WHO WE ARE:
RM: Raven Mack, although I have been calling myself Mr. 2009 lately. I make a lot of t-shirts with iron-on letters, and I've got both an emerald green with white letters and a bright orange with black letters MR. 2009 t-shirt thus far. I am manifesting my riches to be cashed out that year, although when I gave that too much thought while nursing a pinched nerve torn shoulder internal part with some codeine the other night, I figured I should also make some Dr. 2006 shirts too, as the self-taught science that has been building to that 2009 pay-off was graduated in 2006. Of course, like any doctor, I had been studying that bullshit for a decade in advance. Don't doubt my metaphysical status.
MD: My name is Mike Dikk. I work at a popcorn factory now. There's an old dusty 386 here and I rigged some stuff together using spare computer parts I had around the house so I can use the internet on my lunch breaks (where I am allowed to eat all of the free popcorn I want, except the White Cheddar, but I do get a good discount on it). It has one of those gigantic old school monitors with the green screen. So it's a trip viewing the internet on it, or at least the parts of the internet the archaic graphics card can handle, which isnt much to tell you the truth... Everything looks like fucking War Games or something. I fully expect this thing to bust out with WOULD YOU // LIKE TO // PLAY // A // GAME?? at any moment.
JD: I was the one that championed not ending this, but alas I became the slacker in this Top 10 deal. But shit is real for me now. I am doing the full-on dress rehearsal for my future career, so I am putting all of my time into dealing with first grade kids that are all sons and daughters of the soil. What I did notice was something that Raven mentioned in a quick blurb while we were having our cool internet chatter in homo code in the Clubhouse. There is a high amount of sexualization even at a young age in the public school system. For example, during a spelling test, these words were "randomly" put in order:
BIG
BUT
BLACK
CHICK
MAKE
COME
I insist that this was coincidence because all the teachers are straight laced, but who the fuck knows? Also, we were playing a phonics game and when the kids laid out the game pieces and there was a word chunk of "ore", and the beginning sound piece sitting right next to it was "wh". Finally, every exercise with the high frequency words ends up at some point with all the kids chanting BALLS over and over.
So maybe Raven is right? Or maybe he is some paranoid motherfucker and I am just justifying his paranoia by telling my stories of what an everyday first grade is like? Or maybe we are both stupid fucks who want to defend our educational positions by making up shit? Maybe glue tastes good? Who the fuck knows, but what I do know is I am balls deep in it for the long haul.
#1: INTERWEB LEAK OF NEW EMC RECORD
MD: If you're reading this on the internet, it means you haven't discovered some way to telepathically download our words to your brains without a wi-fi connection. It also means, you probably already know EMC is Masta Ace's new group with some other guys. I've now listened to this record two times back to back, which is something I don't do too often, but my computer recently had a seizure and I had to erase one of my hard drives in order to get it back in working order, so my iTunes is very limited at the momenet, and it was either listen to that record a couple times, sit in silence, or go through all of my unalphabetized, uncategorized records to find something decent to listen to. I guess I could have listened to one of my four remaining CDs, but that's besides the point.
I already forgot where I was going with all that, but it was something about how I don't really want to give this CD a proper review, because every other blog known to man will cover that ground, and the only thing I'm curious about is whether the average internet rap nerd's boner and following orgasm was bigger when they saw this record finally listed on a blog and they hit the download button or if it was bigger when they actually got around to listening to the record. I'm guessing it was the former because we all know the first one of the day is the biggest and produces the most fluid volume.
I'd also like to mention that Torae mixtape that's making the rounds without giving it its own spot, since we've downgraded the number of entries on these lists and I don't want to waste space. The Torae CD came out of nowhere while all us blog nerds were waiting with baited breath on the EMC record, but it still had the same outcome (or outcum). Torae is definitely a dude I have never ever heard of but he has his finger on the pulse of the internet, because his record features every producer that has been jocked over the past year. I'm not dissing, because the dude can rap too, and the record is really, really good, but at the same time, it's definitely good in a very uniform blog-acceptable way, so I can't muster up the energy to write anything creative about it, because I know there will be 400 similar opinions on the internet within the week, just like the EMC record.
