2003 or so ruled the world and didn't put out mediocre beat sample discs from which famous rap producers can steal vocals. I was way more into electronica a few years ago than I am now (DRAMA KINGMOB), at this point I could not tell you five hot new teknojamz because I don't feel that shit as much anymore. But I still dig old Daft Punk. Their last not-crappy CD had this single that my roommate and lots of other folks busted a nut about called "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger". I didn't care for it as much, and then a few months later I heard this old Edwin Birdsong song (DAMN!) called "Cola Bottle Baby". Daft Punk yanked the music pretty much note-for-note and added vocoder songs.
In the hip-hop world, that's called "normal".
Anyway, fast forward to a month back and I hear that vocoder sample on a really average rap beat. I figured it was some do-nothing bullshit until smarmy-ass Kanye West starts talking about O.J. (STREETSWEEPER) and Isotoners and trying to convince me this isn't "Through The Wire 2007". I hate to break this to Kanye, but yanking Daft Punk samples isn't even new (OH SHIT). Busta Rhymes did the shit two years ago on that "Touch It" single. You know, that song where they demonstrated exactly why Mary J. Blige should stick to singing and not rapping? Yeah. That was all about the Daft Punk, and at least it was a club banger. Maybe I would have less of a problem with this song if it had better artists or if Consequence and Lupe were still writing A-game lyrics for Kanye. He should fall back a little, maybe hover back in Pharrell territory instead of thinking he's motherfucking Rakim.
5. XXL 10th ANNIVERSARY HOMO COVERMD: In these modern times, where only around ten people on earth read magazine, making it to your tenth anniversary is a pretty huge milestone. You'd probably want to do some big things to commemorate such an event. I'm not really sure if putting a questionable photo on the cover is the way to get off on the right foot.
Now XXL has had some poor choices for magazine covers all year. From what I understand, XXL is basically owned by Interscope, so there's usually an Interscope artist on the cover, except every three months or so, they'll put Lil Wayne on the cover instead. For their 10th year celebration they went with Lil Wayne and Baby. Topless. With their arms around each other.
There was probably literally millions of photo options to make this cover LESS gay, but they just went full bore and chose the gayest possible cover they could think of without showing dicks and anus holes. This picture is gay even if the two people involved weren't already rumored to be gay for each other, but that fact makes it much, much worse.
To gay it up even more, Baby has a tattoo of Lil Wayne's face on his chest (and he also has a tattoo directly under that looks like Jerry Lewis for some reason) and Wayne has Baby's name tattooed on him. Why would they even agree to do this? Is there some kind of new form of gay where you love men and fuck them but you've convinced yourself it's not really gay? Like is it cool to be prison gay outside of prison now? Is it fine to fuck another guy and pose topless with your arm around him as long as there aren't any girls around to be fucked? Is this an extreme stance against masturbation where you've convinced yourself, possibly through religious purposes that masturbation is the truest of all evils and it's better to get a blow job from a man than to spill your seed into a tissue or sock?
I don't mind XXL. Of course, their opinions toward Interscope artists are a bit biased, and they have way too many porno ads throughout the magazine so I can't ever read it in public without feeling like a creep, but after this disaster, I really hope they go out of business. You only get one ten year anniversary cover, and ruining it with a flavor of the month rapper and his gay lover is fucking ridiculous.
RM: I kinda wish they'd just come out if they're gonna be gay. I think the one thing that has always stood in the way of a lot of dudes accepting homo nature is the very real stereotype of how effeminate a lot of gay dudes are. It'd be sweet if Baby just announced, "Yeah, I fuck dudes, fuck you. I'm rich enough to fuck you if I wanted. Here, catch these hunnids faggot, and strip down." Now, if Lil Wayne tried this, it wouldn't work though, because he's got a babyface, an effeminate voice, and does a lot of drugs normal street black folks don't mess with, so everybody would just figure Lil Wayne was all fucked up, and then all the white hipster trash would think it made him even more awesome than they already think he is, like he's the street version of Andre 3000 or some shit.
As for the prison gay sub-culture, I could actually see that shit happening, although I don't know if it is or not. The fact that "man pussy" even exists makes me uncomfortable, because I'd like to think if we moved ahead enough to accept inter-gender sexual relations, we'd not dehumanistically objectify our own gender in the process. Haha, yeah right. I bet we all have a secret AIDS by now that they're gonna blow up in the next ten years, to thin us out. People who think they tried to kill black people by flooding New Orleans are stupid, because when the types of dudes who want to kill off the poor want to kill of the poor, they're not gonna use some simple assed shit like flooding a city. Although they would allow you to entertain that thought while we all got sterilized by cell phone towers placed in lower income communities.
JD: I saw this a little while ago and was shocked by the queerness of the whole thing, but after thinking about it, I got it. I think Wayne and Baby were saying, "we are so not gay, we can pose like this". At least that is what I hope the cover was about because I can't really think of any other reason why two dudes would pose shirtless on a magazine cover trying so hard to look tough that they come off as gay. I am hoping and praying when we do the EWA cover shot we all keep our shirts on.
6. 10 NEW CHAPTERS OF 'TRAPPED IN THE CLOSET'RM: Supposedly, according to Mike, they announced this shit was gonna happen. I can't tell you how stoked I am. I would go to the theater on opening night to see this shit, and I never go to a motherfucking movie theater. R. Kelly's retarded opus magnum "Trapped In The Closet" series of videos, for me, is the single greatest pop culture creation we've had in America in the last ten years. Seriously. I mean, let's face it, R. Kelly has been steadily descending into untouchable-pop-superstar-criminal-perversion-madness for a while now, like so many before him. But unlike, for example, a Michael Jackson who keeps it all secret and attempts to recreate his previous pop magic, or a Rick James who spirals into ridiculously deep levels of self-destructive drug abuse, Kels is right here, making this wonderful soap opera for the handicapped, full of his genius. And I don't think of R. Kelly as a for-real genius, like someone making amazing new styles of shit for me to consume as a stupid fat American with credit cards; but I do feel that nobody is even close to making the awesomely self-indulgent art he is making. Because we've all been trained by the internet and modern life's chorus of Nelson kids laughing HAHA! at us to be far too self-aware to actually take ourselves seriously enough to sing, not talk, but motherfucking SING about being a fat redneck woman pregnant by a midget with all sorts of worse-than-Galavision storylines woven in. I am so thoroughly motherfuckin' amped to see what happens, and I hope R. Kelly continues to do these forever. He should do twelve a year and release it in theaters for first release and it get held on the same day every year which'd be Bust Out The Closet Day, and we'd all admit something dark and weird about ourselves and go see R. Kelly together. Like, "I'm sorry man, but I masturbate thinking about your wife's tits all the time and whether she shaves her cooch or not. You want some popcorn? I'm buying." "Sure, but no butter. And don't sweat it. Remember when I was all passed out drunk by your bonfire last fall? I woke up and went and tried to fuck one of your goats, but I was too fuckin' drunk and after fighting the little fucker just went ahead and drove home and looked at porn online."
However, if this Trapped In The Closet shit ever ends with everybody being diagnosed with some sexual disease and that's supposed to be the big point of it all, then fuck everything I just said. I'd take it all back. Let's leave the rainbow parades and AIDS test raps to Common in public service spots that air at like three in the morning, and let R. Kelly keep it wide open.
MD: It's all true man. There will be ten more episodes of Trapped in the Closet. The great part is that cable channel and filmmaker people, IFC, have commissioned R. Kelly to make ten more. So in other words, they loved the original chapters of Trapped in the Closet as much as the rest of us, and they ponied up the money in order to get R Kelly to make more. That's a beautiful thing, and I wish more people were like the people behind IFC and sunk (I'm sure) a huge chunk of money of money into ridiculous shit that provided them with hours of laughter.
Some people say those Trapped in the Closet things are genius, and I don't know if they're joking or not. They're entertaining for sure, but I don't know about genius. Definitely insane though. Essentially, it's an 8th grader's convoluted short story transformed into something that resembles a song. I don't know what to expect out of these next ten chapters, but I hope they pop up soon. It can't take R. Kelly more than twenty minutes to write all of them, so hopefully the filming goes just as quick.
I also wanted to write a separate thing about R Kelly's new album, but I don't know if I'll ever get around to it. So, if you haven't checked that out yet, you should. If you need incentive, on one song, he calls himself a Sexasaurus.
7. ZACH GALIFIANAKIS' "CAN'T TELL ME NOTHIN'" VIDEOMD: It's hard to write humorously about something that no doubt eclipses your humor a millionfold, so I'll give you the backstory and leave it at that.
Zach Galifianakis is one of those new hip comedians that you may remember from Tom Goes to the Mayor, amongst other things. A while back, he did a joke video for one of Fiona Apple's songs. Fiona Apple ended up seeing it, and asked him to make an official joke video to one of her songs. Kanye West saw THAT video, and asked Zach to do the same thing with "Can't Tell Me Nothin'", and that's where we're at right now.
The video also includes Will Oldham, who is some hipster folk singer type that apparently everyone knows except me. There's about 400 separate funny things in the video. It's like every shot was done for absolute maximum laughter. From their ridiculous pajama suits, to the comical spitting, it's all completely fucking amazing. Just watch it for yourself.
