OCTOBER EXPERT WHITEBOY ANALYSIS TOP 25 THANGS TANGENTIALLY CONNECTED TO HIP HOP
(not necessarily in any hierarchical order, so much as a good reading order for motherfuckers to throw eyeballs at)
WHO WE ARE:
RM: I am Raven Mack, your average persnickety thirtysomething who hates and loves everything simultaneously. The interwebz are obviously a field where the haters play, and we have been no exception to that rule, but perhaps due to me smoking more weed lately than usual, I am going to try to accentuate the protons in my molecular structure, and keep it bright-hearted this month. Loungin', brah.
MD: I'm Mike Dikk. I have a question for you. Do you remember where you were the day Dave Thomas died? I do. I was on my way to Atlanta, Georgia. We stopped at a Wendy's on the way just to see what the mood would be like in one of the many franchised houses Dave Thomas built with his bare, chili-stained hands. The employees didn't seem to care, or know for that matter. There were no specials or price breaks to help the American public cope with the loss. Life went on unaffected on that cold January day. R.I.P. NEVER FORGET 01/08/02.
JD: I am John and I found out today that I will be student teaching in a room full of 1st graders. I have sold drugs, been in fights, made prank phone calls, and a whole mess of other ill shit. I hope to make a little army full of kids that will do whatever I say. I want to have this mind-meld fucking hold over them and use them to do my bidding. If anyone wants info how to transfer your child to my school, please hit me up at iwillkillyourbabies@aol.com.
BWT: I'm Brian W. Tosh and I'm 58% sure I'm dead after drinking enough at the fight in Atlantic City to make my stomach cough up that nasty black stomach bile. The yellow stomach bile isn't that bad, but you know when you're puking up that black shit you went way too far. Two great things from last night (other than it being the best sporting event I've ever been to in person), after the bar in Caesars closed at 4, my boy Tito and I wandered the streets until we found a bar that looked open. We walked in and asked the bartender what time they closed and got the answer every drunk wants to hear - never. The second great thing of the night, and this was even more surreal than seeing Pavlik comeback in the 7th and kill Taylor on the ropes, was seeing white fucks from Youngstown walking around dressed as ghosts in front a crowd that was made up of at least 40% black folks and get away with it.
KM: I'm Keenon Mobb, King Of Da Something. My internet has been in a condition resembling a wino on life support at county hospital, which is actually worse than the internet welfare Raven's on for 90% of the time. With welfare, you know the check's coming eventually. I wrote all this shit up offline & am praying I don't get kicked out of the e-mergency room for not having insurance. It's cold on the streets, you insensitive fucks, pass the hat.
1. KANYE WEST'S GRADUATION CDBWT: So instead of doing anything productive last night I was flipping channels and caught Kanye on 106 & Park. I hadn't seen 106 & Park in forever and I don't think I will watch again cuz I'm not a 13 year old who is trying to swagger jack black culture; I'm 21 nigga, I read blogs and hip hop sites. I remember a few years ago (maybe it was last year I dunno) when they got rid of the hosts and then the former female host tried to become a rapper. Not that I've ever really cared for Free (I think that's her name) or heard anything by her but watching this made me miss her for two reasons: the new host is about as dark as Jason Kidd and has no ass. How hard is it for BET to find a black girl to fill that roll? So Kanye comes on, talks about his album, puts over the cover work by some artist I don't know, and performs "Big Brother". I think I've flip flopped on "Big Brother" about 29 times since I first heard it. Part of me thinks its gayer than that record Game recorded where he pretended he was drunk off Belvedere and drunk dialed Busta Rhymes crying over the Dre break-up, and then part of me loves it based upon the kinda guy Kanye is - a very egotistical sensitive dude who despite all the success he's had probably needs to be given constant praise. With that line of thinking I consider it to be among the best songs he's ever done. The song comes off as a diss not just to Jay but to Kanye himself and that's one of the reasons Kanye is unique. Most rappers are stuck in this tough frame of mind; Kanye understands that's not him and shows the realness that is insecurity. I actually felt kinda sad for Kanye during his performance. There he is performing this song that obviously means the world to him and the kids are not into it at all. You could tell they would have much rather seen Soulja Boy do"The Superman". Then his "Big Brother" came out and the place went nuts for the twenty seconds that Jay did "Encore". Afterwards they hugged and I shed like five tears.
I remember when the last Kanye album came out I read something that Raven wrote on DVDVR about him assuming it sucked since Dan Patrick was praising it and I remember that comment made me mad at first and then I thought about it more, and yeah it did suck for that reason and many more. Too many guests, overproduction, and that damn "Gold Digger" song made me dislike most of it (well except for "Gone", that song is amazing). Working in a bar that is geared towards middle-aged white males will make you hate a lot of the things they enjoy (well except for beer and sports). Most of the time they won't tolerate rap and if they do it usually sucks. They tolerated "Gold Digger". It sucked.
I have a feeling they wont tolerate this album. He's not on the air anymore but I have a feeling Dan Patrick wouldn't dig it either. Not that those are the only two things to take into consideration, but they're a good start. Unlike his other two albums he keeps it short and sweet and it really works. For a lead single with a Daft Punk sample I dig "Stronger" way more than "Touch It". "Good Life" is my third favorite thing T-Pain has been on in the past month, but it's still awesome. And man T-Pain is well on his way to winning this years Grammy for most-overexposed R&B hook guy of 2007, but he is still cranking out good stuff. "Can't Tell Me Nothin'" has been my jam for the past few weeks and I may have been the last person on earth to watch the amazing remix video that everyone needs to see right now if you haven't already. The song itself is nothing special but for some reason I am in love with the beat and the Jeezy sample.
The two songs I don't care for are "Barry Bonds" and "Homecoming". For a feature on one of the year's biggest albums, Wayne really phones it in. Shit he had a way better verse for a feature on Max B's album. Had a much better feature for Ja Rule. Was Wayne trying to sabotage the album or was he just all fucked up on k-pins and blow? "Homecoming" is a recycled Kanye song mixed with the faggot from Coldplay. Kanye's verses are pretty good but I don't understand why he didn't just use the original version that's been around for like two years.
Other than that, I am a huge fan of Graduation; it smokes Curtis in every single way imagineable and it's a fun listen even if Kanye is an egotistical closeted crybaby. With that being said it is kinda cool that Kanye is the only person on earth who cares about winning a VMA.
JD: This girl I went to high school with became a famous porn star. Nicole Sheridan is her name and her porn specialty is taking stuff in the ass. I am not talking about just some dude's junk, but like multiple junk, candles, high heels, etc.
I am her asshole and hip-hop has become the man-junk and candles.
I have become worn and used.
I have listened to hip hop for the better part of 25 years ever since this kid named Brandon played me a mixtape he had from a radio station in Baltimore at summer camp. When I first started listening, I was a little virgin asshole. Hip hop was like a pinkie knuckle deep, just checking out what the deal is. As the years go by, I worked up to the junk, and now the pinkie doesn’t give me that fresh, new feeling anymore. I need to shove a garbage disposal and a 50-gallon drum of government peanut butter in my ass to feel good. I am a gaping asshole.
Jazz Addix, Bayani, Blu and Exile, and Ill Poetic has been the stuff I have been listening to doing the EWA trying to find that feeling. The pinky knuckle deep. But it is hard to get it again.
Kanye’s album isn’t spectacular, but I like it. I can deal with an album where you skip three or four tracks, but I think the rest is good. I give Kanye credit for doing something different for a mainstream album. I appreciate his cockiness thinking his shit is the best ever and he should get every award possible. He has balls and I don’t think his album sucked. It is the junk in my hip hop ass.
RM: Every one in the EWA Clubhouse has been expecting me to go on my giant tirade about how the rap musics used to be when I had a green and black lumberjack and all that, but remember, I am positivity ionized right now motherfuckers. But this tested it. Not so much because I think the album is a big piece of shit, but already, from the critics to the internetz to the "haha he outsold 50"s to everything, I am being overwhelmed with RAP ALBUM OF THE YEAR hype. But I try to keep it in perspective. 50 vs. Kanye is like voting Democrat or Republican for President - you can pick the one you like better but ain't neither one of them really give a shit about you, or in his case, making something soulful. Though I guess Kanye would be the Democrats because he seems to be more close to the root of shit than completely turned into a robot merchandising machine.
That being said, let me share something with you. We say "fag" and "homo" and all a lot in our write-ups, but I maintain close ties to a couple of gay friends from back in college who still live in Richmond (haha, I know, "some of my best friends" and "you're one of the good ones"). They usually throw odd theme parties like only gay dudes throw, and I'll go back and crash out for the weekend and catch up on old times, and it makes me feel good to see them happy.
Actually, that brings up a separate tangent, that I told one of them on the phone the other week and he thought it was a great idea. That Republican Senator dude who was trying to suck a dick in the bathroom who said he wasn't gay, you know that story by now right? Well, I was telling my boy that if I was King God of Homosexual Rights America, I would right away start an ad campaign that was all, "He said he's not gay, and he's right. He's a pervert. True gay people do not try to have sex with strangers in public bathrooms. That's a perversion, not homosexuality." And then go into how gay dudes and women just want to be cool and have a nice house and somebody to sit on the couch with and watch TV and shit like anybody else, not go suck a stranger off in a stall somewhere.
Anyways, gay dudes have strange tastes in music. I won't say it's weird, but it's alien to me. Judas Priest is the penultimate metal shit. Marvin Gaye with that Tammi chick is some shit they love to play too. But when I heard this Kanye album, I knew automatically, this is the greatest gay rap record ever (toppling the previous holder of that title - The Love Below half of that Outkast double CD). Those dudes are gonna be playing the fuck out of this shit, and I'm sure "Stronger" has already been in heavy rotation on turquoise iPods already.
I have no problem with that, and actually, if you only really consider mainstream rap releases (which most of the world only does), this probably is the best rap album of the year. But if you took a time machine back to some more-better year for rap music (1991, for example, that was my favorite shit, everything was lovely) and played this shit and said it was the best shit from 2007, motherfuckers would probably be afraid of the future. Not like they couldn't handle it because it was so complex and futuristic, but because it was so weak.
And really that's my gripe with this album, which is probably more a gripe with hip hop as a whole. Taking easily recognizeable samples out of left field, as opposed to the standard rap sample staples, and then dropping a confidently inspired delivery of really shittily simple lyrics over top of them, it's not exactly anything genius behind it. Hopefully it's a step in the right direction and maybe someone else will be like, "Hey, maybe I'll listen to something other than the same 125 soul albums to find a loop to jack," but that doesn't make Graduation some great shit. To dork it out, if you took some throwaway weird-ass sample-laden Madlib beats and let Mase of Bad Boy fame rap over them with the same ghostwriter Kanye uses writing the shit, you could conceivably create the same thing. But then again that didn't happen. Kanye spearheaded this CD.
However, the kid who wins the spelling bee in special ed class is still a dumbass special ed kid. Kanye West definitely won the spelling bee when it comes to MTV-accessible hip hop class of 2007.
KM: I am drawing a blank as to why I should still give a fuck about Kanye West anymore. Any time I ever read his name these days, it's him crying about some silly shit or trying to convince anyone who will listen that he's THE GOD MC K HOVA. He is where he is because of "Gold Digger", bottom line. If you look at the career paths of both West and Just Blaze, you see these parallels to something like Romulus and Remus. They both hit large and hard with Jay-Z's Blueprint and this gave them the respect of rap nerdz and music industry doofs. Kanye spent his time hiring out ghost verses, where Just Blaze kept making music and I guess blogging. The only reason Kanye's name is on the lips of white people worldwide is "Gold Digger". You could have had him say the same shit about George Bush, throw the same tantrums about awards or album sales, but no soccer mom would know him from a hole in the wall if not for "Gold Digger". My point isn't to be bitter, just to point out how Just Blaze could have jacked verses from Saigon instead of making interesting music and maybe he'd be on a similar career path. There were only two or three joints off Late Registration I enjoyed; the rest of that album was ass. I liked "Gold Digger" despite the sheer overload of demand for that song - it wasn't huge because it sucked. "Touch The Sky" may be my favorite thing he's ever done but that's because I love "Move On Up". In 2007, I hear these bullshit Graduation singles, I may play them on the job, but they're mostly wack. He's treading water musically. Maybe this would be more phenomenal to me if he went away for a minute and shut the fuck up about how deserving he is. I dunno, originally I had this codger rant worked up but I had to split my bile with this bullshit and the whole no-cursing RAP IS OUTTA CONTROL situation. In the end, apathy is a whole lot easier to articulate.
MD: I wasn't going to write on this, but I figured I'd complete the EWA cycle. Graduation isn't that good and it isn't that bad. It's nowhere near being an "album of the year", but at the same time, it sounds like it's been constructed to win a ton of Grammys, and as far as mainstream rap music goes, I'd be incredibly surprised if it came up empty handed. Graduation sounds a lot like the soundtrack to a musical, and I have this crazy theory that it sounds like that on purpose. The highest selling record last year was the Soundtrack to High School Musical, and everything about this record, from the mixing, to the vocal recordings, to the sequencing is set up like a modern soundtrack musical. It's not necessarily a bad thing, since Prince's Purple Rain is one of the best albums ever recorded, and this is definitely Kanye's Purple Rain. It's not nearly as masturbatory or lengthy as his last two, just like Purple Rain is not when compared to Prince's other notable releases. I would respect Kanye a lot more if he just came out and said it was his intentions to make this record sound like a sountrack, or that he's a big fan of Prince and wanted to do something in the vein of Purple Rain. I guess it's very well possible he has said these things, but I avoid any press on Kanye like hippies avoid baths.