I guess my point is, I like stuff just like you do, but sometimes there's no point in really writing about it when a gang of European kids already beat you to it since their time zone is like 12 hours different than our's, and they already wrote about it while you were still sleeping. Except for me. I don't sleep, because sleep is the cousin of death, but I'm generalizing here.
JD: Like Mike, I am not going to get into a track-by-track analysis of the album like some other blogs have done, but I will get into it a tad deeper than Mike. This album is beyond fantastic, and during a time when all these releases are coming up in the next few months, I really don't see how it could get better. The production is great but not overwhelming, the lyrics are insane (my early frontrunner for line of the year is when Punchline says, "I'll fight for my fam like Antonio Davis"), and even though it is a "concept" album, it doesn't get all hokey with doing songs about walking down the street and other inane bullshit that a concept album can wander into becoming.
Before I wrote this, I watched the Youtube videos of the group members talking about the leak, and I know it must suck to have your album just given away. But to be honest, I am going to buy this no doubt when it comes out, and in the age of stealing shit being so easy, that is the highest compliment you can give an album.
(P.S. I hipped Mike on Torae, trying to steal my heat son.)
#2: KOOL G. RAP'S "ON THE RISE AGAIN" SONG
RM: Forgive me because I'm thinking disparaging thoughts about someone I consider one of the greatest five MCs of all-time, and I probably won't type them out because it is uncomfortable enough to even have "Has G. Rap flipped his cabbage out there in Arizona?" thoughts two-stepping through my white head.
I mean, I have to admit after my initial reaction of "This is awesome!" when I heard him with LL and G-Unit on that song a couple months back, I eventually settled into, "Why the fuck is G. Rap fucking with G-Unit?" I mean, I could understand LL Cool J, because he's been a pop star for purt near two decades. And I eventually just decided that it's wack of me to be all Hip Hop Holier Than Thou about an MC legend wanting to deposit some G-Unit checks into his bank account.
But a song with Haylie Duff on the hook? I'm not gonna be like every faggot blog I found when I google searched "Kool G. Rap and Duff" to figure out how to spell that young bitch's first name correctly, who basically did thirteen variations on "Signs of the Apocalypse. Dogs fucking cats. Blah blah blah I'm an unclever homo who loves to dramatically employ really played out cliches in the hopes some other homo types 'LOL, let's link blogs' in my c-box." For me, it just seems questionable in a way I never thought I'd question Mr. Kool Genius Rap the IV. And honestly, I've not been able to let myself listen to it yet. I downloaded it after hearing DJ Premier talk about it on his radio show, and Premo (who made the beat) expressed his own discomfort with Haylee Duff being on the track, but that there was no time to change it and G. Rap sent him the thing with her on it to mix down, so Premo added the cuts over her hook to try and at least mute it down some. I don't know... it worries me over this shit. Although I'm enough of a Kool G. Rap mark that I'm just going to assume this is trickery on his part to fool all the rap fag nerds who know way more than they really know, so that when his real shit drops and makes people go, "Oh yeah, for-real rap music," he can laugh at us.
MD: I figured I'd throw something up on this already failing top ten idea (originally cut down from 25 after everyone lost interest, and soon it will become the top 2 because only me and Raven will write for it, and then I will replace everyone else with people who know absolutely nothing about rap music and 16 year old girls) because Raven's been bitching and it's a slow day at the popcorn factory I now work at. On top of that, the main boss dude keeps firing all of my co-workers so I don't have anyone looking over my shoulder every five minutes and asking me what I'm looking at while talking to me about sugar gliders and couches they found on Craigs List.
Anyway, I haven't heard this Kool G. Rap song yet either, but I could have told you a year ago that bad things were in Kool G's future. You see, I am on Kool G. Rap's Myspace friends list, which is weird all together, because I'm not friends with a lot of people I don't know in real life, but I could be thinking of one of my Myspace profiles for one of my 3,000 side projects where I am friends with everyone, but I digress.