RM: I always hate when it's viral video links for this bullshit list because I am on internet welfare so can't look at that shit, unless I want to hit the link and come back tomorrow morning. And then when I do that shit, it's not even funny half the time.
I thought I didn't know who this dude was since he had some greek-ass fool's name, and Greece is close enough to Armenia that I hate most Greek shit, except for their salads, but even then only if I get it from an Italian joint where only Hondurans work in the kitchen, so I guess it's not really Greek salad so to speak. But I actually did know who this dude was, and he is one of those whole slew of hipster comedians everybody is supposed to know about is so goddamned funny it makes your horn-rimmed glasses fog up while you suck back your PBR tall can you got for one dollar and five cents at the "ghetto" convenience store which is so ironically awesome because it has porn magazines like Black Tail and is run by a funny Indian dude. Haha, shit is so funny. Dude is great. I bet this viral video is the absolute funniest shit that makes people post things like "FUNNIEST SHIT EVAR" because that's the type of shit they do all day long all the time.
Back in my day, if you wanted to watch a bunch of funny-assed clips about how stupid people were, some dude from Ohio would send you an 8-hour compilation video tape and you'd see some awesome shit like retards having a heavy metal show or a redneck dude getting his head duct taped and spray painted silver while his pant leg is set on fire, but then you'd also see something fucked up like a dude birthing a Sesame Street toy out his ass, or scat snippets or something. Now kids just sit around and type in "Larry Williams gives directions" or "Jerry Lee Lewis overdose" or "Chuck Berry pissing on blonde" and see that shit right away with their goddamned robot machines.
I know that shit ain't out on DVD, but you motherfuckers need to go to the mom-and-pop video store and rent you Maximum Overdrive. For real. Like the old saying goes, those who don't learn about the shit from old movies in the past is gonna get fucked by it again in the future.
8. RICK ROSS'S "SHOT TO THE HEART" SONGRM: It took me a while to actually hear that "Hustlin'" song when it was the new hotness last summer, and I think I got too hyped about how this was the greatest newest hotness since Supercat's "Ghetto Red Hot" back when we rocked fitted hats for the first time with our street names embroidered in cursive-ish letters kinda catty-corner so you could turn it just ever so slightly and that shit was right above your left ear, because when I did finally hear "Hustlin'", I was underwhelmed. I mean, it was alright, but it didn't make me want to tear down my life-size DJ Quik poster right beside my stand-up mirror where I look in the morning to make sure I'm as fresh-dipped as a man can get (working with my limited means, that is) to throw up a Rick Ross one. I think Ross had an Isaac Hayes as Black Moses appeal going on before he was overexposed, where there's this big balding bearded black dude looking all cool like a character from Sanford & Son but dressed in the '07 pimp styles, complete with obnoxious chain dangling low. So people flipped for his shit.
In the time since he blew up the first time (and this could probably be said for Young Jeezy and The Clipse as well, and still won't make a difference), the coke shipping Mr. Big persona has been played the fuck out. Like twice. Far worse than clock radio speakers or zodiac signs on sweatshirts. I think there are far more coke selling rappers right now than actual cokeheads out there to support their kilo importing and arm-and-hammer chemistry skills. (By the way, the most hilarious thing in hip hop in at least five years is the end of that Yung Joc "Coffee Shop" song where he catchily jingle jangles his way through selling cocaine metaphorically for four minutes, then at the very end says, "Kids, don't do drugs.")
But I can sort of overlook it with Ross more than the others because he's from Miami and has connections to shady notorious dirtbags. However, the hot new "Shot to the Heart" single off his forthcoming album is just plain ridiculous, mostly because Mr. Coke Dealer rhyme patterns should not be put over top some corny-ass '80s pop song. I mean, let's go back through the levels of Miami Cocaine Coolness within Pop Culture. Scarface the movie definitely set the tone, and Miami Vice the TV show was basically stealing that style but making it all goody-good for TV with a couple of cute cops (often when I was young and masturbating, when I spit on my hand, I would pretend it was jheri curl juice from Philip-Michael Thomas's hair all over my hand) and all that other shit. But no coke rapper's lyricism is ever gonna be as hard and gritty as Scarface, ever. So when you have this "Shot to the Heart" song, it basically seems like some shitty two-bit bad guy on Miami Vice had his own song before Crockett and Tubbs closed in on him at the end. Or maybe they played this shit at the end of the first episode of a very special cliffhanger two-part deal, and Rick Ross, big baldhead shining in the sun, sunglasses mad cool, rode off on his powerboat towards Cuba after escaping the long but domestically bound arm of the law, Crockett wiping his forehead frustratedly with his gun-holding arm, then turning sideways for a sexy profile as the Producer credits rolled. Then, we'd get this shitty song the following week, and Ross would come back to try and convince his stupid straight-and-narrow sister who worked full-time at a shitty restaurant while working her way through college to come live with him in his mansion made of elephant tusks in Cuba. She wouldn't do it though, because not only was she following society's laws, but her and Tubbs had been thinking about knocking boots. This would lead to Rick Ross's corny character getting his comeuppance and having to go to jail, or at least get arrested, and then we'd be treated to some fine ass Jan Hammer scoring as we got a video montage wrap-up of all the involved characters from the last two episodes.
Unfortunately, this cornball "Shot to the Heart" beat with coke-slanger rhymestylings was made in 2007 rather than 1987 so we're gonna be hearing this crap for far longer.
KM: I was misled. Initially, this was supposed to be a blurb about Rick Ross's unintentional hilarity because I think Raven may have noticed how Rick looks like Kimbo Slice, but ri-goddamn-diculous as opposed to terri-goddamn-fying. I mean this is the guy who's always showing up with these crazy gigantic sunglasses and necklaces that look like blinged-out hubcaps. His interviews are normally really boring, but the pictures that go with them are hilarious. Dude looks sillier than the silliest hyphy album cover (NEW SHIT! FORESHADOWING! READ ON FOR DETAILS!). But I guess we are scaling it back to talking shit about this boring song with Apache drums and a shitty Roxette hook so let's go there. You'd think with a title like that, it would have the Bon Jovi song somewhere, but nope. I obtained a version off somebody's mixtape that also had Lil Wayne's world-renown, unflappable mediocre jabbering so maybe my first impression is a bit biased. It's uninteresting, and why would this be a single?
But then to address the Scarface/Miami Vice shit, Rick Ross already blew his Scarface wad on the last album with "Push It To The Limit". There, we had the Giorgio Moroder song interspersed with Ross talking about Pushing It. If you weren't aware of where that sample was from, you may have come away from it thinking Rick Ross is into sodomy. (WHOOO! EWA STORM!) That song was also pretty uninteresting for a single - I guess it was fairly difficult to follow up on "Hustlin'". I liked that one, but to this day I can't really say why other than I heard it a whole lot and got used to it.
In closing, Yung Joc's "Coffee Shop" gets radio edited at the end. For the first couple times I heard it, the last line was "Kids, don't do drugs. Bring 'em to me!" Now, it's all sanitized and shit. One of these days, we should blurb about schizophrenic radio edits (COMING SOON! TUNE IN TO A FUTURE EWA TOP 25! THIS BLOG NEXT MONTH! MANATI!) - my current favorite is Gorilla Zoe's "Hood Nigga" where they bleep out everything approaching profanity except the hook where someone repeats "HOOD NIGGA." Does not compute.
9. FREESTYLE PROFESSORS' "VINTAGE" EPMD: From what I could gather, The Freestyle Professors are an old rap group that reached slightly less than mild success back in 1993, but somehow managed to gain a cult following in foreign markets. I can respect that since I was in a band that reached slightly less than mild success but, as far as I know, gained a cult following in foreign markets.
It is now 14 years later and I guess they figured it was as good a time as any to release an EP. The title Vintage says all you need to know about this record, ss long as you consider “vintage” hip hop anything made in the early '90s.
You may not know that I come from a hardcore (as in Hardcore Punk) background. Hardcore has been basically rehashing “vintage” sounds for quite a while now. However, this is a completely new and exciting idea in the realm of hip hop. It’s been popping up more and more over the years. There’s basically three ways you can approach a “vintage” sound. The first method is the one people do the most, but usually with horrible results. It’s when you try and mimic a vintage old school sound without doing much else to convey that message. For instance, you might have some booming and bapping beats, but they were probably made with Fruity Loops, and you may rhyme like Kool G. Rap, but the subject matter is completely relevant and topical.
The second method sometimes produces the best results, but 90% of the time it still sucks. That’s when you do the old school sound thing, but put a new twist on it. As you can guess, this has a high chance for disaster, but the people who do it right, really do it right.
Third is the method The Freestyle Professors use, and it’s the least approached method because it’s so hard to pull off. It’s when you fully immerse yourself in a vintage sound and image. Not only do your beats and rhymes sound like something made in 1993, but so does your clothing, music videos, CD packaging, etc. This is something completely hard to pull off and usually not worth the trouble. Since The FP are a couple old dudes, it probably wasn’t as hard for them to pull off as say, Joell Ortiz, but you’re not really moving forward with this approach, and that’s kind of bad.