2. 50 CENT'S CURTIS CDBWT: Last year, MTV had this show that was supposed to be this barber shop in NYC where the barbers spent the days talking hip hop and cutting snaps on each other to pass the time. In terms of realness, it's up there with those other shows MTV has where the rich white kids do rich white kid things, but in terms of horrible TV this was one of the best shows ever. When the barbers weren't randomly discussing topics such as "Is Justin Timberlake cool even if he isn't a brother?" they were giving C-list rap and R&B dudes like Chris Brown a fresh shape-up. One of these guests was the man himself, Tony Yayo. So while Yayo was getting his hair done, one of the barbers interrupted the interview/haircut, where he was discussing how he came up with the title for his Thoughts of a Predicate Felon album, by cutting a "freestyle". After the rap, Yayo just looked at the dude with his eyes blunted and said, "Anybody can spit a hot verse but can you make a hot album?" My friend Dan and I must have laughed about this for weeks. So as hilarious as that interview was, Tony Yayo has a feature on Fiddy's new album where he rhymes about MySpace, and it's my new favorite funny thing Tony Yayo has ever done. "these OG's talkin about back in the days/ I put an RIP sign on yo MySpace page/ top 8 nigga/ drop 8 nigga/ GCT coup is sour grape nigga" There's this kinda oblivious charm to Tony Yayo. When you listen to him you can tell that he honestly believes that he's good at making words rhyme over a beat and there's something to that. It's not good but there's something to that. As an MC you need confidence and Yayo at least has that even if he is the shittiest rapper in the whole world of shitty rap. 50 Cent on the other hand, has no confidence whatsoever. So while that might be reason #72 why Curtis is horrible and I deleted it right after I played it, it might be the biggest. He just doesn't care. And honestly why should he? He's beyond rap rich at this point, and it's not like he's going to be able to change people's minds about his music now. Plus lets be real, if any of us made half a billion on some off brand Gatorade shit we wouldn't either. 50 needs to just chill and take some time away from rap. Start playing up the fact that he's rich as fuck and stick to doing guest spots/remixes of random dudes shit until he finds that fire again. Basically just do what Jay-Z did and build up that buzz until he's ready to comeback. I know I haven't talked about the album much but like it's pretty much just garbage. Every other song had some R&B dude on it and they all sucked. I liked two of the beats and they were both by the same guy so maybe this Jake One has some future, but he'll probably just spend all the money on some Nate Newton shit. The only songs I didn't delete (other than the Yayo feature) are that "I Get Money" and that song he did when Floyd Mayweather fought that washed up hispanic bum who's so pussy-whipped he won't fight Miguel Cotto. Oh, and that "Smile" song. That's actually pretty good. 50 kinda goes all "How To Rob An Industry Nigga", and unlike "Fully Loaded Clip" it works. He raps about making Tipper Gore a fan, how Oprah won't invite him to be a guest, compares himself to MLK, raps about Bill O'Reilly's wife, and some Interscope political shit. The hook is "smile nigga my next album might be my last" and maybe it would be for the best. It's been about two weeks since off-brand Gatorade has come out with a new flavor and I don't know what I'm going to do with myself.
RM: Basically, I doubt anybody else in the Expert Whiteboy clubhouse is gonna listen to this, and I had planned on listening to it, for blogospheric purposes, which is kinda like rubbing Astroglide on your own asshole even though no penetrating objects are lined up to be inserted. But I didn't. However, I was fucking around on the interwebbers, and my wife (aka ol' lady) was kicking it too, and I was on some bullshit and it had a 50 Cent ad for his album with his hands against his face, scrunching it up, and my wife was, "He looks like the evil rhino on Babar." We laughed and laughed, and that's why I love her, for being retarded, like I am just only about 64%. Also, the other night, she was pregnant and immobile and I was hungover and in pajamas in the living room and we watched that Emmy's bullshit, and they did some Broadway memorial dedication doo-wop nonsense for The Sopranos, and my wife said, "Change the channel; it's like gay robots are trying to sneak out the TV and kill me." I changed it to football since we only get like whatever four channels the giant space age clotheshanger on top of our house pulls into our TV from the skywaves. Oh yeah, I had also read somewhere unimportant and unverifiable that 50 Cent supposedly bought 300,000 copies of his own shit from the label to boost his sales results to not be so far behind. Then I heard him accuse Kanye's label of doing that for Kanye. The funniest thing about this is I can totally see some rapper of 50's wealth and ilk doing something like that, which is why the rich Jewish dudes who run the entertainment industry don't mind throwing big money at somebody like 50 who sells three jillion records, because eventually they'll get it all back anyways.
MD: Like Raven, I didn't bother listening to this. I was really thinking about it so I could have some journalistic integrity or something, but fuck it. Here's the deal: If you are reading this right now, you are more than likely reading it on dumpin.net, unless one of your little friends sent it to you in an e-mail, which would be weird. Anyway, dumpin.net is a blog I created over a year ago initially to squeeze free promo copies out of record labels in order to trade them in at the local record store to get records I actually wanted to listen to. About a month into that plan, I changed my mind about it, because I was completely fucking sick of reviewing emo and bad hardcore bands, which is what I had been doing for the two years prior to dumpin.net's creation. It just seems those are the labels that cough up the most promo copies. Instead, I switched the focus over to rap music, because I hadn't written that much in length about rap music, and Raven and I, along with a bunch of others were getting ready to work on our top 100 hip hop jamz list (which still isn't finished), so I figured the Dumpin site would be a good place to put that. I am now getting sick of writing about rap music, which I knew would happen eventually. It happened a lot quicker than the bad hardcore band review gig because I was at least getting free shit out of that deal. What I'm getting at is, I now visit my own blog and see a lot of talk about 50 Cent, whom I hate to no end, and I have to see enough about 50 Cent on BET all day, and I don't need to see it on my own site. No disrespect to BWT, because that Tony Yayo shit was funny, and I'm just as much guilty of it as anyone else who writes on here, but seriously, this better be the last piece about 50 Cent I ever see on my own site, unless he does something really spectacular, like dies.
3. AMERICA'S TEAM CHEATSJD: I will give a quick breakdown of what happened if you don't follow football (homo). The Patriots got busted having some 21 year old schmuck go into a camera booth to videotape the NY Jets coaches calling defensive plays on the sidelines. This would be helpful to the Pats because in the NFL a big trend is disguising defenses, so the offense will not know what is coming at them. It is a big deal because the Pats are on the verge of being a football dynasty, and their coach is jocked as one of the best football coaches ever. FOX broadcasted a piece of the tape on Sunday, and I just checked it out on Youtube, and I really don't see what the big deal is. The tape is the Jets coaches signaling, then moving to the scoreboard to show down and distance. I don't get the big deal because this is something one of the fifteen coaches could scribble down just standing across the sidelines during the game. If it was any team except for the Pats, it probably wouldn't be such a big deal, but in sports, people hate winners. The more the Pats win, the more they are bound to be scrutinized, and having a head coach who seems like a massive asshole doesn't help. Personally, I can't hate on them; they take cast-off players and make them into vital cogs in the machine, they have a QB who knocked up one hot chick and is dating a supermodel, and they seemed to have tamed Randy Moss (although it is a bit early on that). I enjoy talking about sports and this has become a good outlet to do it because in my "real life", outside of being a friend to the black community, I am surrounded by women. I live with my wife, work with 98% women and gay dudes, and go to school in a class where I am one of five or six dudes in my class. Plus it is nice to not be forced to listen to horrible hip hop as much. Like Mike said, I am getting burnt out on going through the hassle to DL and listen to a sucky album a few times around. This is a good release, and truly if you want to read about crappy hip hop read Dora's horrendous shit on dumpin.net. Thanks!
MD: I don’t think the Pats are on the verge of a dynasty, they ARE a dynasty, or at least as close as a modern age football team will ever get again with the free agency boom and parity in football and all that other happy horseshit. The Cowboys were supposed to be the last modern day football dynasty and this is seriously a lesser of two evils thing for me because it’s hard for me to decide if the '90s Cowboys were bigger cocksuckers than the '00s Patriots. In the end, I’d still have to root for the latter over the former. The Pats have basically been a “pretty good” team ever since they drafted asshole Drew Bledose a million years ago, and they went from being pretty good to phenomenal right after 9/11 because the Giants couldn’t carry the ball and become America’s Team in the wake of those two buildings falling down in their fake home turf, since the Giants actually play in New Jersey, so the NFL Storyline Writers had to go with the next best thing and let the team with the most USA AMERICA GO GO GO name become America’s Team, and ever since then, it’s become really, almost abnormally odd that the Patriots have stayed awesome all throughout the '00s, and no other team has come close to their dominance. Then last year, in the wake of serious tragedy, The New Orleans Saints became the new America’s Team after Katrina came through and turned their home turf into America’s biggest water park. Up until opening day kickoff, all the sports journalists and football shows were all but ready to pass off the America’s Team moniker to the Saints, but as of right now, it turns out the Saints blow dicks like they did for the 30 years before last season. I truly believe in my warped fantasy land I currently reside in, that this Pats cheating controversy was a way to give the Saints an extra push in becoming the next America’s Team, since they are in the NFC and should have no trouble toppling their conference since there’s like two other teams in the NFC that are worth a shit and the Pats have a lot of real fierce competition in the AFC. It’s easier for me to believe it was a set up because during last week’s FOX pregame show (week 2 for those of you reading this in the future), all of the ex-NFL dudes who are now pro analysts all said they were privy to this type of cheating during their careers and nothing ever came of them. Fast forward several hours later, and the Saints get blown out by the shitty Tampa Bay Bucs and it’s not really looking like they’re ready to become America’s Team anymore. I fully expect the NFL to downplay the Pats little slip up for the rest of the season because they are putting up Madden numbers. As of this writing, they are getting prepared to play the lowly Buffalo Bills, and they’re giving 16 points on the spread. I don’t think it’s out of the question that the Pats could put up 60 on the Bills at this point and go 16-0 for the rest of the season to once again become without a doubt, America’s Team. I’m sure Belichick really gives a fuck about losing a draft pick too. That dude dresses like one of those 1600 pound fat people who are immobile and can’t leave their house. I bet when he’s at home during the offseason, he wears nothing but an adult diaper around the house. Cocksucker.
RM: Everybody has missed the real story here. This type of shit has gone on forever and a day in the NFL. Home teams steal transmissions, cut off headsets, steal signs, open gates for windstorms, everything. Shit, they probably have those green dots on helmets now so people know where to point the spy boom mic to steal the radio transmissions of the plays more easily. What happened here is Eric Mangini bitched out the Patriots, out of spite, and has upturned the standard practice. Everybody's still doing it, but it was a straight up bitch move, like that asshole dude playing pick-up basketball who calls foul every time he misses a shot. But the real deal here is what Mike alluded to, the fixed nature of this thing. The NFL is like the greatest sports entertainment ever, like 1980s WWF times three million. And the Patriots have been installed as this dominant power post-9/11, simply to get us amped on patriotism. And the Bush administration is almost out of power now, but the Bush/Clinton power team has to set up a begrudging acceptance of the past seven years. Yeah, America tortured motherfuckers and spied on people here and all that other shady non-Constitutional bullshit, but in the end, we're still America and we'll kick ass, regardless. At least that's how it will be laid out, with troop surges and probably more embedded media and all. So the Patriots used cheating tactics, which were always used (like the torture and spying and all), but it got exposed, and they swore it off, and will end up kicking ass like never before and win another Super Bowl, being perhaps the only at-large favorite team to ever feel like everybody was against them. That's America. We're still torturing Arabs and they're still spying on us all and shit, but they're at least trying to do what they can to make us feel better about it all, on the surface at least. And that's what the Patriots, and the NFL is for - to make us feel better and avoid the reality of bullshit. Sports entertainment. And I'll have my ass sunk into the couch cushions for at least six or seven hours on Sunday myself, watching that bullshit enthusiastically as fuck. God Bless America.
4. LIL WAYNE'S "I FEEL LIKE DYING" SONGRM: This song's been on Shade 45 for the couple months I had that shit already, so it's not exactly new, but it seems to have gained a second wind on the internetz lately. At first, this was like every other Lil Wayne song with retarded lyrics and overblown cleverness, but the other day I was riding home, all frustrated with life with a double deuce in my lap and half a bottle of Robitussin in my system, and this shit came on, and I flashed back to being a shitty teenage pre-expert whiteboy, all hopped up on lefthanded cigarettes and geeked up to dip my dingle in between some white girl thighs (either the clean smelling well-manicured prep girl pussy hiding behind some khakis, or that wide open white trash wild ass cooch with juiced-up maneuvers), and this Lil Wayne song would be like the greatest shit ever. It's completely stupid, but fuck, what isn't? And smart people don't smoke weed and fuck sluts, or at least think about all the time. So fuck it, Lil Wayne is overhyped, not nearly as great as people think he is, and his album is probably gonna be a big piece of shit if it ever actually gets done. But this song is awesomer than fuck and I wish he'd start doing heroin and shit, hanging out with Billy Gibbons and making some really weird ass music. Fuck hip hop and it's bullshit.
BWT: I was shocked to see that Raven dug this song since I am pretty sure I'm the only one of the expert white boy dork fuckers who's openly into the Lil Wayne "best rapper alive" hype stuff. I first heard this song in the summer at some point off one of the leaks of what was supposed to be the Carter III or something and while I thought most of the tracks off that were garbage, this song stood out then as something awesome and still does, but it doesn't really feel like a Wayne track. The Lil Wayne gimmick as I see it is he's just this drugged up maniac spitting all sorts of nonsense at an amazing pace thanks to Baby paying him strictly in blow. I can buy Weezy rapping over all the hottest beats of the week, releasing his 3rd mixtape of the month just to get his hands on some white. I have lines like "And when I was 5, my favorite movie was the Gremlins/ Ain't got shit to do with this, but I just thought that I should mention" to show how off the wall he is. In this track, Wayne kinda sounds like that guy who will give you the play-by-play breakdown of his night and just how fucked up he is. Guy who probably keeps tabs of his fake drink count on his iPhone instead of trying to pick up a female. Did Weezy record this while he was at the University of Houston? Did he rush for one of those black fraternities that brand you after you get in? Even if it doesn't really feel like a Lil Wayne song, thats not really a bad thing. Its trippy and a pretty awesome song to smoke to if that's your thing. In fact, the reason I don't think I'm that into it at this very moment is cuz I'm 100% sober so maybe this song will inspire me to get off this gay intarweb, call up my boy, and see if he wants to smoke a bowl.