So at some point, Kool G. Rap, or whoever controls Kool G. Rap's Myspace page, sent out a Myspace bulletin saying that G. Rap was available to do features and had listed prices. That is something a rookie should be doing, not a fucking rap legend. So right then and there, I knew any douche with a grand to blow was going to have a shitty G. Rap verse on their shitty album that no one will ever hear outside of their hometown. Luckily, I haven't heard of any of those tracks popping up yet (except that brand new one, where it's G. Rap, and RA The Rugged man, then some jobber, and of course the track is from the jobber's record), so if the worst thing to happen to G. Rap since that Myspace bulletin is making a bullshit song with Hailee Duff, we should all be thankful. It's only a matter of time before MC Dudebro420 from Vermont's new hardcore street track featuring G. Rap surfaces.
#2: YEAR END WRAP-UP ISSUE CORRECTIONS
RM: I failed to rememberize Evel Knievel when I did my Heaven Needed A Something-or-Other write-up. And that is a ridiculous oversight on my part. Evel Knievel had all the pomp, flash, calculated recklessness, gold jewelry, tricked out cars, and sluts by the dozens that any rapper could ever dream about. And if you can be THAT hip hop, all while being a bitter old racist fucker, then goddamnit right, props to you Evel. I hope they didn't let you in Heaven, so you jumped the pearly gates on a KX80, fucked God's wife in the ass, then bolted to mujahadeen heaven, where there's mad virgins to be fucking. (Special note: the virgins awaiting terrorism martyrs is misinformation, as it's not actually virgins but instead unpolluted women, meaning they don't bleed at all. Virgins still menstruate, and their period blood touching your ass is as bad as Grandma Deepwater Baptist finding your milk crate full of thrash metal records from 1986 in the attic. Also to specially note: no gods or heavens or actual people named Grandma Deepwater Baptist, although she's more likely than an eternal country club with an open bar on a cloud.)
MD: I have no year-end Wrap Up corrections and no regrets. I'm kind of bummed it was the least talked about 5,000 word project we've done so far, but it was also the least promoted. I'm pretty over promoting my own shit. It's been over a year now. If you want to see the shit, you find it. Even if it's two years from now after we've all given up on it and you're some young stupid kid looking for something unrelated through a search engine and you stumble upon it and get hyped on it, wondering whatever happened to us and why we quit doing this stuff when everything seemed to be going well. I am comfortable with the fact that in our mile a minute world, shit gets slept on for years and rediscovered when the original proponents of said shit have long given up on it. That's how life works now for the starving artist. So fuck promoting, you either see this or you don't. We aren't a real magazine so we don't need the advertising money so fuck it if we go belly up. I am sure just like every other dumb shit thing I've done on the internet, I will be on some random message board several years from this moment and some dude will ask me to dig up something I did on Dumpin.net so he can re-read it, and how he doesn't understand why we ever quit and we should do it again. Story of my life.
#4: STUPID FUCKING NEW YORK GIANTS IN THE SUPER BOWL
RM: You know, I was all set to forever hate the Patriots finally after this QUEST FOR PERFECTION finally trampled upon whatever rah rah Team America subliminal national pride my public education had immunized with, but then the stupid fucking Giants and that retard's little even more retarded brother Eli Manning is going to the Super Bowl. Now, it's bad enough a team I hate is going to the Super Bowl, but it's the Giants. We've come a long ways in the past two decades from when the Bears had to rush to record "The Super Bowl Shuffle". With laptop recording studios and the worldwide web, you might have a dude diss another rapper onstage on a Saturday night, Sunday morning the video is on youtube, Monday afternoon the dissed rapper recording a response track over top a throwaway beat, and by Monday night it's on his myspace page. The whole beef can flare up, simmer down, and be overanalyzed by the end of the week, without the need for Minister Farrakhan at all. This of course means I will probably see Jim Jones Super Bowl songs featuring Michael Strahan, a Saigon/Papoose/three other fuckers posse track featuring Sportscenter soundbites of Plaxico Burress, and just a general hip hop frenzy over this, being New York has been pretty hard-dicked to have something to act like they're running ever since shitty southern pop rap has tooken over the pop rap charts, and older rap heavyweights like Jay-Z, Nas, and the Wu have become sort of uninspiring. I was ready to root for anybody but the Patriots (haha, it always amazes me the coincidental parallels between the Bush regime and the Patriots dynasty), but I could never root for the stupid fucking Giants, especially not now with those stupid red numbers on their road jerseys. But the Patriots? It's like making me choose between having one guy fuck my ass or three guys fuck my mouth (notice I said three, because in my twisted mind the choice between getting one ass-fucking or giving two blowjobs is not even a close debate, so I had to make it three blowjobs)... I guess when it comes to Super Bowl XLT or whatever it is, I'm gonna have to be rooting for Al-Qaeda.