I’m not saying this EP isn’t enjoyable, because it really is. The “lead single”, “Hear What I Hear” is definite song of the year material, and I’m surprised that this record hasn’t set the blog world on fire yet, since 90% of reputable bloggers focus on early '90s shit. If you are looking to listen to something that was made in 1993, but was brought into 2007 by a time machine, then this is the CD you’re looking for, but don’t expect any new twists on old ideas. In 2007, this is a great fucking CD, but if this was released in 1993, it would currently be 3 cents on Amazon.
RM: I always forget to download these things when Mike tells me to, and he uses sendspace and when I remember, that shit's already gone. I did listen to the one so-called lead-off single, and it's good enough - definitely heavily steeped in a bygone era, but fuck, so am I internally, so I got no gripe with that. But Mike's right - it's kind of an odd genre to do retro rap with full authenticity, because what the fuck market is there for that? And I know it's about doing it for your self and not platinum plaques; but still, if you're doing it for your self, wouldn't you want to play some shows and shit? So it has to be marketable on that level at least.
Then again, I've seen a ton of shitty shitty rappers in the past couple years, to the point I won't even go out of my way to see shows sometimes because it's more of a hassle than not. Souls of Mischief played nearby recently, and I was stoked at first when it was announced, but then I realized I was gonna be dropping $20 at least, before drinking, to basically go hear the beat from "'93 'til Infinity" live in tha club with the real dudes on top of it. What's the point beyond that? And I'm betting the opening acts were gonna be local since it didn't seem to be part of a larger Awesome Indie Dudes Nobody Cares About tour of some sort. So I didn't bother. I think I saw an ad for some group that was touring with them in a magazine like the week after the show that might've temped me to go see it, but even now I can't even remember the name of that other group, so it probably wouldn't have.
My point is, I'd rather see The Freestyle Professors than a ton of the shit I do see. Even if it is retro boom bap rap, it's still more original even in it's duplication of the past than a majority of the shit coming out now.
10. HYPHY ALBUM COVER ARTRM: By now, everybody realizes hyphy music is stupid. Even Bay area artists have become quick to disassociate themselves from the hyphy label to not seem part of a fleeting trend. But hyphy music has given us two great things. The first is of minor importance, and really only matters if you're a stupid baseball fan of the Oakland A's and wanted a different style of A's hat for every day of the year, which hyphy has helped happen. I was thumbing through an issue of Murder Dog mostly on the hyphy tip and there were at least 23 different A's hats just in pictures in that one issue.
But the second great contribution hyphy music has given us in the rest of the world is the album covers. I feel, without absolutely no attachment whatsoever to the music and how slap-happy Rick Rock's beats can get, that this is easily the greatest genre of album cover art to have hit hip hop music since the heyday of pen-and-pixel joints. First off, the effects of hallucinogenic pill abuse is obvious, as almost every picture has a sort of fish-eye lens effect, but from the lowered perspective at ground level rather than up face high like normal goofy photoshop fish eye filters. And the hyphy dude's love of obnoxiously airbrushed t-shirts is usually in effect. If there is a landscape in the background, chances are it's been given an Edward Scissorhands' neighborhood make-over in regards to color palette. And dudes are only too happy to be wearing some retarded glasses, like Harry Potter prescription glasses but with one lens busted out, and holmes wearing them doing cross eyes with his tongue out, which I assume is an extreme thizz face of some sort, which I've been led to believe is supposed to mimic the facial reactions to the sour taste of recreational pills. It's almost enough to make me wish Mistah F.A.B.'s wack ass would blow up to Mystikal levels so that I could get a bunch of full-page ads full of these things for the next few years in assorted shitty rap magazines.
MD: I'm also a fan of recent Hyphy cover art, but at the same time, I'm pretty upset that there's some idiot in the Bay area with a pirated copy of Photoshop and, at most, a Photoshop For Dummies book possibly making enough money to live off of from these record covers. Sure, in real life, this kind of design work isn't going to net you enough money to live comfortable, but in the rap world, people pay $1000 for fliers and think that's a great deal. So I'm sure Mad Thizzin P. Shop or whoever the fuck is making these things is charging at least $500 an hour for 23 minutes of work, but then bumping up the total labor time to 3 hours because he had to smoke a blunt and Go Dumb before getting to actual work.
Then again, we are in America, and this is one of the greatest benefits of living in America: making a lot of money for ridiculous work. I'm just upset because I've lived on this earth for 28 years now and still haven't figured out a racket like this yet. You think Mad Thizzin P. Shop has to wake up at 6:50 in the morning to an alarm clock set to the country station because it's the only station that comes in to make bad Photoshop art? I really fucking doubt it.
11. PHONTE'S ESSAY REGARDING THE RACISM IN 'MIKE TYSON'S PUNCH OUT' JD: Mike said he has a lot of time at work to listen to music. I too work at a job where I consistently have internet down-time, but I play video games because my job is not cool with listening to an iPod or whatever during work. I found this site called everyvideogame.com, and I hate to fly the geek flag, but it has tons of old Nintendo games on there you can play on your PC, so I play Tecmo Bowl, Baseball Stars, and Mike Tyson’s Punch Out. I don’t really get the overt racism that Phonte is talking about, except for the Arab dude wearing a turban, but I never noticed Glass Joe was from France and never took that a step further to say how he represents what pussies the French are. Someone who is looking to stir shit would be the only person to say that.
I think Phonte’s “essay” is a microcosm into how fucking annoying he can be and how he seems to be on a mission to make Little Brother hated as well. First it was the bitching about not having their video played on BET, and then it was they didn’t get five mics in the Source, and finally it was dropping 9th Wonder like a bad habit. In my expert whiteboy opinion, Phonte is a top five MC out there now. But he should really shut the fuck up.
MD: Unlike John, I'm giving Phonte the benefit of the doubt on this one and I'm thinking (HOPING) this was all done tongue-in-cheek. The "specific thing" is racist angle is old and tired and I can't really believe someone outside of the stand-up comedians on BET's Comic View would consider a game made by Japanese people and prominently featuring a black man as racist.
Outside of that, this was mildly funny. I mean, the basis is pretty hackey to begin with. I could see Dane Cook coming up with the same scenario, but he's not black, so it would never fly. I admit, I found the part about Bald Bull just being some mechanic from Cleveland pretty funny, and I would definitely let Phonte write dumb shit like that for my own site, but I suppose he's too famous to do that. It's alright, because I'm funnier than him and less famous. We would make an overall well-balanced combo together though.
RM: Little Brother is crazy to me, because on one hand they could be my favorite shit ever, and then they'll immediately be the stupidest shit I ever heard. I assumed this was gonna tip the scales towards stupid, especially since that terrible "Good Clothes" song has been in satellite circulation lately, so when I clicked the link and saw the title, I just Xed it out real quick, so that I can continue to give Phonte the benefit of the doubt as well, even though he tries pretty hard to spit on that benefit with his pseudo-intelligentlemanly ways fairly regularly.
KM: We go roundtable on the strangest shit sometimes. Having spent a solid year subscribed to Phonte's blog on Myspace for Little Brother, I feel I can safely say that I know the answer to the "Is he joking or not?" question. He both is and is not; you should check him out some time (GET FAMILIAR!). Dude often manages to be hilarious and on-point one second and then didactic and annoying moments later. The Minstrel Show was probably a snapping point for him, it seemed like the BET/Source shit was just a jump-off that led to other perceived indignities, like playing Summerjam-style shows with trap and snap rappers who don't appreciate Little Brother. He spent a lot of time getting online and raging against the machine to a chorus of "YEAH YOU RIGHT" comments from Hostess Black Folks (chocolate with white filling - GET FAMILIAR), white people, and other assorted dudes who think they're street enough to say "nigga" and not get slapped (but are too shook to try). At the same time, Phonte pops off with some funny shit once in a while. Often, Phonte blogs are kinda like a slightly-funnier Byron Crawford with a record deal. I really doubt LB dropped 9th Wonder - that seems like a dude saying he dumped that hot Ecuadorian girl he's been dating for five years because she snored in bed. No, she probably got tired of your stupid ass (GET FAMILIAR) and now you're trying to save face.
Punch Out is full of stereotypes (go play the SNES one and GET FAMILIAR with the Chinese, Irish, Mexican, Jamaican and goth homosexual punching bags), but be fair - they changed the Russian guy to a soda-loving weirdo to kill that Ruskie Drunkie one. I think maybe Phonte snapped after someone sent him to that YTMND shit for the 500th time and he had to see the newest flashmovie for "Nigga Stole My Bike." Punch Out itself isn't annoyingly racist, but the internet takes the ball and runs to the end zone.
12. RAP MAGAZINE EDITORS' INTROSRM: I guess basically everybody is copying the old style of The Source where Dave Mays would show and prove how down he always was, even though he was an Ivy League whiteboy, but it does not matter what magazine related to hip hop that you buy, the intro by the editor is gonna talk about how this magazine is the most down of all magazines, knows the real shit from the fake shit (and will prove it by misspelling things in demographically geared ways), and then will talk about how them other mags is faking (which usually entails name-dropping one other mag in extra-mocking particulary action).