5. SAIGON & TRICK DADDY HAVE FIGHTS JD: When I was surfing some blogs to steal music, I ran across the story about Saigon punching Prodigy in the head on stage. After examining the Zapruderesque footage of Saigon jappin' Prodigy from behind, it made me think of how far Mobb Deep has fallen. I do not think you could find a hip hop fan in '95 who did not have The Infamous on repeat, and in a time when a whole mess of hip hop artists fell, I think the Mobb kept it up through Amerika'z Nightmare, which I am listening to right now, but it all started to fall through once they signed with G-Unit. Their best track during their G-Unit time was one that 50 had to put his stupid face all over, which made me hate it by proxy. According to the blogs, the fight with Saigon started over Prodigy saying in an interview that Saigon could suck his dick and/or Saigon was pushed off the stage, so he hit Prodigy. Fuck, if I had a nickel for every time I told someone to suck my dick, I would have about three dollars and at least two blow jobs right now. More importantly, it never led someone to punch me. I don't know if this was legit considering it occured at the release party for Havok's new solo album, which was around the same time Saigon is pimping his album, which I am listening to tracks now, and it sorta sucks. The best thing about the punching thing is after Saigon hit Prodigy he ran off the stage with his buddy and ran to his car. HA! Fuck that, once you punch some dude, shit is on. Running out the door to your car is a gay move for a hip hop guy, or anyone really. I was in one fight in my whole life and it started because some kid shot a paintball gun at my car. I am not a violent dude, but I pulled my car over, walked over to him, and punched him in the face. At that point shit was on. I didn't want to fight the kid considering I worked with him, but I had to save face. Plus I was in high school and if I bitched out, I would have been thought of as a bigger dick than I already was. This was me as a 16 year old. Not finishing the job as a 20-something rapper, is some douchbag shit.
RM: I had heard them talking about this on the extra-terrestrial radio machine the day after, and without seeing pictures, I always get Saigon and Papoose mixed up, being both our the NYC saviours of real-rap once their real shit finally drops, and I couldn't remember if he was the one that looked like Franklin the cartoon turtle or the one that looked like a Brillo pad. I think Saigon is the Brillo pad. A tough month for local rap legends who've made national noise, not just for the Queensbridge's most infamous, but also for Miami's self-proclaimed king. Miami rap history, for an outsider, goes along these lines a little something like this... 2 Live Crew, meaning mainly Luther Campbell was the shit. There's some Uncle Al dude or something that them dudes look up to as Miami's godfather of rap, but basically Luke took that role over once he was paying Hurricane players their paychecks in the V.I.P. rooms of strip clubs he owned. That's when Trick Daddy came along as the shit. He held the role with pizazz, close to being a southern Ol' Dirty Bastard at time, in actions not in lyrical styles, although both of them have made mention on wax of being for the kids numerous times. Then along comes Rick Ross, who became the new shit, meaning Trick Daddy moved up to, conceivably the role of Miami rap godfather. And he tried to play that role, but it came off as cocky and not fair to Rick Ross and Pitbull and whatever other shitty cocaine rappers were blowing up, so resentment grew. Luther Campbell never held anyone down - he let them shine and gave them free champagne at his strip clubs, so he never got hated on, to this day. Trick Daddy has made some non-friends though. This brings us to last week where Trick showed up red-eyed and slurry-mouthed (as a penchant for smoking crack blunts and drinking hard will do to you), and got into an altercation at a strip club with security. Trick Daddy's posse actually, allegedly, called the police, and by the time they got there Trick was all busted up, bloody, and carted out on a stretcher. I am no public relations genius or anything, but if you are a rapper attempting to maintain your street credibility, getting rolled out of a strip club on a stretcher all bloody-faced is not a good move. Getting shot is okay, so long as you never snitch, but getting busted up? Shit, that's not a good street credibility move on the local level for your around-the-corner cats, much less for some self-proclaimed rap superstar like Trick Daddy. Hopefully though, this will lead to some sort of Rick Ross/Trick Daddy beef so that Rick Ross might be inspired to do something worthwhile and Trick Daddy might have another run in the MTV spotlight, hopefully enhancing his more ODB-esque character traits during that time.
KM: I actually kinda dig this in a way. If you look at it from the perspective of how hip-hop has been geared up to dudes slinging hot lead at one another for any perceived slight for years, people punching other people in the face is at least a step down. Granted, there could still be some gunclapper bullshit in any or all of these situations, but my hope is that maybe dudes just stick to the gentlemanly art of trying to whup they ass with fists and feet (and maybe chairs.) Prodigy talked some shit on Saigon, he got hot and hit him in the mouth. That seems reasonable. I never looked at Trick Daddy as a guy who'd have to dodge a fight, but at the same time I never really looked at him as a scrapper. You know how there are dudes who just chill the fuck out most of the time? That's how I saw him. Maybe he tried to get buck without backup or someone decided to try their luck for kicks, who knows and who cares? Hopefully Trick Daddy learned an important lesson others have before and will in the future - the best way to win a fight is not having one and the best way to avoid a fight is to buy a round and walk away. Or maybe he'll go get some training from Kimbo Slice and come back to crush motherfuckers in their tracheas. Or maybe he'll just hire Kimbo like the skeevy porn dudes did and let old boy make statistics out of anyone trying shit with Trick. Possibilities are endless.
6. JAY-Z'S "BLUE MAGIC" SINGLEJD: This is that new single that the "retired" record executive did which is "inspired" by the American Gangster movie. First, I don't fucking get it. The movie didn't come out yet, so maybe I can't make the connection, but what the fuck? The content is just like 95% of the other bullshit Jay does, so I guess everything he has ever done was inspired by a movie that wasn't made at the time. Second, could Pharrell give him a weaker/lamer beat? This sounds like a throwaway beat from Philly's Most Wanted. It just exposes Pharrell as one of the most overhyped producers ever.
Finally, why bother? Is Jay getting that paranoid about becoming irrelevant that he is going to jump on a movie that looks really dope to spew his bullshit all over it? I am not going to front, but I am a fan of Jay's. I think Reasonable Doubt deserves credit that we give to Illmatic and Ready to Die, but the Jay of 2007 shouldn't be comparing himself to Rakim. This is the same dude that may or may not start some sort of diss rap bullshit with LL Cool J. Give it a rest and don't release a whole album of this same uninspired shit that sounds like this single. Chill, name the Nets arena in Brooklyn the Hovatorium, and fade away.
RM: I think the problem with Jay-Z is over-value of self, and not just as an MC within the history of rap music. His shit is too much of the same bullshit for him to be considered one of the all-time greats. But even funnier is his overemphasis of himself as a brilliant young CEO and shit, acting like he's Russell Simmons v2.0. Has there been a single release on Def Jam since camelface took over that the artist didn't fucking complain about how there was no promotion? I remember reading in some interview with Ghost that they didn't even have a set single for Fish Scales and that Jay just wanted to wait and see what radio liked.
This lack of promotion is, of course, what led to this bullshit grade D beef between LL and Jay-Z, since LL's last Def Jam release wasn't promoted enough to be successful. And as stupid a fuck-up Jay-Z is, someone might want to point out to LL that this is not mid-'90s music industry, where you can have a $750,000 video pushed incessantly on the cables, and make it all back by selling into that million into million and a half range instead of the standard platinum. Everybody acted like Kanye/Curtis was the greatest sign of a comeback ever for rap music, and the next week, both of them dropped off to a trickle. And Chamillionaire cracked the top 10 that week with like 70,000 units sold. 70,000? That'd be great if he was still on Swisha House, but I doubt major labels are all that stoked about a 70,000 first-week debut when every other rap album since 2002 ends up doing like a tenth of that the second week.
Part of this is motherfuckers like you and me downloading music, but shit man, let's be honest here... a lot of the problem is the shitty music industry slapping famous names on shitty music and expecting us to be like, "Oh shit, Jay-Z's name is on this shit so I've got to get it!" Too many artists have mailed shit in for too long. I mean fuck, we're hyping up the Kanye West piece of shit as an album of the year, and that's probably proper hype, but if that's the album of the year for hip hop... I don't know, maybe I should start getting into jazz guitarists or some shit. Bill Frisell is pretty fucking rad and that dude releases a CD like every other month. When's the last time hip hop came out with a timeless classic? I've been telling myself for like ten years now that there's another Wu Tang or another Chronic, festering outside of the spotlight about to bust out and crack hip hop on the side of the head and be like, "YO! This is the shit here, so fuck you." And then we'd all - black white and brown, educated and ignorant, wi-fi dial-up and checking our hotmail at the library, old school heads and new school know-it-alls - we'd all get down together, rocking some fire shit in our rides and homes and backyard cookouts. But shit, I don't know... I ain't gonna be a melodramatic faggot and say "OH NO! NAS WAS RIGHT... HIP HOP IS DEAD!" but this shit has definitely been mad perverted into something where dudes think like used car salesmen using tactics from training seminar 3-ring binder notebooks to try and sell me some useless ass undercoating instead of dudes, you know, trying to make good music for the motherfucking sake of making good music, and then letting the chips fall from that.
7. ISAIAH THOMAS IS A PIMPMD: Isaiah sure is lucky there’s like 15 bigger sports news stories going on right now, because sexual harassment is usually something that will take up the first ten minutes of SportsCenter for at least a month straight. Fortunately, there’s all this other shady shit going on in more popular sports and the Yankees are making a run to take down the Red Sox in the AL East for the first time all year, so even NY Sports news is moving Isaiah’s sexual trial to the back pages. Then there’s OJ, which cancels out any actual news.
I just like it that this lady has painted Isaiah to be this serious '70s blaxploitation pimp who starts every sentence off with “bitch”. It also doesn’t help (well it helps the hilarity) that you have Starbury vouching for you that you’re a bad ass pimp and that the accuser is in fact a bitch. Though Starbury would like you to know that she is a bitch, but he has never called her a “black bitch”, just to clarify.
Another suspect claim is when Isaiah told this bitch, “Bitch, I am here to win fucking games”, when in fact the current era NY Knicks may possibly be the worst NY Sports franchise in my lifetime. I mean, I think the Islanders might have been doing worse at some point, but it was at a time where only serious nerds and closet cases paid attention to hockey. Like, back when The National was still a newspaper.
I really wish Isaiah was more of a mongoloid thug like the rest of his former '80s Detroit Pistons teammates so he could really play up this womanizing pimp persona in real life, instead of the smiling, always pleasant guy I thought he was. If every Knicks game started off with a press conference from Isaiah where he said, “Bitch, I don’t give a shit about any of you crackers, all I care about is pussy and if you have a problem, you can kiss my multiple championship rings. I’ll see your stank asses after the game motherfuckers,” the Knicks would quickly become my all time favoritest sports team ever.
JD: The Isaiah deal is some crazy shit. Every time there is a court date, new hilarious shit comes out. Most recently, Isaiah was quoted as telling his accuser, "What the fuck is your job? What are your job responsibilities, you fucking ho?" Then following up that gem with, "Don't forget, you fucking bitch, I'm the President of this fucking team." Awesome. After the Dolemite word play, Isaiah would then flip his game to being in love with her. A witness said he was groping her at a Knicks public practice, and Isaiah's accuser said he compared their relationship to the movie "Love and Basketball". Oh, and the owner of MSG and the Knicks fired the accuser to get her out of there. What I gather from all of this is MSG and/or the NY Knicks is the greatest place to work if you are a man. You can bang interns like Starbury, verbally assault females, and try to get mad pussy from whoever, and if it doesn't work, your boss fires them. NBA is MANNNN-Tastic. Gay.
RM: What the fuck is this, a sports blog all of a sudden? Two NBA blurbs in the middle of September? What the fuck is next, weekly reports on where the top 50 basketball juniors committed to for next year? Isaiah Thomas has always looked like a creepy fucker with his eyes just barely sideways on his head like he's part fish, so I'm surprised he just didn't rape the bitch in the first place.
Seriously though, I didn't think attempting to be king-sized dorks in the nerdtastic confines of the rap blogosphere could be topped, but apparently now we are ESPN Page 7. Stay tuned for next month, when we reveal the most hilarious Division III mascots! Plus, in-depth behind-the-scenes non-NBA player scouting from the European championships! And all the gay-blasts and self-loathing you've come to love from us!
8. PERCEE P'S PERSEVERANCE CDJD: OMG MADLIB DID THE BEATS~~!!~!~ LET ME CHANGE MY DRAWERS FROM THE IMMENSE LOAD OF CUM I JUST DROPPED IN THEM FROM THE BEATS~!~#!!@!~OM GZ!@~!
I am not a Madlib fan. I do realize that that statement is probably the opposite of what an Expert Whiteboy should feel. I don't find taking samples from the most obscure bullshit Iranian porn movies that pleasant to my hip hop palette. However, I can deal with Madlib when he does two things: First, stay the fuck away from the mic. Doing an imitation of a retarded baby isn't that cool. If I drive my car into the church steps, I can do a cool retard baby imitation too. Second, when he makes hip hop beats people can rhyme over. This album isn't bad. But I am sure it will continue to receive the blog fellatio because Madlib did the beats.
MD: I basically hate John after that blurb above because I feel that was a direct dis at me, and it's unfortunate John couldn't call up all the black people he hung out with in college (John went to Hillman with Dwayne Wayne and Lisa Bonet) to see how they felt about this Percee P record.
Anyway, I'm a pretty big fan of Madlib and all, but once I heard it was going to be 100% produced by him, I thought it was going to suck, because like John said, Madlib is all about finding obscure Iranian (PC term would be Persian) porno samples, and Percee P is the type of guy that would sound comfortable on one of your seven popular drum breaks from the early '90s and some James Brown loops.
The end result isn't as bad as I thought it would be, and outside of a few songs, Percee P does a good enough job working his style into Madlib's weirdness. The Vinnie Paz verse caught me by surprise because I didn't even know he was on the record, and that sounded PAINFUL. I don't want Vinnie Paz getting that close to a Madlib beat ever again. He didn't even bother to say "faggot" a lot.
All in all, I wish this was just another Madlib Instrumental CD, but I know Percee is some old fogey rap dude that blog nerds are supposed to cum all over, and Madlib is a dude that internet dudes liked cumming all over a couple years ago, so I guess when they came up with the idea for this record a couple years ago, it seemed like something that would be making Stones Throw heavily semen stained piles of money.
RM: I had hyped myself up for this for some reason, and I got into it a little bit, but after three or four songs, it was the same shit over and over. I was playing it for a second listen and my pregnant wife was sitting on the couch in the next room, and she goes, "What are you listening to?" And I groan, "Why?" assuming she's gonna shit on it like always because it's not Arrested Development or Jurassic 5, but she answered, "It's oddly relaxing, just calmly repetitive." When you are making some shit that puts pregnant thirtysomething white women into a calm meditative trance, you might want to mix in some sort of methamphetamines into your daily routine while working on the music.
9. THIS MONTH IN DIPSET MD: I took last month off from this continuous entry because nothing that great was going on in the ongoing Dipset saga, but business has really picked up this month. Let's review...
Team Leader Cam is still missing as far as I know.
Shift Manager Jim Jones is more than likely signing to rival franchise, G-Unit. No word on whether or not he will take the place of current G-Unit Shift Manager Tony Yayo, or if he'll play a smaller role in the company.