MD: I have become a fair weather fan of the Giants now that they made it to the Super Bowl. Raven's intense bias toward all things New York are really blinding him from seeing the bigger picture. If you follow football at all, you should know that the Giants are incredible underdogs, and they have been through the entire playoffs. That's the beauty of the NFC. The AFC is usually a lock by pre-season for 1 of 4 teams to go to the Super Bowl, while the NFC is like hitting the Random buttom on Madden to pick your opponent because anyone can show up to the Super Bowl as long as they are one of the 6 teams to make the playoffs. Even last year when my Chicago FOOTBALL Bears made it to the Super Bowl and more or less dominated the bullshit NFC for the entire season, I was still pretty worried throughout the playoffs, because I knew ANY team in the NFC could have knocked them off, because that's the nature of the NFC.
So The Giants making it to the Super Bowl was a surprise and it wasn't a surprise. Still, they were the last NFC playoff team people expected. That's not the entire reason I am now a fair weather fan though. The other night before I went to bed, I was flipping through the channels and came across a commercial for the March of Dimes. It was one of those local area commercials (I'm assuming it is local in the greater tri-state area, so perhaps you've seen it) where the audio is all muffled and the video quality makes it look like it's still 1989. You know, some shit your local wacky used car dealership throws together.
Well, this March of Dimes commercial starred Eli Manning, and he was jibber jabbering something about premie babies, but I was so amazed by it. His brother is in something like one out of every five commercials that run on television, while Eli is stammering his way through some late night local area charity spot and now the dude is leading a team to the Super Bowl, much like the Bad News Bears repping Chico's Bail Bonds in Japan. It takes a lot of serious Jew Media magic to turn any New York team (besides the horrendous Knicks) into a serious on-field performance AND off-field media underdog, but they've succeeded big time, and I am so pumped right now to see the Giants beat the shit out of the Boston bullshit Patriots like they were on some 1980 Winter Olympics DO YOU BELIEVE IN MIRACLES shit.
JD: Outside of the game, one of the best parts of the Super Bowl is the legal troubles/ill shit that comes to the forefront about one of the players on one of the Super Bowl teams. So far, the best of these stories has been about N.Y. Giants defensive end Osi Umenyiora. A "magazine model", whatever the fuck that is, started her own blog here to announce dude likes to shit on his girls. She spells out how he wanted her to get double teamed, but she said no, so she had a friend come over and Osi shit on her in a bathtub. She then wrote about how he paid her bills and bought her jewelry so he could shit on her as well.
I am an open dude. If Osi wants to shit on girls, then that is his deal, but I am sure people would read what she wrote and think of him as some sort of sicko freak. But who really is the freak here? Osi would never have come up with this sort of fetish unless a girl let him pinch a log on her, so is it Osi's fault that turns him on? It takes two to tango, kids, and if dropping a few g's gets him a toilet with a vagina, then she is just as freaky as he is. Unless Eli gets caught giving footjobs to Cooper Manning in the trunk of Joe Montana's car while he is in a gay bar doing double anal on Elton John with Joe Klecko, this Osi story should stand tall as the illest shit (ha, shit) to come out of the Super Bowl hype.