The thing is, this shit is always stupid. You know who reads about hip hop? Stupid fuckers, like me, but younger, and with more discretionary income. Rap blogosphere is like ultra-essence of this too, except geared for older folks more like me who don't actually have discretionary income so they steal all their music and fuck around on the internet all day long.
Basically, it seems to me if hip hop magazine editors could try harder at not just re-phrasing press releases for features, and to do an actual review where they might talk negatively about something, you know, in an entertaining way, then maybe hip hop magazines wouldn't have to jostle for the position of Rillest amongst the minds of the poseurs who sit around reading about shit like 50 Cent or how awesome T.I. is all of a sudden.
Being Tha Rillest is like dick size it seems, the more you talk about that shit, the more likely it is you're not walking that talk. Which is why I consider myself an expert whiteboy when it comes to hip hop. I, like you probably, think I know everything there is to know; and when someone has a different opinion, it's not because they're frame of reference is different from mine. It's because they're a stupid asshole. I, though, realize that at the same time as being an expert on all things hip or hop, I am also a stupid asshole. This is the yin and yang of personality, and me understanding this about myself has helped to always second guess myself in life, but in amusing self-deprecating manners. I am good at getting the laughs, and bad at getting the dollars. And if you're gonna be a stupid asshole in life, more people will buy you beers if you're a funny stupid asshole than if you're just a normal full of shit asshole.
MD: Man, Raven must be the only person who actually reads those things. I usually get about three sentences in before I skip over it. From my experience, they're all pretty much the same shit where they try and relate their real life to whatever features they have going on that month. I really hate that technique because it's so fake. I think Mass Appeal has a decent editor's introduction section because I don't think they talk much about the actual contents of the magazine. Anyway, it's a real pointless part of any magazine and should just be replaced with a column, unless an intro is completely necessary. Like, if you don't have a table of contents, perhaps you should do an Editor's Introduction. I'm more concerned with the 50 or so pages of ads I have to get through to get to the fucking Intro to begin with.
13. REMY MA SHOOTS HER FRIENDRM: I remember when this shit first came out, everybody was shocked, mostly because Remy Ma is pretty. Except she's not for-real super-pretty, just that lowered bar for female MCs (a demographic blazed by Lil Kim) where if you at least put on enough make-up to look sorta sexy and you can rap well enough to at least not completely suck, everybody is all tricked into their Ultimate Hip Hop Vixen mode and thinks you're automatically the greatest shit to ever have a pussy and a composition book in the same bedroom.
Anyways, I'm not exactly sure of Remy Ma's Terror Squad stylings, as I stopped paying attention to Terror Squad a long time ago. Back when the mad underrated and overweighted Big Pun was still sucking in enough breath to deliver his rhymes, and Terror Squad meant something great like an "Off the Books" remix or the "Not a Playa" version without The O-Jays in it, I dug that shit. But once Pun was dead and every mocha-colored person who lived within half a mile of Interstate 95 was wearing a Terror Squad medallion and Fat Joe was tricked by someone into thinking Scott Storch was a cool kid and not a nerd like a crazy Disney movie mix-up for the hip hop generation, I could give a shit about Terror Squad anymore.
But the thing that gets me about this story is, allegedly, Remy Ma shot her friend for stealing $2000 out of Remy's purse. The thing is, after shooting her friend, Remy peels out in her luxury car, which she wrecks a couple of blocks away and abandons. Now, the most expensive vehicle I've ever owned only cost $8500 (of which I still owe like $6500, but at least I haven't wrecked it yet, or I should say I haven't totalled it yet), but I'm consumer-savvy enough to know that something that is called "luxury vehicle" in news reports is probably gonna set you back a little more than two grand. So this didn't make good business sense for Remy Ma.
However, if she can record like forty songs while out on bail, then go to jail and while in, have Fat Joe wear t-shirts and talk DJ Khaled into replacing his annoying signature "KHALED!" with "FREE REMY MA!" until she finally is freed by normal legal means, like serving the time you were given in court, then she might sell a few more CDs and make this all worth her investment. Although people don't buy CDs anymore, and if UGK ends up not being mega-multi-platinum, then that line of thinking would be a terrible mistake for a second-rate female MC to make.
MD: I was supposed to segue this into my hatred for Fat Joe, but Raven fucked up, because Remy Ma hasn't been associated with Terror Squad in like 45 years. Needless to say, I don't really like Fat Joe. I don't understand why he's still around, and why he's the one rapper that's allowed to flip flop between being an East Coast hardcore guy and a Southern imaginary crack dealer.
Another reason this blurb is going to suck ass is because my whole basis for writing it was that Fat Joe never had a platinum record so why the fuck is he still around? Then I found out he went platinum with whatever record "Lean Back" was on, and it ruined everything for me. I don't know. I guess I just have an irrational hatred for the man. I've never liked any of his music, and every other rapper from his original era that's still around is legendary now, and he's still like a Keith Van Horn type, trading jerseys every year but staying the same old crappy Keith Van Horn that does something mildly spectacular every few years or so that gives people the excuse to keep him around for another year. WHEN IS IT GOING TO END?
14. THIS MONTH IN DIPSETMD: Not much has been going on with Dipset, thus making my ongoing gag not really that great. Besides that, Jim Jones did another interview this month saying that him and Cam are cool, but not too cool, and Jim would love to do collabos with former Dipset enemies, except Jay Z, whom he still hates for some reason. Everyone else he's cool with though.
Also, Stack Bundles is still dead. It hasn't stopped his mixtape game though, as every third-rate mixtape DJ has been scrambling to find some Stack Bundles exclusives to put on their crummy CDs. It may be messed up to say, but Stack Bundles is probably better off dead as far as staying famous goes. I guess that's not as messed up to say after you've come out in support of dog fighting, which I did at some point in this 65-page monthly masterpiece.
Oh, I think Freaky Zeeky released a CD too. Not only will that not sell real copies, but I have a feeling it won't even be downloaded for free by many people.
In personal Dipset news, I was in Poughkeepsie, NY, this weekend and Jim Jones is playing some club in the area soon. That's not really all that noteworthy, but the weekend after, Taylor Hicks is playing the same club, and the weekend after that is The Charlie Daniels Band. I really hope there's some kind of giant mishap that forces these three shows to be combined. Besides, what's Taylor Hicks doing playing some hole in the wall club anyway? I thought once you won American Idol you became a millionaire and only played arenas? I almost feel bad for Taylor Hicks. Looking all old at the age of 29 and shit. Oh, I'm getting off course here. BALLIN GOONIE GOO GOO!
JD: I applaud Mike for trying to keep this going, but I think we are getting to the point of Dipset not being relevant anymore. The couple talented guys in the crew are relatively quiet when it comes to the beef, so I am hoping we kill this shit after this month.
But Mike busted out a Jim Jones Dipset story, so let me tell you mine. A couple of years ago in the height of Dipset mania, and when I was still living in my hometown, Jim Jones was supposed to do a show at this 18-and-up club. This was one of those clubs that had one section for over 21 and another for under 21. I dragged my hippie friend to the show on the premise I would pay for his drinks in return for going to a hip hop show again (first was a Roots/ATCQ show I tricked him into going to by telling him it was RUSTED Roots). The club was packed with fat, white, young girls wearing tube tops and really short skirts so it made for some laughs, and Jim was supposed to come on stage at 10 pm after a few local opening acts that really could only muster a song or two before the bordeom of the crowd forced them offstage. 10 pm went by, 11 pm went by, and finally around 1:00 am, Jim comes in unannounced running through the crowd to the stage, did two songs, then hopped off stage and left. I laughed, my friend was pissed, and I am sure Jim took his check and got the fuck out of dodge and fast.
15. TONY YAYO DISSES GHOSTFACEMD: A couple months back, Spin magazine printed an interview with 50 Cent. Since no one reads Spin, it mostly went unnoticed, but then at some point, the guy who conducted the interview released the uncensored transcript to the internet. This version contained Tony Yayo and 50 dissing Ghostface, along with some other rappers I don't particularly care about. They made claims that someone else wrote Supreme Clientele (which is actually a claim that had legs behind it before this interview, but no one really believes it), and that Ghost is old and can't sell records anymore.
Now I will give 50 a point for one of his comments. The interviewer asks him how he feels about the records Ghost makes and 50 says "What? The kind of records that don't sell?" and that's pretty funny, but I'm not sure if 50 will be saying the same shit once his record drops, since he hasn't released a record yet in this "no one buys records anymore" era.
Outside of that, this shit is pretty ridiculous. I think it's mostly ridiculous to me because you don't ever hear people going at members of Wu Tang because it's retarded. They were one of the key components in modernizing the way rappers approach record contracts and essentially banished the days of rap artists being treated like indentured servants.