Employee of the Month J. R. Writer recieved a promotion and has reportedly signed a "seven-figure multi-album deal" with somewhat notable indie label Babygrande. I'm not sure where Babygrande got seven figures to sign J.R., but something tells me the "multi-album" part of the contract is the key. I wouldn't doubt it that it's some kind of ridiculous album deal where he has to release 12 albums in 7 years or the "seven-figure" part becomes void.
Hell Rell, who is projected to get the now open Shift Manager position released an album this month, and some are saying it isn't as horrible as the album cover would lead you to believe. I've only heard one song off of it, and it sounded like Dipset's 900th try at trying to capture the magic of "Get 'Em Girls".
Juelz Santana has been calling in sick for a while, but as far as I know, he's still on Def Jam and continues to enjoy the life of an actual successful recording artist.
RM: Actually, Jim Jones and Juelz Santana were onstage with 50 Cent recently, adding to the soap opera drama and speculation. I'm sure being in G-Unit will open many doors for Jim Jones, just like it did for Mobb Deep, and also since "Ballin'" is so superior to "Shook Ones - Pt. 2".
I'd like to know how the Dipset farm system is shaping up. Like, who's their big star in four years? G-Unit is obviously the Yankees, just buying up outdated overpriced superstars to half ass their way through guaranteed gold records (maybe). If Dipset wants to compete through free agency, it looks like Swisha House is having a fire sale, but most of those guys don't hit well outside the Southern League.
Actually, on a semi-related funny note, I was digging through some unlabelled videotapes the other weekend, trying to find the tape we dubbed Mouse House from the library for our oldest daughter when she was like four, since our second kid is like four and she'd be loving on that shit if I could find it. While going through unlabelled tapes, I found one where I taped that Louis Farrakhan sitdown with Ja Rule to squash the Ja Rule/50 Cent beef. That shit's really funny now because Ja Rule is so far gone from public consciousness it makes no sense to me nowadays mind. And here 50 Cent still is - videotapes obsolete, record sales obsolete, in fact actual records actually obsolete and only CDs that don't sell and imaginary MP3s with their lackluster sound effects that people easily steal rather than acquire - doing his same ol' thing.
For those of you who care, I never did find the Mouse House tape, nor did I find the tape I made of all Wu videos and Wu appearances on Rap City (Killa Army on a park bench - featuring the Sunz of Man "video" for "12 Archangels"), but I did find a tape full of Sid & Marty Krofft shit, and the youngest has really been digging on The Buggaloos. Also, I'm sure she'll dig Gomer Pyle as that funny robot with a gay southern accent. Most post-toddler pre-schoolers sound like robots with gay southern accents anyways. Shit like that show's right up their alley.
10. RAEKWON'S VATICAN MIXTAPE IIIJD: Raekwon is on a pace to pass out Lil Wayne and his mixtape every 15 minute pace with yet another mixtape. As a Wu fanboy, I have to say, JUST RELEASE CUBAN LINX II FOR FUCKS SAKE!
I don’t see what Raekwon gets out of these things because I doubt many people are lining up to scoop up Vatican Mixtape III, outside of paying off that van he was driving around a couple of years ago hyping CLII. That’s right, he was driving his hip hop Oscar Meyer hotdog car over two years ago. It boggles my mind that there is a finished follow-up to one of the best hip hop albums of the last dozen years or so sitting as a file on a computer just collecting virtual dust. Could there be that much political bullshit holding it up?
I doubt it, I think the album was done, and it sucked. Whoever is the brainpower behind Rae is having him pump out mixtapes just as bait to see if people still dig on him 12 years past Cuban Linx.
The mixtape culture of hip hop is a fascinating one to me. With the internet and sites like datpiff, you can find these mixtapes for free, so what is the point? There is no way Raekwon, Lil Wayne, Saigon, Papoose, and whoever fuck else can really have enough GOOD material for 68 mixtapes. And why do people have this fascination to listen to throwaway beats or dudes rhyming over other people’s beats? I don’t get it and I think I never will. Mixtapes to me have always been something you make, and not buy.
MD: I showed John the link to a post on Unkut that more or less said why Cuban Linx II probably isn't coming out for a while, but he must have forgot about it. I haven't listened to this new mixtape, but I did hear one song off of it by accident, and it had the same problems all newer Wu stuff has - the vocals sound like Raekwon is falling asleep and they were recorded on a laptop nowhere near a real recording studio. That's been the Wu M.O. for the past few years now, and it's really not getting me excited to hear the new Cuban Linx CD if it ever comes out. Rae tricked me into listening to that Ice Water CD too, and outside of the first single, which was like if Tha Lox were friends with the Wu Tang Clan, it was laughably bad. Unfortunately, I don't have anything else to say about this, but I'm just trying to fill my quota here.
RM: I would like to speak on mixtapes, as John talked on, because I'm an old ass faggot internet codger fuckface who used to go to Angie's Records and Tapes in Richmond's notorious southside, which basically had the same 50 records in the bins up front, a slew of mixtapes in a glass case at the counter which people actually bought, and you'd ask to see the water pipes, which meant the dude working there would take you to the back room where you could buy bongs, pipes, crack vials by the 100s, those tiny little plastic bags we've all bought drugs in but you can't find on the CVS shelves no matter how hard you look, so we end up having to do that trick where we use a regular-sized sandwich bag to put a dimebag in, hold it cornerwise, twist it and then put a lighter to the twist to seal it and tear off the top part and you have a nice sealed up dimebag for some chump-ass. Anyways, at Angie's you'd get mixtapes where dudes who were DJs who didn't yell over the whole motherfucking thing had newer tracks and usually three or four "freestyles" where some dude rhymed over someone else's beat that was hot about two months ago. It was a good formula, and I'll always be commercially loyal to Tony Touch for being the best at that shit ever back in those days. But to just release a bunch of throwaway rhymes over other dudes' beats and throwing up the mixtapes on the internet for people to check out... it seems crazy. I don't think money is being made at all, unless they're ripping off whoever puts out the mixtape, because even back when I bought mixtapes at Angie's, five of every seven you bought was a bootleg mixtape, so the DJs always had their contact info on the back sleeve for booking.
As for Raekwon, I heard some of the Ice Water and it was like Theodore Unit but three degrees less interesting. I'm sure the Wu record will sell a million copies because there's tons of fucks who're all about the Wu, but I'd be interested in how many Wu fanboys from back in the early days are still on board at this point. I think we're basically dealing with all those dudes younger cousins at this point, who think they're buying into something magnificently special, when the Wu has long lost its luster, and at this point even a good entire Wu song is like Joe Montana engineering a 4th quarter comeback in a Kansas City Chiefs uniform - more a memory of past things accomplished than future things to come.
Basically, if I was King Jew of the RIAA, here's what I'd do to make Wu viable and plus make a bazillion dollars. The whole Kanye vs. 50 thing hyped wallets up to spend money that one Tuesday a few weeks back, and I heard Jay-Z was gonna engineer a similar thing on Def Jam for the new Jay-Z and Nas releases, so I figure you take the eight most Wu members alive (originally they were eight in major mag interviews, but Master Killa became the 9th, but ODB is dead), and you have all the subjugate crew members be forced to sign allegiance to one of the eight Wu members, including beatmakers and everything. Then you just have a single elimination two CD face-off, once every other month. Like the first one could be GZA vs. Master Killa, and whoever sold less lost and was eliminated from the tournament, and then whoever he was and his underlings could all allign themselves with whoever else was still alive. You do this shit single elimination over the course of a year until you end up with like a RZA/GZA/Inspektah Deck/U-God vs. Method Man/Ghostface/Raekwon/Master Killa CD vs. CD battle, and by that time I'm sure some things would be personal between members. It'd take a while to run its course, but it'd totally push forward that Tuesday rap release as UFC mentality, and it'd make Wu worth a shit again, because ideally, they'd start to give half a fuck again. My money would be on Ghost, especially if he got Bronze Nazareth on his team.
11. GREG ODEN IS BROKE-LEGGEDJD: I am a big NBA fool, and using this foolish knowledge, I can say that Oden would have been a dominant dude. Driving to school today, I came up with this theory about basketball players, and that is if you look like you are older than you are, than you will be good. Look at old pics of Kareem, Russell, Magic, Wilt, and LeBron... All those dudes looked at least ten years older than what they are. LeBron is only like 22 and he looks like he is 45, and Oden looks like one of those Jamaican dudes who were friends with Dr. Huxtable that would play some weird Jamaican game in the backyard on the Cosby Show.
Reading new info, after Oden skipped out on USA Basketball, he went on this long vacation where he might have fucked up his knee. I guess banging short, white broads at Sandals resort is not good for the joints. USA Today said he realized his knee was fucked up when he stood up after sitting on the couch and felt some cracking. The human body is fucking insane for a guy to have passed all his pre-draft physicals, and then end up needing some weird-ass surgery that is meant for old people at age 19. This microfracture surgery is when they poke holes in the bone of your knee to allow the cartilage to produce cartilage again. I think NBA dudes started getting it in 2000 and dudes like Jason Kidd, Allan Houston, Amare Stoudmire, Vince Carter, and Kenyon Martin all had the surgery with most players recovering minus Martin. So Oden has hope.
The NBA is always in this weird place where you are either a hardcore fan, or you could give a fuck about it. Not since Bird, Jordan, and Magic has the league been followed by the “casual fan”; this year’s draft with Oden and Durant was going to be attempt 2,000 to get players that transcend the NBA to cross over to the casual fan. But that shit is not happening. I wouldn’t say he is the biggest bust ever yet, but if he recovers like Jamal Mashburn and Allan Houston recovered, Portland is fucked hard.
BWT: Around like February of last year the Oden/Durant debate really heated up into one of those sports things where you had to pick sides. I saw Durant get lit up by a mediocre at best Villanova team in person and after that I was an Oden man. My reasoning was and still is that guys who can put up 25 are a dime a baker's dozen in the NBA. Guys who can dominate the post on both ends, well, aren't. Even if Oden was just decent he would like automatically be a top three guy at his position behind that 7'6" Asian dude who looks like he has down's and that Jesus freak teenager down in Disney. So while I'm not a Blazers fan, it sucks that the Oden pick I have been defending since February just blew up in my face but oh well I'm a Sixers fan and this makes me feel a little better that my team played it's way out of a lottery pick by winning meaningless games in April with a bunch of jobbers.
As for how all of this will end up? I dunno I mean, it sounds like most guys are able to come back from this but he is a 47 year old man and the NBA don't have too many of those guys unless you count Dikembe but he's ageless due to drinking the blood of starving kids trapped in some village in the Congo.
RM: In here I expose my sports nerdery because I always mock John Dawson for being an NBA fan. But fuck this injury, it won't matter. Durant is, like BWT pointed out, common. He is Carmelo Anthony and the three or four dudes just like that before him, one of which was Allen Iverson, which is why A.I. and Carmelo on the same team is AMAZING because it's two pseudo-hype fake-Jordans together on the same team, like you were playing NBA Live on la computadora.
I mostly feel bad for Portland. It's a mid-sized city full of liberal-assed hippie punk rock fucks, and the whole Jailblazers shit tested their tolerance. (What do you call a white dude with two black guys? Liberal. What do you call a white guy with five black dudes? Coach. Haha, says my dead pops, who taught me them jokes.) They cleaned up that team, and Greg Oden - not to sound like a homo Sportscenter color commentator - seems like a solid cat. You'd like to see him give Portland some hope for the future beyond punk poetry coffeeshops and blue state precincts.
12. DJ MICK BOOGIE & THE KIDS IN THE HALL'S DETENTION MIXTAPEJD: It was a boring night at the Dawson household, as most are being a 30-something married dude, so I hit up the net to find some new music this afternoon, and I stumbled upon the Kids in the Hall mixtape. After the awful album they put out that we shitted on a few months ago, I thought I would give the mixtape a chance. When you have a new spindle of blank CDs, there is room to just DL shit on a whim, but man I am glad I DLed this.
I don't know if it is Mick Boogie's production or the MCs, but this shit is really good. We are all cynical bastards that are so quick to jump down the throat of something that either the "mainstream" might like, or are so "underground" that it would be gay to really like it, but this is an exception. I will stand up for this mixtape amongst the other assholes on the EWA panel.
It is creative (see the first track with the MCs rhyming over a dude banging on a table), the beats are a fantastic mix of the typical underground sound and the mixtape-ish random beats, and the MCs are really on point. Maybe it is the freedom of being on a mixtape, or maybe it is Mick Boogie, but this is on the Little Brother/DJ Drama level of a mixtape being so much better than anything that was released in album form. I wonder if the new Rawkus is so hell-bent on being underground that they lay a heavy hand on the group to make them sound like every other underground group that is being jocked? Whatever the case, this shit is dope and it has re-listen value in that each time you listen to it another track stands out.
This shit is one of the reasons I enjoy doing the EWA 25 so much. We are grasping at straws to finish out the 25 at the end of the month looking for content and you find some shit like this.
RM: I guess I was supposed to be the second person to listen at this, but fuck all that. That piece of shit CD they had out sucked far too much for me to bother, regardless of what John tries to convince me (although, it is interesting to note how almost every other "notable" mixtape that seems to come out is by Mick Boogie - that dude is on to something apparently).
Mixtapes themselves are ridiculous. Everybody has mixtapes galore (my mom just sendspaced me a mixtape she did over some old Bad Boy beats over the weekend, she really rips it talking about putting crushed green olives in deviled eggs to secretly spice them up over the "Get Money" instrumental), and the shit's even crazier because it's not even mixtapes. Now understand, I'm like 7000 years old and used to actually buy actual mixtapes on cassettes (which I probably mentioned elsewhere this month, but fuck it, I'm a drunkard so I say the same shit over and over and add different shit each time so eventually you realize I'm completely full of shit and don't even bother listening), and it seemed weird to me when mix CDs still referred to themselves as mixtapes. I wasn't knocking mix CDs, it's just they weren't tapes. Why wouldn't you just call yourself a mix CD? Now, the shit's not even on CD for the majority of people and it's fucking little digitized 0s and 1s clumped together that you download into your personal robot, so it's not even a mix CD. It's just some shit, with little DJ skills anymore, and dudes just rhyming over top of other beats other people used or shit that has samples they can't clear. It's not even close to being an actual mixtape. Again, why wouldn't it just say, "Hey, this is a file of a free mix featuring these fucks you probably don't care about," instead of calling it a mixtape? I mean, if I fuck a dude's ass, even in jail, it's not really getting pussy even when you call it "jail pussy". And if I'm just fucking some vibrating machine that plugs into a socket that I have to manually clean out afterwards, and you can't use a lot of water because cum and water turn into like gelatin glue, that's not getting pussy either. So I wouldn't call it getting pussy to do that stupid shit.