RM: Mike mentioned to me that somebody has a New York Giants song now, but he said it was a rapper. The other day in the truck I heard them play a Collie Buddz song "Blind to Them" (or something along those lines) about the Giants and how they'll crush the Patriots and fuck the haters. I hope this is the song Mike heard, but even if not, it's funny. It's not bad as a throwaway dancehall song, but haha all the Giants have backing them is a white dancehall dude from Bermuda. I guess when you don't know about Collie Buddz, he still sounds awesome, but once you learn all about him and his fake Jamaican patois, he just seems like a fucking first class chump. Although he's a white guy so he may be googling himself and find this and send me a "cease and desist this shit yo" email.
#5: AMY WINEHOUSE SMOKES CRACK
RM: I am the type of know-it-all hipster douche who's all like "LOL, yeah Amy Winehouse is sooooo great. What about Sharon Jones, asshole? Don't you know every obscure soul singer who does a retro schtick in 2008? God." But I have to admit with Winehouse being all ugly and drugged up, and not just regular white American people drugs but crack - I didn't even know they had crack in England - it sort of makes her awesome in a different way. Sharon Jones seems pretty straight-laced and into doing the "I'm an older black woman sanging some soul" thing, but the degradation of drug abuse unlocks a tortured part of your soul, or creates it, and as long as someone's taping her attempting to mangle some R&B classics on Protools files that'll eventually get touched up by Mark Ronson in between them videoing her smoking rock to throw up on youtube, I'm straight. It's also funny to me that my four-year-old can actually sing "Rehab". I'm such a hipster douche.
JD: Really who cares? But she did get a hip hop rep of sort for singing old school soul music with crackling horns and all that other bullshit that people tend to think is cool even though they would never own a record of her's. Fuck her though. I think if you want to truly emulate some old, black singer, you should get hooked on heroin for years and years like Ray Charles, Miles Davis, and that one lady from France, but still put out classic music. See, I am sure there are people out there doing way worse shit than crack, and are still contributing something to society rather than looking massively haggard, wearing 16 lbs of eye makeup, and not washing your hair. Smoke on up stupid bitch, because the only way now you are going to get jocked is if you die - coming back all clean is pussy. If you are retarded enough to videotape yourself sucking a glass dick, then you should live that shit and just do it on stage at some Brit Pop awards show when you get a Lifetime Achievement Award based off your one jocked album.
#6: MEXICAN COKES
RM: So we had an in-depth discussion on the merits of Mexican Cokes from the Mexican stores, made with for-real sugar instead of damned weak-ass fructose syrup Americanized sodey pops, in The Secret Clubhouse message board a few months back, and ever since, I've been meaning to buy a couple. Well, it just so happened a couple of yesterdays ago I found myself right at a la tienda mexicana, so I went in to get me some sugar sodas to hopefully accelerate the diabetes because I don't really need both feets. They didn't have no Cokes in there, but they did have Pepsis, so I got two of those plus a jug of that strawberry banana Guava nectar (my kids love that shit).
The best thing about the Mexican Pepsis were they are bottled in some old school 1979 hard bottles that you could beat people to death with, with paint and a capped top. At the counter, there was a full-on "no ingles" chick holding her toddler and a bi-lingual chick who rung me up. I am always susceptible to the allure of a spanish chick (except Puerto Ricans, which are like annoying New Yorkers, but brown), but this chick was something else, with her dyed hair, and when she said, "I'm sorry..... I have no cents today," so she shorted me two pennies and her "r"s in "sorry" rolled ever so sexually enough, I wanted to make children with her right away, because that's how my brain works.