At the same time, Wu Tang IS old. I probably would have had less of a problem with the comments if they weren't coming from Tony Yayo, a guy who has sold less records than Drag-On (remember him?). Plus my indifference toward this whole situation has built up since suggesting this for the monthly 25 because I recently read the Wu Tang feature in the last issue of URB. I'm sure that was supposed to paint Wu in a good light, but if you can read that and still think their new record is going to be good, then you need to get the fuck out of whatever optimistic treehouse you currently reside in. That entire article exposes Wu as being more about business and less about everything else. The fact that RZA openly admits that all the group members have come in separately to record a few verses that will be pieced together at a later date is fucking shocking.
Anyway, I'm sure nothing will come of this because Ghost doesn't really go at rappers too much, but the interview will be ten times more hilarious once 50 is reduced to doing Jim Jones numbers, which is still considered a success in this day and age.
RM: 50 Cent will probably still sell records, being part of the Interscope Illuminati and shit, but selling records and being an awesome MC are two completely different things. Before I go off on standard internet dork expert whiteboy tangent, let me just cover it all real quick instead of exploring it in-depth: Kool G. Rap never platinum still greatest, Big L the original Eminem R.I.P., R&B hooks equal wack, haha Tony Yayo who?
Okay, now to the one thing in all this that makes me most interested, which is the URB article Mike speaks upon, because I bought that thing too, mostly because I read a couple paragraphs in the store and was amazed at how stupid RZA has become. This was a dude who seemed to be on some revolutionary twisting the entire rap world on its ear shit at one point, and now he just seems like Luther Campbell, just speaking in 5% jargon to make it seem more mystical than it really is. Anyone who thinks this 8 Diagrams CD is gonna be anything more than a giant piece of shit was probably not yet out of diapers when Enter the 36 Chambers came out. And if those young kids love it enough to support it and it gives Wu Tang more money, then great, I'm fine with that, so long as they remember to pay Cappadonna so he doesn't have to keep driving his fucking gypsy cab around Baltimore.
16. EMINEM'S DAUGHTER SONGSRM: Eminem's tough because as an internet nerd I am required to hate him. But he's not completely terrible, though he mostly is. Basically, he's like Aerosmith was for rock music after they quit drugs, where they sounded like a robot spit out the songs for them and they'd do it and it sounded just like most everything else they did but everybody loved it who was young and stupid enough to buy music, so they stayed successful. That's Eminem.
But one thing I've paid attention to lately, purely out of boredom, is the series of Eminem songs geared towards his daughter, who's obviously gonna grow (or is growing up) to hear all his bullshit. And Eminem has been compared to Elvis as far as his role in rap music, and that's a stretch because when Elvis died I remember my stupid aunt crying about it. I can't see grown women crying when Eminem dies. However, he makes these songs geared towards his daughter that's released to the public at large, and there's always this justification that everything he's done has been to provide for his daughter. That's why he has to leave and be gone and shit. Which is a shitty excuse. I mean, Elvis got rich, then fat, and died, without second guessing. Lisa-Marie Presley grew up untouchably rich. She could buy me and tattoo gay porn scenes on my face and make me stand around in public, against my will. Eminem however is continuing to make music and dabble in family and make these corny ass songs where the gyst of it is, "I'm a shitty dad I know, but I'm better than your mom, and part of the reason I'm shitty is so I can not be so shitty by giving you material bullshit, my bad, I love you, please don't grow up to hate me, for real though." A better move would be to just hire a nanny, get completely fucked up all the time, make whatever music he can, and then die indulging in something too much. Then the kid will get all the money and won't have to hear all these bullshit cover-up guilt-ridden songs. He's already blown it with the offspring, so he might as well go out high as fuck and leave her with enough money she doesn't have to worry about regular people shit like most of us who screw up our children with our own bullshit have to deal with. I mean, Eminem's probably already at that financial point, but if he keeps hanging around trying to prove how much he loves his daughter through a string of rap songs, she's eventually gonna get old enough to be like, "Why didn't you just tell me this shit instead of making a goddamned song on a CD about it? You stupid fucker."
People are too concerned sometimes with being a shitty parent and making things right. I think it comes from our high-minded notion that intelligence creates the penultimate human being. I'm of the belief you could let your kids go feral in a kennel with a pack of rottweiler/great dane mixed breed puppies, and if they grow up doing nothing but silently and bug-eyededly working in a ditch digging it deeper, but without ever second-guessing themselves, that might actually be superior to over-thinking everything and trying to make everything right and work out your past. Of course, psychology and psychiatry and mind-altering prescription pharmaceuticals are a big industry with lobbying power in D.C., so there's laws against me D.I.Y.ing my kids mentality by leaving them in a pen with four pygmy goats.
JD: We must have been hurting this month because I don't think in the grand scheme of hip hop Eminem is even relevant anymore?
Luckily, I didn't have that shitty of a childhood to which I can relate to anything Eminem does in his daughter songs, but if he wants to take X years of being a shitty parent and try to rectify it by making songs about her, then more power to him. I am not sure how much difference it is going to make when that little girl hits 18 and Eminem has dropped off the face of popular culture, and more importantly the hip hop scene. I think those songs are going to make her resent him even more. I took pills, had one of my boys fake pistol whip mom, I was never home, I was tortured by being drug all over the place with my famous dad, and I only get to see my mom (who by the way dad has stated he hates and wants to die) on the weekends, if that. If his girl isn't stripping with the ability to stick a stiletto heel, two dicks, and a Yankee Candle up her ass by the time she is 20 and on meth I will be suprised. I think the ultimate irony of the whole thing will be when she does her porn with Freddie "Boom Boom" Washington from Welcome Back Kotter, one of those whiny Eminem daughter songs will be playing in the background.
17. BROTHER READE'S "RAP MUSIC" CDMD: This is one of those things that got put on here in the end of the month scramble to fill out the list. I don't hate this CD, but I'm not exactly in love with it either. I put it on here because of two dumb things that interested me.
The first thing was their intro. For some reason, they re-enact the intro from Refused's "The Shape of Punk To Come". Complete with audible outside background noise and everything. For those of you who don't know, Refused was a hardcore punk band who released a record boldly titled The Shape of Punk to Come. It was a very good record which did end up predicting the shape of punk to come with it's sound. Of course, this probably had more to do with other bands not being creative enough to come up with their own sound, but that's besides the point.
Now I'm not exactly sure why Brother Reade wanted to remake their intro, and I'm also not sure how many people will notice or even give a shit. I just found it a weird thing to do, so I thought it was somewhat notable.
The other thing that I thought was kind of weird about this album is that these guys are definitely white. There's really no doubt about that one. A quick glance at their photos and album layout and what not would lead you to assume they fall under the "backpacker" rap category, and let's be honest, 99% of the time that's what category white rappers fall under anyway. There's always the Milkbones and Lil Wytes of the world, but they're few and far between. The weird thing (and I guess kind of cool) is, these guys aren't exactly doing backpack rap, and they aren't doing "wigger" stuff either. It's kind of in the middle, which is pretty cool. I mean, it's not like RA the Rugged Man or anything, but they have a sound where you can tell they wouldn't mind being on a major label and have nice looking videos, but at the same time, they realize they are goofy white dudes so they should try and keep it simple and appeal to as many people as possible. It's kind of like stuff Murs does (who is not white), and I just saw he got onto a major label, so maybe this is the new viable option to become a mainstream artist without shucking and jiving.
All in all, this CD is good for a couple listens. I'm not sure if me listening to it will even make it into September, but I didn't mind listening to it, and I'd like to see more rappers blur the line between underground and pop rap.
RM: I had meant to download this since I knew nobody else would, but forgot. Then when I remembered, it was some crazy Hungarian shit going on at the blog Mike linked me too, and unlesss a motherfucker is related to Al Hrabosky and hooking up some goulash with some sort of strange animal sausage in it, fuck a Hungarian bullshit. Which is my roundabout way of saying I couldn't navigate the damn blog. So then Mike gave me a link to the actual spot, and I guess it was dead but it told me in German or some other fucking language I don't know how to pretend to read enough to find my way to rapidshare.nz.du or whatever the fuck. So I didn't get it.
I am intrigued by what Mike writes about it, because indie rap is apparently huge in Europe (like all indie musics it seems), so the possibility of white people making music without being completely conscious of their whiteness is interesting. This is the internet, where when you talk about the hip hop musics, you are either a white-ass dork who doesn't understand the rill shit or a wigga who hates his self. At least those are the predominant two stereotypes other white people trying to make themselves feel better about being a chump ass reading some other chump ass write about yet another chump ass making music predominantly done by black folks over the years throw out.
So since no one else bothered to listen to this shit but Mike, to fill out a second response, I just made a really long-winded beta post about the pretentiousness of all things worldwidewebbed, which of course shows what a pretentious asshole I am. Yet, in my defense, I marked out driving home from work today (where I painted a roof in shitty 95 degree heat like some dumbass) because the music machine in my moving mechanism played both "Luchini" by Camp Lo and "Po' Folks" by Nappy Roots within the ride, which, since I had the window down and my arm out to conserve gasahol by not running the conditioned air, it made me want to open my 12-pack while riding. So I did. In real life.
Yet, at the same time, since a majority of people who would read this are not the types, most likely, to do such a thing, it can easily be inferred I completely fabricated this to paint myself into a redeeming light amidst the aforementioned two categories of white rap internerd fags. Of course, by creating something entirely different than what actually happened, it makes me even worse than the two stereotypes, yet also fits right in with the interwebz perfectly. Betamax.