Also motherfuck Rawkus, motherfuck the Internetz, and motherfuck you kids with your fucked up bullshit. I hope you all get AIDS off of craigslist hook-ups.
MD: My Bad. I actually listened to this, and didn't get around to writing about it. John's right, this is slightly better than their original album, but who gives a fuck about that? I want to know more about this green olives in deviled eggs thing that Raven's mom does. I'll tell you straight up, if it wasn't bad for you to eat eggs all day and if it didn't make you so gassy, I could eat deviled eggs all day, every day, but I've never heard of this green olives recipe. I really hate green olives, so I don't think I'd like it, but I'd definitely be willing to try it. I don't know how to make deviled eggs, so I just wait for my mom to make them. I don't even know how you get the egg yolk part to turn into the goopy egg filling, but all my mom does is make the egg filling part and put some paprika on it and it's fucking perfect. Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I don't think I could tolerate foreign objects like green olives in my deviled eggs, but I still might have to try one or ten. Of course, I'll have to wait until my mom feels like making them and then suggest she put some olives in a couple, and she'll probably smack me, but I'm not about to learn how to make deviled eggs just to fuck them up with olives. I seriously wouldn't even be able to control myself if I learned how to make them. I'd be going through five dozen a day and surely die of cholesterol and chicken fetus poisoning within months.
RM: Actually, I was just joshing you dude. My mom doesn't have a mixtape, and to be honest, can't cook worth a shit. But I'm a good cook, and I've been hanging with this kid DJ Montgomery Montague IX lately since he's been hooking up beats on a stolen laptop that had Protools on it already. He used to be this juggalo kid that worked at the grocery store (with a mohawk), but now he's into the more acceptable forms of hip hop, and gave himself that wacky DJ name (reppin' the Two Much Money Too Fold Clique, aka 2M$2F, which he thinks is a clever group sex reference), and I go over to his house and drink his beer and smoke some of his crazy modern biotropic colored weed and then just freestyle over his beats, and it's been funny to me lately to just freestyle about cooking, since I'm a pretty good cook. Then when we're low on beer, he goes to the store to get beer and his girlfriend, who's 19, lets me suck on her titties while she plays with my penis, but only with her hand since she's got a man.
Anyways, the green olive thing is actually my trick, and when you learn how to make the egg goop, then you take a garlic press and crush the fuck out of green olives so they become almost invisible and add that to the egg goop. That shit's awesome.
13. PERSONAL POOKIESRM: My dabbling in leisurely crack use took a turn for the scary a few weeks back when, in trying to get some crack from a shady apartment building near Dillwyn, I ran into a dude I used to be tight with way back in the day. Metalhead Dan is what we called him back then, but mostly he's just Dan to regular people, and I hadn't seen him in probably ten years, even though we were best friends forever drawing thrash metal album covers on his mom's house's walls when we were 13 and shit. I didn't want to see him the way I saw him though, at the sketchy apartment building, looking a little too acclimated to the sketch, dirty short-and-long hair, ragged Dale Earnhardt Jr. t-shirt and crusty jeans, hanging around the crack den. When he saw me, he didn't really perk up at first, because I could see he wasn't so disconnected from reality that he wasn't embarrassed at how he looked and where he was, but when I mistakenly made mention I was looking for some rocks, his face brightened up a thousand percent. I knew before I said it that it was a mistake. I could see in that ten seconds of him turning to look for his man to hook me up the whole thinking - how he could share some good times with an old friend and how I was driving a nice truck so I'd be good for a nice-sized binge and how I couldn't turn down an old friend. Seriously, the shit bugged me out with the quickness, and I grabbed my cellphone out my pocket like it was on vibrate mode and flipped it open and pretended to talk so that I could be like, "Oh really... fuck... alright, I'm on the way right now," then to Metalhead Dan, "Shit man, I've got some shit I gotta go do. You gonna be around? I'll swing back later tonight." And he said yeah, looking sad we weren't gonna smoke it up right then, but his little cracked out mind was spinning - you can see that shit in their eyes as it happens - and he hit me up for five bucks till I came back. I gave it to him, figuring fuck, that's buying my way out of this shit, and I ain't never heading that way again. Shit was scary seeing him all burned out. A couple of times since then, I've had the urge to blow off an afternoon smoking a few rocks at the river, you know, just to waste some time and shit, but each time I've thought of Metalhead Dan outside that scummy-ass apartment building and went ahead and just got a 12-pack for the riverside relaxing. Fuck ending up like that, even if by accident. That's a hard ass accident to fix back up from.
MD: I've been racking my brain trying to think of a good companion piece for this, but the differences in mine and Raven's writing is blocking me out of doing so. Raven writes all this deeply personal shit about his real life, and I've been reading his stuff for so long (around 7 years) that not only do I feel like I know entirely too much information about him, but also the supporting cast of characters in his life. Outside of Raven's dead dog Waylon, Metalhead Dan has always been my favorite to read about.
Now on my side of things, I am not a deeply personal writer. If I write about real life situations they are either highly exaggerated or a blatant lie. Even simple things I write about, like if I talked about a trip to the store, it's most likely a lie, because I don't give a shit, nor do I want you to know that I frequent stores. It's nothing against you personally, I just feel that I shouldn't exploit my.... exploits until I see some greenbacks for it. So from now on, please remember everything I write about is 99% lie. Then again, I could be lying about that and 99% of everything I write about is true. That's the beauty of the faceless internet, it keeps you on your toes.
Back to Raven though. I was glad to hear Raven ran into Metalhead Dan again. I'd also be lying if I said I didn't want Raven to start Crackin' It Up again, because I want him to hit rock bottom so I can buy the option to his life story at a low price and make millions in Hollywood.
14. ALI & GIPP'S KINFOLK CDRM: I'd been seeing this floating around more and more in the past couple months, so I finally copped it at the bootleg spot to check it out. And it's not completely unenjoyable, but basically a hodgepodge of other shit that's not great but better than snap/trap/crap synth beats that have been so big on the radio the past year or two. Ali and Gipp are lower-rung members of the St. Lunatics and Goodie Mobb, respectively, and they've come together and brought all the quality high spots you'd expect - Big Rube stepping up with Def Poetry Slam Ex-Convict intros, Nelly just naturally sing-rapping another annoyingly catchy hook, even Ceelo dropping in to snarl his way through a refrain. The CD bites off homages to Houston style (talking on that lean) and Memphis style (featuring Three Six of course) and is just a general mixture of southern Friday night, just cashed a check and I'm riding around in a fresh shirt, ain't looking to do nothing but get my dick covered in pussy juice, my lungs full of reefer smoke, and my bloodstream slurred up with that vodka and beer style feelings. Which is a great feeling. We can't be all intelligent and high-minded our whole life, or we'd go crazy and shit. You need shit like this too, to get loose with.
But it's not that great a CD, even if it is refreshing. Mostly, it made me sad for the loss of Goodie Mobb (even though, supposedly, they're gonna do another album) as a four-man unit. Their first two albums were some great shit, and get lost in the shuffle of that time in rap music when so much good to great shit was coming out. Unlike today, where some half-assed crap with a flashy cover seems genius (see Kanye West blurbs). Goodie Mobb had a great mix, with Big Rube doing his ex-convict slams and Gipp just being that weird dude who was so into dancing and weird fashions that you were glad he was fucking your cousin so that you knew he wasn't gay and Ceelo being raw but also have an attention to things beyond his immediate environment and that other T-Mo dude good for just adding the standard gold chain drug gang I love the block for life vibe to the background. That was a great team, and having guest spots on every other song doesn't recreate the chemistry of an actual team that takes a CD from being more than not-just-as-crappy-as-everything-else and gives it a shot at being classic material.
MD: Not only is this the worst record of the year, miraculously edging out the new Lords of the Underground CD, but it's also the worst record of the decade so far. I was completely floored with how bad it was. This is seriously the Blair Witch part 2 of albums. On top of that, I'm pretty certain Raven was fucking with me by nominating this because the last track on here uses a sample that Madlib has very prominently used in the past.
There's a lot of talk about shopping at the mall on this record, which I guess is a way to express that you have a lot of money, but I shop at the mall almost every weekend and I'm broke as fuck. There's another part where one of the guys (I already can't remember who is who because I blocked it out of mymemory) mentions that he's wearing $1000 jeans. You know, it would be an incredible suspension of disbelief for me to think these guys don't have day jobs. Forget being able to afford thousand dollar jeans. Maybe their jobs are hanging out with Nelly and Cee-lo, and maybe they get allowances to shop at the mall and buy thousand dollar jeans. How fucking old are these guys? Avril Lavigne is like 15 years old and doesn't brag about shopping at the fucking mall. What the fuck is wrong with you Ali & Gipp? You guys need to be banned from recording anything ever again. You fucking assholes. It's probably easy for you to shop at the mall because you work at mall kiosks selling those dumb fucking helicopter things that fly up to the top of the mall and soar down to hit an unsuspecting passer by. All copies of this CD need to be confiscated and burned immediately.
15. MAVADO'S GANGSTA FOR LIFE CDRM: As a white dude with dreadlocks, I find it's my societal duty to pump the dancehall in my truck at least a couple days a month, so that I can look like a complete tool to the random passersby. All too often, we get so hung up on being cool ourselves and looking down at others that we forget how easy it is to bring other folks up by making ourselves look stupider than fuck. I'm not gonna ever see most of the people I randomly pass again, so who cares if they see some dreadlocked hillbilly in a paint-splattered truck pumping the raggajamz out of strained speakers and laugh at me? I've made their day better, at my expense, and with no harm to me.
Anyways, I had heard of this Mavado dude forever in magazines that hype up that type of shit, and bought a couple of reggae mixes over the past year that had him on it, and I liked him. He sorta stands out because it's not that same SUPERHYPE CADENCE OVER FAMILIAR HIP HOP BREAKBEAT flow that he's got. There's melody and it's a mix somewhere between traditional reggae and the dancehall style we've all come to know and hate because of AM reggaetone stations. This Gangsta For Life CD will probably become my go-to CD for when I'm trying to cultivate that what-a-fool-assed-dreadlocked-whiteboy-so-corny image riding around and shit. I don't have a tape player in my ride anymore, so my collection of Tony Touch reggae mixes from the mid-'90s before Tony Toca set off the reggaetone explosion are useless to me. The beats on this CD are not that annoying ass "Hey, we took the boomingest line of a club banging beat and looped it incessantly so some dude can yell over it in Jamaican patois" like Elephant Man does so well. There's layers, and I think even my hippie ol' lady will pump this in her robot ipod machine. I'm not pseudo-patois rasta white dude Collie Buddz style guy anyways, so to be honest, I don't know what the fuck he's saying two-thirds of the time - it's mostly cadence and linguistic patterns when it comes to dancehall with me. But Mavado's style is so different from the standard dancehall that's been prominent since, well fuck, since forever... going back to Supercat and Shabba Ranks.
If you are the type who listens to this type of shit at all, this CD ain't gonna let you down. Unless you're really hung up on it all sounding the same like the aforementioned NYC breakbeat dude yelling "PON DE FIRE PON DE FIRE BUCK BUCK" the whole time. Then you may not like it.
MD: Has anyone seen that movie Shottas? I don't blame you if you haven't. It's like the Ali & Gipp CD of movies. It stars a 9th tier Marley and there isn't any part of the movie that makes realistic sense. It's just shooting in broad daylight with no repercussions for an hour and a half. Master P movies have more plot structure.
Anyway, I think this Mugato CD was playing the entire time under the movie. I don't understand this new type of reggae that's sort of like dancehall, but doesn't really have the repetitive beats or anything. I guess this is more like rap music for Jamaicans than dancehall is. I think if you liked this CD, you might want to check out Shottas though. The best part is when the Shottas (which is Jamaican for "Gangstas") go into the jewelry store to buy expensive things, and the one Shotta talks to the jewelry lady for like two minutes, and the next thing you know he's fucking her from behind in the back room. Just like that.
16. DAMIEN HIRST'S $100 MILLION SKULL
(PICTURE NOT AVAILABLE)
RM: For those not in the know, there's this shyster artist dude named Damien Hirst who recently became the most successful living artist on the earthball by selling his latest piece to an anonymous collective for $100 mil. His piece was a platinum cast of a human skull that he then covered in like 10 million dollars worth of diamonds that were supposedly guilt-free or some shit like that, meaning that they weren't straight up jacked from broke ass African people. In the process of doing this piece though, the cost of those diamonds went up, since he used so many, probably making cheap regular exploitation route diamonds even more popular as well. But I digress.
The piece itself is completely ridiculous and relates to hip hop because it is the bling-bling mentality to the nth degree. A platinum skull covered in diamonds? As some sort of art statement? What the fuck is the statement? The whole thing is just ridiculous on so many levels. Why would a supposed serious artist basically undertake the task of creating in real life what Tha Shop Boyz photoshopped together for their album cover art? And how does selling a useless hunk of precious materials like this call attention to guilt-free diamonds or whatever the fuck I read this Hirst dude talking up in some interview? I mean, folks have blood disease and famine and fly crawling around on their unfocused eyeballs, and this dude's cashing a $100 million check from anonymous art collector collectives. (Even stranger is how it's rumored that Hirst is actually part of the collective, meaning he helped buy his own art at the highest rate ever a piece of art has been purchased from a living artist, sort of self-creating this status.)
The whole thing seems crazy to me that somebody would do that. I mean, I can understand some stoner kid buying a ceramic skull at Spencer's and then hot glue gunning swarovsky crystals from the craft store all over it as a cool trip toy to have laying around his living room beside that glass orb with eletricity inside it that crackles towards your fingertips, but for a for-real bonafide "artist" to do some silly shit like this... I don't know. Every day, I get one step closer to understanding why them dudes rammed jet planes into the World Trade Center.
KM: Motherfuck this stupid motherfucker and his stupid motherfucking blinged out skull. I read about this in a not-rap magazine (maybe Wired), but then saw something about it in XXL or Ozone or something and wanted to punch the guy in the dick. Are you fucking kidding me? 10 million dollars worth of diamonds attached to a human skull? In the first place, whatever bullshit ass "point" he was trying to make to draw attention to the plight of guilt diamonds in Africa is absolutely disingenuous. That motherfucker wanted to make 100 million dollars, bottom line. The only way I could begin to believe he set out to fix a global wrong is if he donates like 89% of that shit to humanitarian aid in Africa. I can't even personally justify going for a 1% profit if you spent 10 million dollars because you don't fucking need money in any real sense if you spend that much on something like this - but I'm trying to be reasonable. Raven brings up a good point about how this entire situation just ran up the value for OMG BLOOD DIAMONDZ as well.
And secondly, he's a stupid motherfucker because he glued it to a human skull. Artsy-fartsy, put that shit on some gold or platinum if you want to bling out properly. Whoever bought it will probably pop all the diamonds out and do whatever they want anyway. I am also taking this opportunity to talk shit about Pall Wall, who had an interview in Down where he's trying to talk about how his trip to Africa changed his mind and opened his eyes about the diamond trade. Obviously, he missed the fucking boat completely but still wants to get credit for being a deep person. He says that you HAVE TO support the "guilt-free" diamond producers because it's their national product and that's how they live and eat and oh the African babies will starve. Cracka, please! Those African babies are starving because conditions in Africa fucking suck. By pumping cash into the diamond trade, you finance those fucking sucky conditions by keeping the fucking sucky governments running. Guilt-free, my ass. That'd be like someone in the good old days saying if you don't buy cotton then slaves would starve and hey, there are plantation owners who DON'T completely mistreat their slaves. I mean they are slaves, right? You can treat them well and still FUCKING OWN PEOPLE, DENY THEM HUMAN RIGHTS AND TREAT THEM AS SUB-HUMANS. That guilt-free bullshit is some serious spin to help all these bling-crazed motherfuckers sleep a little better at night. I don't feel as bad for not buying Paul Wall's album anymore. I guess that means I feel negative-bad about it, it wasn't something I regretted before this. PS: Fuck DeBeers.
RM: The thing that makes me laugh heartily about the immense fuckeduptitude of Africa is how you get these red shirt campaigns for Darfur or AfricAIDS or whatever the fuck, but you still have to buy some useless shit to "help". Also, and this is basically my problem with "liberal" political-thinking types (which is not to insinuate I lean the other way) is that, the basic problem is meddling ass people have fucked up shit, yet people who could be labelled liberal stereotypically think the solution is for more meddling. I say fuck it, let people do them for themselves. Global warming? Anything we do to fix that shit will fuck up five other things. Just let it happen. Motherfuckers will adapt to survive or they'll die. And I'm sure the counter-argument to the insensitivity of that is the whole "OMG 5% MAKE 95% OF THE WEALTH WTF?!?!? LET'S MAKE PAPER MACHE PUPPETS TO PROTEST!" But most of those types come from affluence as well, even if they self-righteously shun it as much as is comfortable for them. I just say fuck rich people. I wish more people would kill them, which is why I have a block against personal wealth, which is why I can never get ahead in life because I've been mentally acclimated towards identifying my broke-assedness as some sort of nobility. I could change my attitude and get rich or try dying, or I could just accept my poverty is nobility mentality and form redneck ninja Al-Qaeda-like terrorist cells. But most likely I'll just be self-paralyzed in the head, drink a lot of beer, listen to a lot of shitty music, and write a whole bunch of stupid words about it all to entertain myself until finally a fried chicken thigh clogs up my last major artery.
17. MIKE JONES' "TURNING HEADS" SONGRM: Rap nerds have always hated Mike Jones, but now it seems even shitty southern rap fans hate Mike Jones, probably because he doesn't switch up to the flavor of the month. Or maybe because Chamillionaire is the new T.I. in southern rap fan thinking, and Cham could squash Mike Jones. Yet Mike Jones has never delivered a shitty single. Never. Yeah, whatever, that "Still Tippin'" was supposed to be Slim Thug's song originally, but whatever. Pumping Mike Jones is like scratching poison ivy, you shouldn't do it and if anybody sees you doing it they'll act like it's a no-no too, but it feels good when you allow yourself to let it happen.
I may be the only person left on earth (at least from perusing the internetz) who is bummed The American Dream album hasn't come out yet. I'm sure there's shady shit galore going on, as his Ice Age is still distributed by Swishahouse, but he's had beef with Swishahouse, and how knows what happens after it goes through that middle man to the major label behind it all that probably is not liking the bottom line number of spins that "My 6-4" got on Clear Channel stations considering they paid out the money for a Snoop Dogg guest spot... fuck all that business shit.
I guess that's why Screw tapes are so great because there's no business at all to them, just some songs, then at the end an instrumental and Fat Pat or Lil Keke or whoever the fuck else was hanging around Screw's house would get on the beat and flow some retardedly simple yet beautifully perfect shit. In a perfect world, Swishahouse would realize that and start getting these Mike Jones and Paul Walls and Lil Flips and all that have seemingly fallen off together to just get simple and shit on some mixtapes. Not pre-packaged mixtapes designed to sell the next for-real album about to drop, but just some doing-it-for-the-fuck-of-it mixtapes. I don't think dudes fall off so much as lose focus and get too caught up in the business and politics and somehow feel their style is a brand and doesn't need actual emotion, even if they are just rhyming about custom car accessories and jewelry accouturements. Not that I think Mike Jones has lost focus. That guy seems like he'd be doing this same shit regardless of everything and anything around him, so I can't fault him. Especially when he consistently drops the catchy ass jingles like "Turning Heads". I have never got a Chamillionaire song stuck in my head.
MD: I am another person who is bummed that Mike Jones’ new CD keeps getting pushed back. I have to admit though, I’m growing less and less interested with each new single released. This new one is the worst of the bunch, by far. One part of me doesn’t mind that record companies are delaying albums until the particular artist hits big with a single, but the other part of me (I’m made up of two parts) thinks it’s dumb. It’s one thing if you’re some unknown that just got a record deal and a label doesn’t want to waste money on you without a single to justify having an entire album, but if you’re someone like Mike Jones or Three 6 Mafia (especially them), your shit shouldn’t be getting pushed back for almost a year, despite what kind of numbers your single is doing.
Honestly, I probably wouldn’t have bought the Mike Jones CD regardless if it was good. I like Mike Jones a lot, but that’s something I can download and not feel bad about. Maybe if it came out when it was supposed to (a year ago), it might have been an impulse buy if I happened to be in the record store the week it came out and it was on sale. The new Three 6 Mafia CD however has gone from something I couldn’t wait to spend hard earned money on to something I don’t care about at all. Their record has been pushed back for a myriad of reasons, none of which were a weak single. As it stands right now, it’s supposed to come out in December (almost a full year after the original release date and the release of their single “Doe Boy Fresh”) to capitalize on the publicity they will be getting from the second CD of their reality show (at one point, this same record got pushed back to coincide with the FIRST season of their reality show).
I don’t mind if things get pushed back every once in a while, but for a record label to insult my intelligence by pushing back a release in order to capitalize on a fucking reality show is something I can’t tolerate. These dudes have had three platinum selling albums in a row AND a fucking Oscar. Over the course of 2007, I’ve gone from fully supporting Three 6 as the best rap group to ever come out of the south to a group I don’t really give a shit about, all because of stupid record label bullshit. These labels have not only managed to put out a ton of shit no one wants to buy, but now they’re pushing stuff back that people actually DO want to buy.
KM: Goddammit, this is the same shit I was bitching about for uhhh the last year they pushed the UGK album back. First they came for the Jews or something... But really, Mike Jones's album getting pushed back is less of a surprise to me. If I had to pick the one I'd expect to hit first, it would have been his (with Paul Wall's getting the hurry up and wait treatment) but Mike all but disappeared in 2006. He hit hard and fast with Who Is Mike Jones?, put Houston on the map and then waited two years to come out with another goddamn album. In the meantime, how many hot shits was he on? "Badd Bitch," "Draped Up," what else? He guest-spotted on dudes' albums, but not on singles I can remember. Oh, and he was on Nick Cannon's TV show. Houston's Class of 05 is in better shape than one would expect, even if they didn't take over the planet. I can rag on Paul Wall as much as I want, but at least he put Lil Keke out there. I wish Keke would get a real album! That "Chunk Up A Deuce" shit was huge last year, should have been his single. Chamillionaire hit huge and while he's closer to TI turf than most, who knows if that will carry over past the first album. I've warmed up to him a whole lot from the days when I'd have annoying wiggaz begging for his shit because they want to hear him talk about "Dyke Jones." This new album's on the edge of awesome, at any rate. Slim Thug got fucked with his pants on with no vaseline, hopefully his next album makes him some more cash. Hopefully he puts out some better joints, too. Z-Ro's in jail, but will probably have another 4 albums come out by the end of 2007. Trae has a new one, and will probably not get any respect from people who don't already know he's really good. Chingo Bling will hopefully go mute, but my luck he'll go triple platinum rapping about getting river water out of his ears or making chalupas with spam. ESG may put out another couple albums, Idunno. Back to Mr. Jones, his first single (Mr. Jones) fucking sucked, the latest one with Bun & Snoop is great though. I'll definitely pick up the CD. I'm not ashamed to admit I like the guy, neither are most people - Lil Flip is still the King Pariah by leaps and bounds. Jones is on some new shit with Flip, by the way.
18. HIP HOP VS. AMERICAMD: This was some kind of debate series on BET, which featured horrible rappers talking about how horrible rap music is these days. The whole thing was very post-modern.
Truthfully, I watched about 8 minutes of this before I got bored with it, and I figured 8 minutes worth was enough for me to develop a hilarious opinion about it. I remember there were some important African-American figures and then some shitty rappers, and they were all like "Why is rap so bad? blah blah blah."
You know, in case you missed the first sentence, this was aired on BET, which is more or less responsible for showing every bad minstrel show video that comes down the pipeline. I'm not saying MTV are saints, but they are usually too busy showing dating shows where there's a gay guy who has to choose between some other gay guys, and then his parents come out and say funny things, and he also had one of his gaymo friends hiding in a truck saying scripted things to him through a hidden earpiece.
Anyway, I feel there's one of these hip hop summit things at least once a year and it never helps. Rap keeps getting worse and worse. At least last year there was that big thing on whether or not it was cool to wear diamonds because people get blown up for them or something. Truthfully, I try and stay as far away as possible from any type of hip hop politics. All of that shit is like a baseball players WHiP average - pointless and almost impossible to understand.
RM: Same week this shit came on the TVs, David Banner testified in front of some Congressional panel about why rappers say "nigga". And reading the transcript, for someone who posts on a southern rap message board things like, "WEEZY THA BEST EVA, FUCK DAT BULLSHIT," Banner's speech seemed like Einstein gang-raping Hilary Clinton with Isaac Newton and making a baby who got played Mozart while incubating in the belly. And Banner is a college alum, and probably one of the two or three rappers out there I secretly hope somehow find blinders from the rest of the music industry because I think he could make some good shit if he could escape the industry. But fuck, Congress is sitting around listening to this shit, and because of the Don Imus thing supposedly, and up and down my road there's people having to sell their houses off at a loss and shit, and predatory creditors are swooping in picking up past predatory credit debts and they hope to be the last one to pick the bad credit carcass of motherfuckers, and we just keep juggling shit, hoping we don't drop it, and Congress is trying to find out why Lil Boosie says "nigga" too much. Man, fuck, Al Qaeda can't knock enough buildings down for me to be happy.
KM: So BET does this roundtable thing, right? They grab a few journalists, some of those So Well Spoken dudes like Michael Eric Dyson & Stanley Crouch, a couple of ex-video girls, and then a handful of rappers including Nelly and TI. They had folks like Al Sharpton or Chuck D on, but in a shocker, they're only on briefly. I really hate Stanley Crouch. The promo promised Superhead, but the TV show didn't have her. On BET.com, they have some bonus shit, like the Nigga Panel (where they actually gave Nelly a break from his public crucifixion). What the shit is Judge Mabeline from that stupid court show doing on here, since when is Divorce Court hip-hop? The Nigga Panel is fairly annoying, one of the talking head fuck journalists is popping off with the Oprah party line, where OMGZORZ NOBODY USE IT BECAUSE WE DON'T WANT WHITE PEOPLE TO SAY THAT WORD. Looking at this panel, it's actually the Oprah Panel, plus Dyson and Chuck D. I take it back, they didn't give Nelly a break from anything - they're throwing him under the bus while he and TI went to swipe a credit card in some ass cheeks and possibly have a gunfight in the green room. This is an issue partly because white people don't want to be denied access to anything, much less an ex-girlfriend like "nigga" who they used to throw around without a care in the world. They don't want to see her rolling with anyone. ESPECIALLY not a black person. All Don Imus's situation ever boiled down to is a cheap excuse for Oprahpeople to buck up about how rappers are why Black America is stunted and going down the tubes. To put it in the appropriate context, I watched the 2nd half of Oprah's "town hall" show and wanted to kick everyone except maybe Kevin Liles in the dick or uterus when I was done. It was funny, though - the Spellman Sistaz were bitching about how no rapper would come down (and bemoaned how Common was the only one willing to "step up" on that show), but on the BET thing Nelly mentions how he got run out of Spellman without a chance to speak when he was trying to do his blood/bone marrow donation program there. That was the only time during the whole thing where Nelly got a little salty, since his sister died from a lack of matching donors. Another difference between the shows is at least BET had Nelly out there to defend himself when they wanted to have a public crucifixion - he got to yell back when they cite the credit card swipe in "Tip Drill" as the most offensive thing ever. It seemed like they planned to keep Nelly & TI out there and rotate who was going to talk shit on them. The funniest thing in my mind is how out of his element Stanley Crouch was. That toad-ass uncle tom motherfucker was among friends on Oprah, this time even the journalists cut him off and ignore him. None of them had shit to say when Dyson and others specifically rip the church for having the same level of patriarchal sexism, if not a worse variety - another subject Oprah didn't touch with a ten foot pole. I like Professor Dyson, mostly because I've seen him other places (including Spike Lee's doc on Hurricane Katrina) but he comes off a little preachy on this show. Not to a fault, but he's pretty much filling the role I expected Al Sharpton to take. I wish they would've brought up the church shit when Sharpton was on stage. I think there was probably more to this, but I am on a denial of service time-out from Sudden Shitlink and cannot watch the internet part 3. Motherfuck Stanley Crouch.