By the way, to further prove how true I am, yet also reiterating my retardedly rural adventures in nature, I bought a condenser mic for five bucks off a bluegrass lady at the flea market in town last weekend. Plus a shitty Tascam 4-track for ten bucks. Or did I?
18. NERDCOREMD: In real life (where I’m not a Viking), I have a consistently boring job that allows me a lot of time to listen to music. I am essentially listening to music for at least eight hours a day. As you can imagine, this gets boring every once in a while. So for the last year, I’ve been dabbling in podcasts. A lot of people are still totally clueless about podcasts, which is alright, since 90% of them suck anyway.
The one thing I’ve noticed about the handful of podcasts I listen to regularly is that a good amount of them prop up Nerdcore on the regular. If you haven’t opened up a newspaper, newspaper website, or magazine in the past year, then maybe you missed out on Nerdcore. It’s a subgenre of rap music made by dorks and usually distributed on the internet free of charge. At least once a week for the past year, some kind of form of mainstream print media has written an article on Nerdcore, specifically about how it might become the “next big thing”. With this kind of publicity, it’s surprising everyone on earth doesn’t listen to Nerdcore by now. Of course, most people don’t listen to it because the majority of it is amazingly horrible to the point where it basically legitimizes itself as to why it can’t get a break and be recognized as an official genre of music.
Here is the history of Nerdcore from a non-dork’s perspective: MC Paul Barman came out around eight years ago now. As far as I know, he was the first visible nerd involved in rap music. He had the backing of Prince Paul (and the approval of Masta Ace) so he was completely legit from the start, regardless of whether you like him or not. Though no one actually regards MC Paul Barman as a Nerdcore artist, he has to be looked at as some kind of trailblazer at least.
Next was MC Chris, who is most known for his work on Aqua Teen Hunger Force. He has put out a handful of slightly funny, but mostly mediocre free records and regularly packs small to medium-sized bars on the east coast when he comes through to play his Star Wars song. I am guilty of liking a couple of MC Chris songs, which is the main reason why my Ghetto Pass was officially revoked a couple years back.
After MC Chris, it gets kind of confusing. There’s like 5,000 Nerdcore artists now, all with varying degrees of fame. They all seem to instinctively hate MC Chris (I’m assuming because he’s the only nerd to get pseudo-famous), and 99% of them seem to instinctively suck.
Now, I can get down with the whole DIY aspect of Nerdcore, where you make music in your bedroom and you pass it out for free over the internet, but just because it’s free doesn’t mean it has to suck, or sound like it was recorded in your bedroom for that matter. Also, the few Nerdcore dudes who don’t seem half bad (TYT and YTCracker seem to stick out for me) shouldn’t rely on this Nerdcore label, since it associates them with the rest of these scrubs, and cheapens their own music.
I’m not trying to mold your opinion on Nerdcore, but you have to think: this “genre” has been getting mainstream press for at least a year now, all focusing on how it wants to become a legit thing and how it’s not just a fad. Nine out of ten times that means it is just a fad, just like Pogs and squirt porn.
RM: Very strange turn of events happened while working on this month's list. We have a secret spot on the interwebz we write this shit so we can interact and shit, and Mike brought up "nerdcore" (I ain't capitalizing that shit) as a possible item for inclusion. I didn't even know what it was. Then John piped in and the two of them were basically talking a foreign language to me, though I'll admit I think some fat chick I used to know sent me an email one time telling me how awesome MC Chris was and I should check him out. I never check out shit she emails me though. John and Mike's explanation of this music - and to their credit they both distanced themselves from admitting to liking it - sorta creeped me out, like I was hanging with two holmes of mine and while we were sitting around bullshitting, they both admit they like to dress up in chipmunk outfits and watch each other masturbate. But that reminded me of an old adage my dad never told me since the interwebz are new, but I fully plan on instilling in my children's heads: Take the coolest ten people you know through the internet, whether that be through websites, blogs, message boards, whatever. If you met all those people, seven of them would be complete fucking losers. Not just weird dudes but complete losers, like 20-year-old virgins who have like every Jiffy Pop commercial ever made stored on their computer or some odd-ass future repressed child molester shit like that. (Half of those seven think that To Catch a Predator shit on Dateline is the greatest show ever, mostly because it justifies their own inadequacies for not acting out on their own desires to internet meet and then rape pre-teens or teenagers because they might just get busted.) That leaves three people who aren't complete losers. Two of those three are pretty much losers, but seem cool enough when compared to the other seven we just mentioned. Those two, you could probably tolerate in small doses, so long as you're getting some free shit out of it. That last guy is the one good dude you know through the internet, and he's awesome, but only by internet dude standards. If you were rolling with like four or five of your real-life friends and that one cool internet dude showed up, it'd be uncomfortable because he could be too internet-dorked out and ruin a good night, but he might pull it off too. Mike and John are two of my favorite internet dudes, so this nerdcore conversation made me sad for a minute, until I remembered it was the internet and they don't really exist. And that they'd probably think I was a fag if they ever met me, but that would only be because I got high beforehand and I hate being high in strange towns because I get way too internal-minded and paranoid.
Anyways, the next Sunday after that nerdcore shit came up, the Sunday paper of the Washington Post had a big front page article on nerdcore. That shit was funny to me. MC Chris had a packed house in a coffeeshop and everybody in the pictures of the crowd looked like David Cross playing a wide variety of nerd characters on Mr. Show skits. So I laughed heartily at nerdcore music, at Mike Dikk and John Dawson, and then proceeded to hypocritically spend the next two or three hours laying on the couch doing the samurai sudoku puzzle while listening to Jimmy Smith's Best of Blue Note double record.
JD: Listen, I will admit to owning an MC Paul Barman album, but I think I am really out of the nerdcore loop to the contrary of what Raven stated. Sure, I DLed a YTCracker album that was made from Nintendo soundtracks, and was called NES-Nerdrap Entertainment System, but I deleted that a long time ago. But outside of that, I have never listened to an MC Chris record, or any other of the nerdcore artists. The closest I will admit to is really digging Atmosphere, but I think he is at a level like two slots above that nerdcore shit because his crowd is emo hipsters, not dudes dressing like Urkel.
19. PIMP C HATES ATLANTARM: I guess some late breaking rap dork news was Pimp C hating upon Atlanta in some random interview, then backpedalling upon the matter. Pimp C is not exactly the best person to be talking down upon any town, even one as full of as such shitty musical trends as Atlanta seems to be. I mean, it was two ATLiens who showed up Pimp C in that "International Players Anthem" song.
I am as geeked up as the next geek for UGK and shit, but seriously, Pimp C seems to have been better off in jail. The more I hear him think his twangy drawl is enough to make it through another shitty assed verse since he's been out, the more I realize Bun B was probably better off, as well as UGK, with Pimp C unable to utilize Protools outside of the prison pay phone whenever somebody put some money on his books. I am to the point where I'd like to pretend Twisted Black was the second dude in UGK and Bun B could just wear FREE TWISTED BLACK shirts all the time and carry the UGK torch again with pride, instead of carrying Pimp C's career on his shoulders.
MD: I've kind of ignored this whole thing just because I can't see myself sitting down and listening to an audio interview with Pimp C. Plus I think the original blurb was in Ozone, so I'm not sure how Raven and Keenon weren't on top of this months ago. It's good to see Ozone getting some press coverage, albeit a very minuscule amount, though.
I do know that Pimp C has since apologized to Atlanta but still held his ground by saying whoever he called a fag is still indeed a fag, and he will fight them if need be. I don't know, all of this would come off as a lot more genuine if it didn't go down a week before their album is supposed to come out. Then again, Pimp C smokes PCP, so it probably is genuine. There's a good chance this True South vs. Southeastcoast civil war may be the final incident to cause mainstream hip hop to become ringtone exclusive. I'm pretty sure it's basically ringtone exclusive now, since rappers that sell 20 million ringtones sell 50 thousand albums, but yeah, this feud may be dumb enough to destroy all record sales for everyone. I hope Dipset gets involved somehow.
RM: I forgot how I used to always want a Houston vs. Atlanta war, back when it was screwed music vs. snap music. Luckily, they all seem to have come together under a giant umbrella of suck. I don't think I actually know a single person who's ever bought a ringtone. Billboard has Top 10 Ringtone each week now, too, which is odd because it'll be like Lil Boosie, Mike Jones, and then something from Harry Potter at the top of the charts. What the fuck is wrong with this world? Blip blooping motherfuckers running around all over.
20. PASTOR TROY'S "TOOL MUZIQ" CDRM: First let me say that I am by no means endorsing you go out and financially acquire a copy of Pastor Troy's new CD. It is not worth spending money on, although I got it for $3 from a bootleg stand and that was a very well-spent three dollars. But in the process of doing this monthly list as a group, we all subject ourselves to different things that somehow at least one of us ties to the blurry concept of hip hop. And I had been forced to sit through listening to some really queer, goofy shit, which caused me to snap back too far in the other direction, which just so happened to coincide with copping Tool Muziq for me.
Pastor Troy is one of the more self-important people in Atlanta hip hop. I have heard it mentioned, probably all from him indirectly, in the past few months building up to this release, that he was the first trap rapper (as popularized by every fuckwad on the radio right now), that he single-handedly started the downfall of No Limit Records, and that he was the true King of Crunk (he even had a wrestling style title belt made to say as such, which unfortunately for Troy got stole out his truck, which he details in detail on a song on this album). Lyrically, he's shooting people with a wide array of heavy artillery. And I don't mean that figuratively; that's basically what he's rhyming about. But it has that good southern cadence.
The beats are what sold me on this CD though, and also gave me some self-insight into why southern pop rap of recent years is so goddamned annoying. The rhymes have the same cadence they've had for the most part, but the snap treble kick computerized keyboard beats are so thin and Disney-sounding, that when you throw in a reworked nursery rhyme hook, it makes you feel like you're on an amusement park ride run by crackheads with far more money than drug habit. But Pastor Troy's new CD has that old thick and heavy southern sound, most wonderfully done by Three Six, complete with all those awesome semi-corny sounding drum rolls which sound perfect somehow. In fact, I'd say that musically, this album is as close to a great Three Six Mafia album as you're gonna get in 2007, and I don't care if Juicy J and DJ Paul do actually release a couple of CDs this year as well as two or three more Hypnotize Camp b-team and disgruntled former employee joints on top of that. It probably doesn't hurt that effect that Gangsta Boo is all over this CD (well, she's listed on one track on my bootleg copy, but she's either on a few more of the songs doing hooks or Pastor Troy's a funny sounding motherfucker when he tries to sing). Tool Muziq is full of that hazy yet violent beat machine magic that makes you want to smoke a big fat joint, put the headphones on, and think about murdering your ex-girlfriend. And for that reason alone, I do not think you'd be wasting your time stealing it from the internet, unless you have internet welfare. Or if you're one of those fags who downloads everything but doesn't actually listen to any of it and will only hype something if it's oddball and obscure and most folks don't know about it. If you're that type of dude, you're gonna hate Pastor Troy, a lot.
MD: Raven brings up a pretty good point about being forced to listen to queer and goofy shit because of this project. You see, a few months ago, I was ridiculed for liking some song I don't even remember, and since then, I've just been nominating dumb shit on purpose, and in retaliation, Raven has been nominating dumb shit too, but "dumb" in a different way. It's pretty cool, because we've been doing this thing for six months now. We've put in countless hours of labor, listened to absolutely awful music, Googled things we never wanted to Google in our lives, and haven't seen a dime, or even a free T-shirt from all of this. So essentially we now hate each other and all of our interactions we have over the internet usually consist of calling each other a fag. One time Raven, who is staunchly against the use of AIM, installed AIM on his computer with the 14400 baud modem just to tell me I was a faggot who couldn't even manage to fuck handsome men, and that all I did was fuck ugly fat men while listening to Atmosphere bootlegs, and then he sent me some kind of AIM virus and signed off.
As for the Pastor Troy CD, I haven't even listened to it. I'm sure I own some kind of Pastor Troy CD somewhere and I'm sure it sounds comparable to this new one, so why bother really?
21. WAXPOETICS MAGAZINERM: Being a music dork, I have really come to love reading this magazine whenever I'm lucky enough to see it in a stupid newsstand with it's odd-sized midget cover ass. This newest issue I got has an interview with DJ Shadow where he doesn't talk about normal Shadow "I'm so multi-faceted and underrated" stuff, but just about buying old records. That's really about as useful as Shadow's gonna get, unless he's gonna play old records. You take a magazine that has that, plus track-by-track detailed descriptions of Rick James making his most famous album, and the complete story of some group you never heard of somehow put together by the ubiquitous Roy Ayers, then that's a good read, that tends to last in the milk crate magazine library by my toilet for at least two or three weeks. And always right towards the front where the shit I actually read is at.
JD: I have this rule about magazines - I don't read them. I really tend to stay away from the $7 magazine with fucking hipster bullshit trying to take something like an interview with some nerd DJ and making it like it is Earth-shattering bullshit. I do admit to reading magazines when my wife and I make our monthly trip to Borders or Barnes and Noble. I think nothing gets more stares than drinking some chocolate milk with ice, sitting amongst the idiots reading Roget's Thesaurus and HTML For Dummies and reading a music mag.
MD: I now get Waxpoetics "regularly", meaning I've gotten two issues in a row and I plan on getting the next one. It's a pretty great magazine and I don't mind spending the hefty cover price on it. The weird thing about Waxpoetics is that the back issues almost instantly go up in value once the new one is out. I remember the first issue I ever saw of this mag was sometime last year, and had a P-Funk cover article. That issue is already something like $30. I don't ever resell shit like this, but now I get all paranoid reading it because my smooth as silk baby soft hands always smudge the ink, thus destroying any resale value it would have. I'm sure leaving it on the coffee table so I could more than likely spill Kool Aid on it in the near future doesn't help either. Anyway, this is a magazine you should support, so go out and buy it, but don't smudge the ink, because you will be able to resell it for twice what you paid for it 6 months down the road.
22. PLASTIC LITTLE'S "SHE'S MATURE" CDMD: I’ve already grown tired of this record, but it was a great diversion for a week or so. Plastic Little are some group of hip individuals from the Philadelphia area that make wacky rap music. This record actually came out sometime last year I believe, but I’m slow on the come up.
I don’t really know what type of people would really like Plastic Little. I mean, besides white people who don’t normally like rap music. They would probably love Plastic Little. Unlike most wacky records that fall under that category, some of the rapping and beats on She’s Mature are good. They even get Ghostface to spit one of the most pedestrian verses in his entire career on this, showing he put a lot of time and effort into collecting his paycheck.
I don’t know. Even with all the sassy back talk I’m throwing toward this record, I still think it’s worth a listen or two, especially if you’re the type who does coke in your friends’ bathrooms. You might have a hard time illegally downloading it, since it took me roughly six months to finally accomplish that. The good news is, I saw this in Other Music in NYC a while back and it was fairly cheap on vinyl, so if you live close to there, you can pick this up without wasting too much money.
RM: This is a pedestrian rapping record with some funny skits and humorous ideas. If you're the type of motherfucker who really dug the first De La Soul record, but thought all the hilarious skits were kinda held back by the stupid songs, this is your CD. If you're like the rest of the World, you don't need to hear this. This shit was so disturbing to my macho heterosexuality that I pretty much dusted off the Screw CDs and listened to nothing but bass heavy gangsta shit for a week, usually with a tall can of Negro Modelo in my lap, riding around just trying to wash the feeling of faggotry out my earlobes.
That being said, these guys would make great wacky morning DJs for the hip hop generation if they could actually come up with some of this funny shit on a regular basis. But that's about it. If you steal it, you should just listen to it on the way to work one morning, but pause it every twenty minutes and talk about the traffic or weather. Then do that again on the way home, except no weather this time because nobody gives a shit about night time weather, and you're probably done with this CD after that.
23. SCREWED MUSICKM: (I couldn't keep the DJ joke running with Screw Music. It doesn't work with writing. You can't chop with words without it looking like one of those old Little Caesars commercials, and if I did the Michael Watts thing where he repeats the same section three times, only a few of you would know it was deliberate, instead of me being stupid and not realizing I wrote the same thing in triplicate. Maybe if you get really high and read this really slowly, we can pretend it's screwed.)
I'm starting to think a lot of people who enjoy and/or make and/or finance what is commonly known as Screw Music (or Slowed, if you obey Trae's frequent rants) refuse to see the music for what it is - a function. It's a remix. It's something that is done to music to make it sound different. Look at screwing and chopping something like you would someone putting food in a blender or changing a paint job on a car. We makin' it purple. What it is now is just a marketing thing, but there is a whole other level of interesting ideas that spawn from screwing and chopping.
I guess ever since Who Is Mike Jones? (I tried to think of something earlier that did meganumbers and all I got was Lil Flip or well Banner's M:TA would work too) the idea of screwed and chopped became a common marketing ploy for the music industry on a national level. Screwed music bumps initial week sales by being a bonus disc for the original. Then a week or two passes, and now the original is being sold separately from the screwed and chopped version at the same second or third week price. It's smart and a lot of people who don't camp on music release dates still want both versions if they didn't catch the 2-disc set. Many will pay for both, doubling the sale. For the first wave of Swishahouse big hit releases, I'm pretty sure it was also cheap. Michael Watts can do that shit for free. Now, it's mostly something to do with Texas artists or the occasional out-of-state southern act (David Banner, Eightball & MJG). From what I have heard thus far (a Z-Ro CD I actually bought), Paul Wall is not very good at screwing and chopping, and should not be doing people's albums.