On a related tangent, I was a lot more excited about Chamillionaire's new album before I listened to it the whole way through. I don't have a problem at all with dude not cursing or using "nigga," but why in the fuck are you having guest spots from people who you KNOW will use that language and then you edit the shit? What's the point of having Pimp C rap on your song if you're bleeping half the shit he says? It's annoying. Rap volunteering to step under the sternful glare of White America, be it Congress or Oprah or anyone - this bothers me. People can put out clean albums if they want, but I am 26 years old and I believe I have earned the right to listen to whatever the fuck I choose. If you don't want Tha Babiez listening to a bunch of ig'nant shit then you need to take care of that shit in your own house. It's not my job to police your children, and I don't appreciate you stomping on my toes because you're too fucking lazy to deal with raising and educating your fuckspawn. It's bad enough that corporate America has such a stranglehold on music, where this achy-breaky "This Is Why I'm Hot" garbage gets instahot and jammed in my face - I don't think policing content is gonna make the situation any better. Lil' Pookie is gonna get his Recommended Daily Allotment of "nigga" "bitch" and "hoe" whether he hears it on a rap album, in a movie, or from someone on the street. And the fact is, Lil Timmy will probably hear it from the same sources even if his cracker-ass parents are leaving the "er" at the end it. If you ask me to choose between "Tip Drill" and "Lip Gloss" I will choose the former every day of the week and twice on Sunday. I'm okay with the idea of hip-hop reaching an age where we now have Debbie Gibson archetypes (Lil Mama) or New Edition boyband analogues (Pretty Ricky), but I am not okay with that being the only thing out there. Nigga, please.
19. DJ MUGGS VS. SICK JACKEN'S THE LEGEND OF THE MASK AND THE ASSASSINRM: This was part of a large DVD disc my connect fed me for this month's EWA expert analysism, and at first listen, I was basically just like, "Oh, a paranoid slightly deeper nasal-voiced dude like B-Real rhyming over top of Muggs beats... yawn." But then I was listening to it again just because I was trying to find reason to review it, and the "Land of Shadows" song caught me off-guard. I dug it, and sort of imagined beyond sitting like a fag listening to it on my tinny laptop and hating it all automatically, there being community college cholo's little brothers smoking weed together and first discovering, in real life, David Icke blueblood reptilian conspiracies, and putting a brown pride slant to it. So I burned a copy of the shit onto CD to pump in my truck, and was doing so, half-enjoying, even though it does get repetitive and is kinda of a more tweaked out west coast version of Immortal Technique, and that's when I noticed the bed of my truck bouncing like retards on the front seat of the schoolbus. Both back shocks busted. So I looked at it, figured it couldn't be that hard at all, bought a couple of shocks, came home and crawled around on the dirt slapping that shit together, with this blaring from the cab. My 3-year-old came out and she helped by learning what a ratchet was and what an oil filter was and shit like that and she handed me what I needed and would put it back in the toolbox when I handed it back to her and then when we were done, I put down the tailgate and set her up there to dance around, her doing ballet moves instead of the chicken noodle menage a trois crank that penismouth dance, because we homeschool our kids to keep them from being pregnant perverts with mouth sores by the time they're eleven. But then that "Stairs to the Beast" song came on and she got freaked out since it was twilight, so I put on Mavado and we sat there drinking beer together watching the moon rise. All of that story was completely unnecessary, but removing that The Legend Of The Mask And The Assassin was about thirty-seven times more enjoyable actually moving from complete computer digital mode into something inside my truck with my kid running around and shit. Blueblood reptilian overlords would want you to have nothing but MP3s that you listen with little earbuds inserted into your skull.
MD: I listened to this record before and during the first leg of work in the morning. This is my true test for new music, because I'm much like those drawings of grumpy Garfields people hang up in their cubicles, and I am not a morning person at all. I spend two minutes when I first wake up on a weekday thinking about how I should just not go to work and run away from everything. These thought patterns led to me calling out of work a lot, but I've shaved it down to maybe only once a month now.
I tend to hate 90% of anything new I listen to in the morning, which is why on a slow music downloading day, I'll usually listen to something with people talking, like podcast versions of the previous day's PTI or Around The Horn. Now I know why talk radio was invented. It's annoying in the morning, but not nearly as annoying as music is. This is why I have such a passionate hatred for Young Jeezy. I first listened to his record on an unforgivingly cold day in December when I had this incredibly shitty job for a two week stint that I managed to quit right before I got fired. So now anytime I hear Jeezy, I think about that day and how much it sucked.
So predictably, I thought this record with a dumb long title sucked right out of the gate. I knew I would think it sucked, but it sucked to the point where I thought to myself, "Wow, this sucks. At least it will be over soon." Then I looked down at my iPod and thought back, "Wait... Track 4... what do you mean I'm only on track 4?? FUCK."
I may give it another shot, since I like Muggs enough, but I have confusing views on political conspiracy rap. I like it in theory, but I hate listening to it, and this Sick Jackie guy isn't even that great at it. Muggs should have got Immortal Technique on here instead and it would have had hippies and stoners and hippie stoners all over the world finding enough energy to scour the couch cushions for enough change to buy this record. Instead, you get some other latino guy rapping about stuff Imoortal Technique rapped about five years ago with some Spanglish thrown in for extra measure. However, I'm still not sure if this sucked as much as the Muggs/GZA collabo.
RM: I listened to this again a week later after the warm day beer effects dancing with doomed offspring in the yard working on my own ride like a piece of shit had all worn off, and basically this CD is Immortal Technique morphed with B-Real's voice and about five years too late, as Mike pointed out to me in the future of this blurb. However, I reiterate my one point about how if even one internet-free Chicano starts to distrust everything he knows while high on sherm one night, then this CD is worth it's release. Us internet types (internet created by Dept. of Defense, spearheaded by secret four-star General Al Gore) have been so fogged up with conspiracies of seventeen thousand angles and motives that we don't believe shit anymore except that a dude getting arrested with no nose is funny to look at. But I'd like to believe there's still people out there who don't let their mind rot with these internet machines, and those are the ones who hopefully will become more paranoid. Which of course will just lead them to the internet for more reseach which will eventually make them more complacent. Let us all LOL together.
20. MARC ECKO BUYS BARRY BONDS' HOMERUN RECORD BALLJD: HAHAHA. This shit makes me laugh. Let me break it down, with the increasing amount of sports topics being brought up, we are all exposed as sports nerdz. Being a baseball nerd is like being a Def Jux fan. There is a subculture of people who are really down with you, and the others look at you like some two-cocked alien. Milestones in baseball now are about what the fool who caught the ball is going to do with it.
I was at Yankee Stadium for Gay-Rod's 500th HR and everyone, I mean EVERYONE was talking about what they would do with the ball if they caught it. Honestly, Jim Thome just hit his 500th HR and I doubt the dude who caught that will put it on eBay and expect to fetch seven digits for it, but Gay-Rod is a future HOFer, which for all you non-baseball nerds means Hugely Outstanding Faggot, so that made this ball different. On his first pitch Gay-Rod jacked it into the left field bleachers about 200 yards from where I was sitting and it looked like that scene in New Jack City when Nino Brown was giving away turkeys in the hood. There were like 50 men and children with arms and legs flailing to get the ball. Some young dude got it and was quickly ushered out of the stadium where he went to the offices to speak to a Yankee lawyer (info from pissed off NYPD cop who was on duty standing right behind us) to get scared out of trying to sell the ball.
Anyhoo, the kid who caught Bonds ball sold that shit to wigga supreme, Marc Ecko, from the clothing line that white dudes would not be caught dead in. He now has some sort of poll asking people what to do with the ball? Hey asshole, you just dropped three quarters of a million dollars for it. Keep that shit in your house or let the HOF (House of Faggots) have it. Do you have to be the fucking moral compass for baseball and brand it with an asterisk or send it into space? First, huge lolz to that idiot if he thinks he can get his hands on a rocket to blast that shit in space. But seriously, even though Bonds is a giant, roided up asshole, just do the right thing with the ball and cool it with the pompous shit asshole.
MD: I have to strongly disagree with John on this one. I think Marc Ecko is doing some cool shit. I really don't believe he's going to get a rocket ship lined up to blast it off into space, and I'm also pretty certain no one will vote for the ball to be sent to Cooperstown non-asterisked up, so the only option left is the asterisk thing.
The main reason I hate baseball is because it's entirely set up just so old people can talk about useless stats and players from 500 years ago no one has actually seen because TVs and newspapers weren't invented yet. I understand that people hate Barry Bonds now for being a steroid abusing piece of shit, but most of that hatred comes from the media because he hates the media (which is fine with me), so they shit on him. I'm also sure people hated Babe Ruth back in the day for being a tubby womanizing piece of shit, so it's no different.
If and when this ball gets sent to Cooperstown with an asterisk branded into it, it will give old fucks several hundred years into the future something to be bitchy about because I'm sure it's ruining some kind of sacred baseball tradition to deface a ball of such stature. Then again, A-Rod is going to break the record in ten years, unless he ends up playing for a west coast National League team next year, in which case he will break it in two, because he'll be hitting 250 home runs a year, so it might become worthless anyway. Ecko should have had a voting option to blow the ball up, because Americans like seeing shit get blowed up, and goddammit, I'm American, and I'd love to see that.
RM: It used to be when I pretended to be a baseball fan, I would claim Giants allegiance because my first little league team was the Giants. Then when the Expos moved to D.C., since I enjoy wasting an hour reading the paper every day (actual physical newspaper - I'm like the last guy left who does that), I started following the Nationals, because all the useless shit gave me an excuse to waste an extra 20 minutes with the paper. Then they started running them sudokus, which made me not care about baseball at all, because I could waste time more interactively with the newspaper.
Marc Ecko is a the perfect example of a stupid fuck, because he bought this useless shit for an exorbitant price, and now he's trying to squeeze some publicity out of it. And of course, like planned, Bonds is all indignant about it. You know what? Bonds is a fuckhead, but who cares, what baseball player isn't? Barry Bonds could eat stem cells and wash it down with the amniotic fluid and sweet breast milk of German mothers who are clinically verified to only have had sex once resulting in their pregnancy, and it wouldn't make him anything. Baseball's irrelevant, except to people who like to secretly make love to numbers, lots and lots of numbers, in their brains. And for Marc Ecko to pay such a large price and make such a big deal out of this, he's obviously outing himself as a pervert of that sort. If he was awesome, he just would've bought some bleacher seats for like 20 of the graff dudes he uses in his video game at the Giants last home game, pull out the ball, pass it down the row as they all tag it with Sharpies, and then throw it onto the field at Bonds, but without telling anybody that's what they were doing. The resulting story would be way cooler than this premeditated dipshittery.
21. NIKE'S AIR NATIVEMD: Nike has took it upon themselves to develop a sneaker for an entire race of people. Those people being Native Americans, or American Indians or whatever they like to be called these days.
I guess one of the big cheeses at Nike is half-Indian so he felt compelled to make Nike develop these shoes. I also guess Indians have a big problem with being fatties, so this is supposed to encourage them to get active. Also, Indians are supposed to have a weird-shaped foot that this sneaker is supposed to cater to. That part strikes me as totally odd, as it's a stereotype I've never heard about. I mean, I live in the northeast, so the only Indians I know about are very rich and own casinos. Am I supposed to be lead to believe that before Nike came along to design the Air Native, that all Indians really wore moccasins and those snow shoes that look like giant tennis rackets?
It's been said that this is the first time a sneaker company has developed a shoe specifically for a race of people, but I beg to differ. I had those first Dikembe Mutombo sneakers that came out with the zebra print and the spears and shield and shit on them, and I am certain those were specifically designed for tribes in Africa.
Nike is supposed to be practically giving these shoes away to tribes all across America. Meaning, if you are a Native American, you get these shoes at wholesale. I suppose that means you pay however much it costs to employ the child labor that makes Nike sneakers, but I'm unclear on how much that is exactly. I'm guessing around 45 cents though, and since they are Nike sneakers and there's enough sneaky Asian shoe collectors out there, if you are a Native American, you may be able to make bank on the ebay market selling these to non-Redskins.
I know Nike has the greatest intentions, but it's always hard to trust these big scary businesses. For instance, Nike is the same company that agreed to be the exclusive sponsor and sneaker company for a made up sport (mudbogging) that some dudes put together as a joke to see how far Nike would take it. All in all, the shoes are kind of lucky and look like sneakers for a Frankenstein because of the weird foot design thing.
Hey, speaking of Indians, I really hate those people who are definitely nothing but white that say shit like "I'm one 16th Cherokee Indian". That is the worst and it's a surefire way to be deleted from my internal contact list. It's the worst when girls say it and they try to relate it to some weird quirk about themselves, like "I am a very proud person because I am one 16th Navajo." Shut the fuck up already. It was only cool to say shit like that in the '80s. There are much more exotic races of people to fawn over.
RM: No shit, I had a friend who does those sweat lodges things and he invited me one time and it was white dudes calling themselves animal names and singing songs in a different language. (Just as a note, my name "Raven" was given to me by my parents when I was born, not something I took on to be whatever the fuck it would make me; inherited the name from a speed demon redneck friend of my dad's who died like all speed demon redneck local legends do - in a car wreck.) I remember telling my friend how the sweat lodge shit, which actually physically felt pretty neat to sweat like that and shit, made me feel chumpy as fuck because of all the singing in a language I DON'T FUCKING SPEAK! He said some shit to me like, "That's how they do it on the rez." THE REZ! A white guy in motherfucking Virginia used the phrase "the Rez". I hope that guy doesn't read stupid fucking blogs all the time, but man, that moment made me lose like 17 levels of respect for him, and not so much for the use of a stupid term but for the obvious lack of self-esteem that would cause one to attempt to find identity in something that's not part of your identity at all.
Still, back to the stupid fucking shoes, I would imagine there's some cross-pollination between rap blog dorks and sneaker collector dorks, and I'd just like to warn you that Nike is an evil multinational corporation and these shoes are probably made of some sort experimental vinyl/leather made from depleted uranium from the Iraq Wars. (What is that war shit called now? Goddamn, that thing goes on and on and I don't even know what to call all those fucking mangled dudes who will be bumming change from me in fifteen years. At least they'll have a fresh new color scheme to their camo jackets to update the crazy Vietnam vet stereotype.) So in like five years, these things will like cause some weird foot cancer that rots off your toes, and white kids in college towns who shun their parents' wealth will protest about the new Native foot cancer epidemic, and Nike will be like, behind closed doors with the Bilderbergs, "Haha, it's just Indians, and we made a market for depleted uranium from the war. We can just sell these things to Africans. And it's just Sri Lankan kids who make 'em, so all's well that ends well."
But if just one white dude who has a coyote tattoo and a homemade hand drum gets new-fangled foot cancer, it'll be worth it probably.