There is some resistance to the idea of screwing and chopping as a function. People who don't understand the music and those who just don't dig it don't want to hear it at all. The folks who dig it get weird about it, though. People act like somebody farted in church when you screw and chop random shit. They get all purist about it, when the fact of the matter is DJ Screw was fucking around with completely random shit just to see how it sounded. You go get 3 'n Tha Mornin' and he's got Laid Back's "White Horse" on there. Dude was slowing down Mantronix and Miami Bass and West Coast music because he felt like it. There are tons of possibilities that still exist with the music and I'm sure there are tons of people trying to explore that "underground" or whatever you call someone making mixtapes on their own. Dudes are kicking out all kinds of shit and selling it out their trunks or in the mom & pop shops much like Screw did in the first place. It's still pretty wide open, though. I have ideas of my own kicking around, it's about time I get off my ass and do 'em real big. You know what goes hard? Screwed and chopped People Under the Stairs.
"Don't call it screwed unless DJ Screw did it" is common. Getting defensive about what it's called is understandable for people who were closely associated with DJ Screw and feel like it's a respect thing. I just think it's time to let that go. Screwed and chopped has become a musical function, not just a gimmick for one dude from Houston. The fact that his style is passed through his name is an extreme honor in itself. I can't think of any other crucial DJs or even producers who get their skills passed with their name attached. Nobody's Hercing or Pete Rocking a song. Sped up music (the polar opposite of Screw Music) is ubiquitous as a sampling technique, but who remembers that Kanye was one of the first to go large with it? Any time you hear someone screw and chop, you're hearing Robert Davis's legacy. Chill out on that "Don't call it screwed" shit already.
RM: At first I expected to be one of the dumbasses Keenon is dogging out and be like, "But fuck a Michael Watts, OG Ron C is tha rill shit!" But everything Keenon said is true, regardless of my contempt for the very predictable screwed stylings of 5000 Watts.
The thing I think people don't realize is how addictive this shit is. I have been playing all my old 45s on 33 rpms lately. A lot of it sounds like crap, but there are moments when it's the best shit you ever heard in your life. And this is a deeper involvement in slowed music for me than just playing old disco 12-inches with the pitch control pulled back all the way to make the bell-heavy break beats sound more familiar to my modern ears. I now have two good friends who play shit slowed down regularly - like usually - and when someone who's not used to that shit hears it, you think people are retarded. And we probably are.
For the life of me, I cannot figure out why the fuck no one's started making screwed mixes of early '90s classics. That shit was made to be slowed down enough to give it a heady stoner vibe. Which is really the point of screwed music anyways, of course, making all this over-analysis completely stupid. Me and Keenon should've both just drank a pint of cough syrup and watched The Avenging Disco Godfather while having June 27th, Southside Rider, Wineberry Over Gold, No Drank, and Shinin' Like the Sun in the CD changer.
24. THE ALL OUT SHOWRM: Satellite radio is only like $13 a month, but I'm still not sure it's worth it. The other day I was listening to Howard Stern because that's most likely why it costs $13 a month rather than $8 a month, and man did it suck. It was like listening to a bunch of yankee cokehead perverts Are there that many people who enjoy yankee cokehead perverts to make it worth satellite radio's money to pay Howard Stern a gazillion dollars? If so, then I hope Al-Qaeda has regrouped enough to start blowing up Americans again, but hopefully a lot more this time.
Anyways, the Shade 45 station is easily the best, even though you have to listen to a ton of G-Unit/Eminem shit since it's basically Eminem's namesake channel. But the 4 to 8 show every day is Lord Sear (who I think produced something I owned at one point - he's some old ass fat ass DJ from hip hop's heyday though) and Rude Jude's All-Out Show. And this shit makes me laugh every day. Every fucking day. Not just saying something funny where I think "LOL" because that's my reaction to something I know is funny, but without actual laughter; but I bust out laughing at some stupid ass shit they do or say every day. And they play music, which is good a lot of times, but you can tell they're forced to play certain shit. However, they're the only DJs I've heard on the satellite radio bullshit who will actually just cut off songs and be like, "Yo, this shit sucks," or rag on it after the song is over. And a lot of shit they force at you on the satellite is just as shitty as everything on regular radio, except they don't have to turn the "shit"s to "isht"s.
I googlefied these dudes, and Lord Sear is a giant turkey-jowls jawboned motherfucker. And Rude Jude is this goofy looking white dude who I guess used to harp on the stupider guests on Jenny Jones or something or other. They are also worth about $9 a month on the satellite radio. In order to get my money's worth, I've been getting up early on Sunday mornings to sit in my truck listening to the bluegrass station drinking red eyes to get my other $4 worth, which sucks, because I thought this shit was supposed to be entertaining, not work. All having to set the clock to get up on a Sunday morning to go do things. That's one of the greatest things about being a godless fucker is getting to sleep in guaranteed at least once a week.
MD: I don't have satellite radio, so I've never heard this show. I think my mom has some weird Satellite TV where they put the satellite radio channels on the TV for you, but I am not at my mom's house enough to confirm this.
I do know that Rude Jude used to be on the Jenny Jones show a lot, and Jenny Jones is my bitter enemy. On Jenny Jones, Rude Jude did an "Eminem as Stand Up Comedian" schtick, so it's hard for me to buy that this guy is funny now. I've heard Lord Sear before on the Stretch and Bobbito show, and I'm not gonna front like I heard that shit first hand. I heard it on the same mp3s all the rest of you fools heard it on. Anyway, I know Lord Sears' humor is based around telling people their breath smells like onions. Usually I would balk at such lunchroom style humor, but Lord Sear is pretty good at it. I would be interested in hearing this show, so if any of you nerds know where I can download it at, please drop me a line. Thanks.
25. MICKEY AVALON'S SELF TITLED CDJD: Last weekend my wife and I were out with our two friends, and I got ripped up. I am 32, and consider myself a pretty professional drinker after years of bartending through college and before I started working in the “real world”. But last weekend, I blacked out and went on this drunken rampage through the streets of Harrisburg, PA. It was capped off by almost getting into a fight in a pizza place with some preppy dude because the obese, Hispanic girl had to use the bathroom bad. My wife reported he was wearing a polo shirt that had baby blue and pink stripes and he had his collar up. I am guessing he had some sort of hemp or other material beaded necklace and was wearing flip-flops.
My point? This kind of dude is the target audience for Mickey Avalon. Some fake fucker from the burbs who goes out and spends his daddy’s cash on heroin or ironic cases of PBR and rapes passed out girls at parties. I am not sure how much Raven or Mike got through with this album, but after the “Jane Fonda” song, I couldn’t take it anymore. It reminded me of every kegger I went to in the basement of some busted-up house at the WASPy college in my hometown that was full of rich dickfaces from Jersey. What I am trying to say is, if you like this garbage, odds are if I was drunk and blacked out, I would be calling you a fag, and if sober, I wouldn’t like you at all.
RM: There is a lot of old lite metal or hard rock from the late '80s that I dug. The fact that music media made it out like Nirvana hit and all those dudes disappeared immediately, and then it all resurfaced as the retro-packaged Hair Metal... that's some craziness. Now the thing is, there's a lot of that shit I loved - GNR, L.A. Guns, early W.A.S.P., Motley Crue's first two albums, fucking Zodiac Mindwarp, etc. etc. - and there's a ton of it I hated, which usually was the shit chicks dug. And there's no real difference between what I liked and what I hated, at least not according to lumping it all into one big category of hair metal like it is now. I do know if it had a keyboard player, it was fag shit. If dudes wore like yellow or lavendar or some shit, it was fag shit. Dudes smiling with chest hair was fag shit. But some fucked up longhair degenerates wearing black and red leather and fucking B-movie wannabe starlet sluts in dive bar bathrooms, that was good shit to me. Good happy degenerate delinquent anthem music, great for fucking sluts and abusing things until you lose control of yourself, either mentally or physically or both. That's basically rock-n-roll, at least how ignorant ass me was raised up to think.
How all this relates to Mickey Avalon is that dude is two years younger than me (he's 32, according to internet knowledge), so he can't be that far removed from the same line of thinking. And he might've turned a gay escort trick for a drug fix or slept underneath a West Hollywood overpass at some point, but still, he ought to know this shit is so contrived. And I'm sure he does. But you go with a corny sound like one of the Beastie Boys turned all Courtney Love after Check Your Head, and make an album like that would've gave us in ten years time. This CD got released last fall, but I guess he just got distribution from some big label now and it's starting to make the rounds. He just played the 9:30 Club in D.C., which is a nice ass club to be playing to be some dumbass pseudo-rapper. And if he was a bonafide dirtbag degenerate like say Nikki Sixx in '87 or the original line-up of GNR before "Patience" blew up, then I could get behind this bullshit of his in principle, even it does suck. Except you can totally hear he's not that, he's just some dirtbag old money Jewish kid dabbling in delinquent lifestyles without ever risking his inheritance thinking he can play an image, and eventually, if it gets exposed to the proper marketing angles, it'll refract into the naive desires for adventure that every stupid teenager since Cain and Abel fucked their mom to make more people has felt, and then he'll be able to make his own money right quick, host a few stupid shows on MTV2, and go back to daddy and say, "Look dad, look at what a success I am. I did it on my own, too." And then the family will welcome him back in, and he'll be a clean rich asshole for the rest of his life like he's gonna be anyways.
If he's halfway legit, I hope he's overdosing right now.
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