JD: What a fucking Mother Theresa Phil Knight is. This dude just donated $100 mil to the University of Oregon to fund their athletic programs and have their football team have a 46th alternate uniform and he is giving wholesale shoes to Native Americans? HA! Donate a hundred mil to some Indian charity dick.
Like Mike said, what would be smart is if every pair of those sneakers somehow end up on ebay, Niketalk, and ISS so they could really benefit from Nike's deal. I am somewhat of a sneaker nerd. I don't buy tons of expensive sneakers, but I follow what is going on. Sort of like a fantasy sneaker fan, no homo. But I haven't heard of these, and I am guessing if you have people willing to line up for days to get a sneaker with a pigeon on it or a pair of cheaply made Jordan re-retros, collectors will pay big bank to own what the Indians had. Ironic?
As an aside, why can't I get the new Steve Nash shoes at wholesale because I am a white dude?
22. TALIB KWELI'S EAR DRUM CD (AGAIN)JD: I am typing this as I am listening to Ear Drum again. I gave that shit a chance. This is the third time I have listened to it - TODAY. It fucking blows so hard. For all the shit we give nerdy backpack group A, Kanye or the southern flavor of the month, Talib has skated by. Kanye's album that we all were blah about is 78,465,423,454,984 times better than the fucking drivel Ear Drum is. As I was driving listening to the album again, I started to think about the shit Talib has put out since Black Star... that first solo album with the fucking pompous skits with Nelson Mandela and Lennox Lewis; his second solo album, which I fucking bought, and is now gathering dust in a box in my mom's attic. He then did these mixtapes pimpin' his Blacksmith label, which suck. He wrote some gay song longing for Lauryn Hill to straighten her act. Jesus, WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT?!
Ear Drum is the pinnacle of Talib's awful career. What a lazy, uninspired album. The three times I listened to the album, not one song stood out for me. What did stand out was the line, "we were hanging from trees, now we hang in the VIP". BWAHAHAHA!!!!! Holy fuck, hey Talib 1989 called and Chuck D wants his lyrics back. That racial crying shit gets old fast, and for people to jock this album as the best hip hop album of 2007 is asinine. My pirated CD of Ear Drum now resides in a ditch off the side of Route 322 in PA. I am done with Talib. This was the last chance. And if you are one of those lame fucks who jock this album so hard, please help me out, because I do not get it at all. Die.
RM: As the oldest most self-important whiteboy amidst the Expert Whiteboy Analysists Posse, I hereby declare John Dawson awesome, because long after the rest of the world has heard and realized this was crap, he just now became smudged by that reality.
But since this is the internet, DON'T STEAL, BUY SHIT INSTEAD, EVEN THOUGH JACKING IT FROM THE INTERNET IS EASIER! YOU OWE IT TO THE ARTIST TO BUY HIS SHIT, SO THAT HE CAN CONTINUE TO GET RIPPED OFF BY HIS RECORD LABEL! ALSO, THIS EAR DRUM CD IS A PIECE OF SHIT AND YOU SHOULDN'T BUY IT! BUY OLD SHIT FIRST, LIKE INTOXICATED DEMONS!
23. THE RETURN OF OUTKASTBWT: Lot of internet white boy dork fucks have major hard-ons for Andre 3000's recent return to form (myself included) and rightfully so, but man has Big Boi been killing it too. I heard him on that "Hood Nigga" remix and he had the best verse on the whole thing. Not that out-rapping Rick Ross, Young Jeezy, and Wannabe Jeezy is anything special but he had a great verse regardless of the clowns he shared the track with. Much has been made about "International Players Anthem" and how it was the best song of the summer. I'm not going to argue that it wasn't but I thought Big Boi had the best verse on the whole track. While out-rapping Rick Ross, Young Jeezy, and Wannabe Jeezy isn't anything special, out-rapping Andre three stacks and Bun B is. The return of Outkast over the past year has been one of the only bright spots in the world of rap and the best part about it is they've been doing it on the shittiest songs. Did Big Boi and 3000 make some outrageous bet on who could have the best feature on the shittiest song? Big Boi does the "Last Nite" remix with Diddy, Andre does the "Throw Some D's" remix with Rich Boi. Andre does the "You" remix with Lloyd, Big Boi does the "Get It Shawty" remix with Lloyd. Did they fall for the same hood rat with outlandish pussy popping skills and the only way to determine who gets her was a rap-off on shitty songs remix battle?
RM: You know, I will admit to being intrigued by Gorilla Zoe, even if he is basically Young Jeezy with a Hanna Barbera slapstick villain's pet monster's voice, but yeah, on that remix, Big Boi was crazy, all retardedly enunciating syllables in oddball ways, almost goofily, but then he lands it all and it doesn't seem stupid. It will be interesting to see what happens when they make another album. That last double album wasn't really a true group album, with the Speakerboxxx being half an Outkast album and The Love Below being a long drawn out skit where Prince and Dave Chappelle got high together in a recording studio for a month. The industry hype for a new Outkast record will be huge, with prominent pre-paid MTV positioning and super Tuesday release parties at midnight the Monday evening before and shit, so record sales-wise, they're pretty doomed regardless of how good the album is. I hope they get all oddbally though, but within the framework of actual hip hop music (not experimental Sly Stoneisms like The Love Below) and don't even think about the sales. I used to be a firm believer in the Outkast's awesomest records going straight from first to most recent, but I've wavered on that lately as I found my ATLiens tape and been bumping that here and there and digging the shit out of how carefree it is. No hip hop is really carefree anymore, and even the shit that acts carefree has carefree as it's image, which means they care about that shit. And fuck, the immense shittiness of Stankonia overwhelms the underwhelming double CD glossy TRL-ready shit they dropped last time.
24. INSTRUMENTAL ONLY RAP FANSRM: I probably pump some homemade instro mixtapes fairly regularly, but it recently occurred to me, mostly hanging out at the EWA Clubhouse with John Dawson, how there's dudes out in abundance nowadays who consider themselves hip hop fans but probably 19 times out of 20 prefer to not hear lyricists at all. That sorta freaks me out.
First off, a big part of the problem is how shitty and derivative a on of MCs are. If you are writing some shit and you do it for your boys and they're immediate reaction is, "Oh shit, that's tight, you sound like (whatever other dude)!" as if that's good, you should crumple up the paper and start over. Seriously. I know it's easy to be all cynical and like everything possible has already been done. But fuck, there's spirit behind shit. Most rock-n-roll has been made with the same 3 or 4 chords. And it took a two or three decades before rock-n-roll got played out, and even then, there's room for someone to come along and fuck shit up. Which is what MCs probably should be thinking about - not just successfully delivering something that sounds like something that could possibly be acceptable, but just straight up trying to fuck people up with some crazy shit they never heard before, even if it's the same old shit done with a different swagger. Whatever. Make it interesting.
But back to the instrumental-only earlobes... I have trouble with this because, for me, when you take away the DJ (who's almost non-existent anyways) and the MC and leave just the beat, that's awesome for a while. And to be honest, most of the time when I'm rocking instrumentals, it's to get the mind attuned to freestyle mode. But to just sit around constantly pumping instrumentals, I don't know, there's a certain jazz fan aura to it of a dude with leather patches on his corduroy jacket smoking a pipe with his feet on a polar bear skin fireside reading a tome of Saul Williams poetry. The shit freaks me out. Not that I hate jazz or anything, but usually shit you have to acquire a taste for is that way because you have to learn to analyze how it's awesome. Like you can't just sit down and be like, "Oh shit, Miles Davis fucked that shit up right there!" But you can sit there and get all high and analytical and learn to understand yourself that dude was on some other shit. But slamming shit slams through the brain, oblivious to thinking and analysis and polar bear rugs and little stubby glasses with scotch on the rocks. (R.I.P. Scott La Rock.)
I would imagine, being an ignorant fuck, that Jay Dilla is akin to hip hop instrumentality's Miles Davis (maybe with Madlib as Coltrane?), and I dig Dilla beats, but to this day I am confused as to why people worship him like he was Rakim or some shit. And I don't understand why hip hop would become nothing more than the beat for people, like MTV generation muzak to fill every moment of their lives. That's probably why it creeps me out, because it is muzak, just like always plays in the background of every piece of anything on MTV. I don't think folks were voluntarily pumping elevator muzak at their cribs back in the '80s or '70s, so I don't understand why people would do it with the updated shit in the double aughts. Give me some motherfuckin' words, so that I can be assured it's not just subliminal bullshit brainwashing me, which is the whole point of muzak in the first place. Shit, maybe that's why Jay Dilla died, because he wasn't down with what they were gonna do with his shit, so they cancer suicided him (I can't remember how he died, the seven thousand R.I.P. Dilla images and moments of silences at rap shows never included causes of death) so that they could then release 39 file collections of ALL JAY DILLA'S INSTRUMENTALS to the internetz, where motherfuckers feel like they have to obtain and hard drive up everything ever as if the future was gonna be 3000% into hip hop and the only source of past music was gonna be YOUR collection. But the Jay Dilla instrumentals circulating on the netz brainwash you, into some shit I can't even think of a good joke about, because my dirty mind is oblivious to brainwashing, and I just wanna fuck, drink beer, and smoke some shit.
JD: As I have become older, I have become more interested in instrumental albums, but not to the extent of 95% of you dorks out there in blog-land. It takes a lot for me to go out and hunker down to listen to an instrumental. I really only have Dilla’s Donuts, MF DOOM’s Special Herbs series, and J-Rawls Liquid Crystal Project in my rotation of instrumental albums.
I started to turn to the instrumental because because of being back at school. I have a touch of A.D.D., so I need to focus when doing school work, and music helps me focus, but lyrics start to get my mind wandering. In my nerd infancy, I started with the Special Herbs stuff and tried everything else. I have a 4th Disciple instrumental of the Killa Army album somewhere, which was okay. I just recently got into Dilla, and love Donuts. The Liquid Crystal album is on some shit. It is the best instrumental album I have listened to. But nothing else stuck.
The sheer nerdery of listening to hip hop without words is like the anime culture of hip hop. It is out there, and there is a following, but you wouldn’t want to spend more than three seconds talking to someone who is really into it. To give an anime comparison of Dilla, I would say he is the instrumental Pikachu. People who really aren’t that deep into the culture, still know who that is.
What I am getting to is instrumentals have become the geek fuckface hip hop badge of honor. White kids would rather buy a $70 12" instrumental of "Paid in Full" than find some shit with words on it. So hey dicks, just because you would rather spend loot on a record and I would keep electricity going in my house. Congrats nerd.
25. THE INCREDIBLY BORING NATURE OF DOING A RAP BLOGRM: Really, this would be more Mike's thing than mine, because the xpertwhiteboyz blog was more about Polaroids of junk cars than the rap music, but still, it seems the formula is simple. Have a chatbox and pester motherfuckers to exchange links, upload shit you got somewhere else plus some obscure shit that nobody but you has from nine years ago because it sucked, and repeat. There are some good rap blogs out there for reading material (I'd mention a couple like Poisonous Pravdagraff or When Your Daughter's Up or a couple others, but if I did and you checked the link, they'd probably be posting about some stupid shit and you'd be like, "Damn, Raven Mack's on some stupid shit", when the last thing I'm upon is some stupid, as you put it, shit), but for the most part the rap blogosphere is a tiny little sectional corner of the vast and mind-wasting enternets, basically like a circle jerk. We all post some dumb shit and hope to orgasm poetically or sendspacily before anybody else does so we don't have to eat the piece of bread in the middle of all of us at the end of the masturbatory cycle. So I'm just gonna be upfront with you... from here on out, since Mike didn't want me to start putting my junk car Polaroids on dumpin, I'm gonna share my thoughts on sex with bitches, because what is more hip hop than sex with bitches and being a white dude talking about that on the internet? Shit, I'm like Fat Joe in '93 right about now.
Anyways, there's a new bar in my town (that now has one bar since the other one closed right before this one opened) and I went the other Monday night to watch the Redskins/Eagles game since I don't have cable machines umbilical corded up to the back of my television setting against the wall. At the bar, there was some young ass girl working there who came up and shook my hand, introducing herself, wearing a straw cowboy hat, looking like 18 and cuter than fuck. I'm sure she was dazzled by my retarded dreadlocks in a small town, as many stupid young women who dream of things beyond the shitty home they've been born into tend to be dazzled by. And she was really cute, yet as I ogled her as the night went on (including her "twisting" her ankle on a spilt beer and falling against me), I realized the thing about really cute chicks is once you take off the cutesy accessories and Old Navy tank top and short jean skirt and frilly underwear, it's just some chick who ain't as cute anymore. I mean, cute chicks smell better naked and have better tended pussy hair, but for the most part it's a trophy fuck where later on when you're with some of your boys and a cutesy assed chick walks by, you can be, "I fucked that cute ass bitch." But sex-wise, that shit is boring and lame, like Russian nesting dolls that you eventually strip down to this tiny little orgasm of an experience. But I guess a lot of dudes like that look, as if women were a squeeze toy full of gelatinous goo inside a plastic shell that you squeeze real tight and it creates bulbous breasts and bug eyes and the rest is held tightly in place by trip toy magic.
Fuck it, I digress, because I used predatory credit systems to purchase an in-house docking station for my truck's robotic satellite radio machinery and the old school station just dropped "Time 4 Sum Aksion" on my earlobes, so I'm gonna slam this fake beer and go outside and either fight my goats again or masturbate thinking about that cutesy ass chick from the bar in town, probably imagining that grugdy position of holding the legs up against the shoulders and stabbing a motherfucking dick into cooch you feel no emotion towards.
MD: I'm really feeling Raven (no homo) on this. Although I've never met Raven "IRL", and I'm almost certain that we'd get along for maybe 3 hours tops, we share a lot of the same dumb personality quirks. I have like 38 hobbies that I alternate between all day because I get sick of shit real quick. I'm very surprised the theme of this blog has stayed at rap music for so long.
Don't get me wrong, I still like reading the blogs I read on a daily basis, but for every blog I enjoy reading, there are 60 more that just post up download links with no explanation. It seems over the years, the entire internet has staunchly become "anti-reading". If you go on a message board and post something more than two paragraphs, dudes will be like "Too much to read". I go to the internet to read and write shit, but it's becoming harder and harder to do so when most sites put little effort into adding any stimulating content and then have the gall to bitch about no one leaving them comments. Do you really need to have your e-balls stroked for putting up a download link to a record that you stole from another site that did the same exact thing? Just get a new fucking hobby. I have 37 spare ones if you need to borrow one for a little while.
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