Instead, I took my 1979 ass sugar Pepsi outside on the street side and sat there pretending I was in a futuristic sci-fi flick from 1981, where Mexicans were trapped as slaves in a world where white people zipped by in rounded sleek silvery cars and had little white machines with earbuds playing music straight to their brains. Unfortunately, there was no revolutionary climax to my daydreaming, because a very obviously modern Mexican dude rolled up in a giant white Nissan Titan with plenty chrome and a big vinyl thing in his back tinted window saying "PAPA GARCIA", and he jumped out with horn-driven breakbeat mongrel ass Mexican music blaring when the door opened. This reminded me that I also had meant to get a couple Los Tigres Del Norte CDs, but I had to get home to put my chivos back in their pen before it got dark and cold as fuck.
MD: I don't really know the joys of a Mexican Coke because there are very few Mexicans living in the northeast, at least legally. There's a good chance I didn't even see a real live Mexican until my 20s.
I do like how name brand sodas are specifically formulated to appeal to the countries they are being shipped to. All soda is, really, is really shitty chemicals, and the fact that they do enough research to know how to tweak those chemicals for certain countries is just bonkers to me. I've had Mexican soda before, in Mexican restaurants run by white people, so I know the whole sugar cane thing, but I've never had an honest to goodness Pepsi or Coke. I did have an Indian Pepsi before though, along with the preferred brand of Pakistani soda, called Pakola. It's supposed to taste like ice cream, but it tastes more like horrible perfume a grandma wears. I'm not even sure if the Indian Pepsi I had was actual Pepsi. The colors, logo and bottle look like Pepsi, but it's called Thumbs Up! It's rather spicy, which is not something I look for in a cola. Kind of like shitty Moxy or something.
Lastly, I had something called Vimto, which is India's answer to Dr. Pepper, and it resembled a store brand knockoff of Dr. Pepper, so there's not really much to talk about.
I am hoping to one day break into Japanese soda because those Japs are all about weird flavorings and have like watermelon cola and pumpkin seed root beer. I've had that one Jap soda that is engineered like a Rube Goldberg device where you have to take the pin out and push down a marble and watch the carbonation rush up to the top of the bottle, but it just tastes like Sprite once all the hullabaloo is over. I want that freaky shit. I need some white chocolate mango Pepsi ASAP.
#7: LIL WAYNE BUSTED FOR THE ASSORTED DRUGS
RM: You know, I like some of Wayne's stuff but I definitely missed the boat on the internerd rapdork "OMG WEEZY'S THA BEST!!!" train, because I don't see it. However, I am hoping beyond anything I've hoped for in rap music in probably fifteen years that there's some master plan going on here. I am hoping that somebody - maybe Baby, maybe some Jew Overlord, whoever really - is engineering things along, learning from the wasted marketing potential of DJ Screw's death, learning from the megamillions struck when Cobain swallowed a mouth full of buckshot, learning from the eternal soundscan flame that was Biggie and Tupac until recently, and someone has kept all the best Wayne shit, like 3000 times more retardedly wonderful than all that bullshit from Tha Carter III mixtape you fags acted like was awesome, and is just sitting on it, giving Wayne his daily per diem in pocket cash, and allowing him all the exorbitant drugs and sex he wants, waiting for the big overdose to hit him one night. Then - BAMM! - you get the for-real Lil Wayne album finally out, and it's the first rap record in forever to go multi-platinum because motherfuckers are geeked for it and want to honor his stupid little gay ewok rapper face by actually purchasing the thing instead of just stealing it like we would've normally done. That's what I'm hoping is going on.
(Also, I was high the other night sitting in my truck in the backyard listening to satellite radios when it occurred to me that Lil Wayne is pretty much a black Eminem for all the white rap fags who want to like some oddball corny tattooed dude with predictable yet wacky linguistical patterns but not really too much cleverness to actually say, so that if they are a true expert whiteboy loving rap, there is no way they could ever love another whiteboy because that goes against the basic principals of being an expert whiteboy rap fan, so now they can love Lil Wayne which is basically Eminem but smudged yet not stained with the ghetto. So before you fags post, "Why you hating on the best rapper alive?" I can say, "Haha you stupid fags wanting to suck a black Eminem dick.")
MD: I want to use this space to mention that Lil Wayne is working on a mixtape with Mick Boogie called Hello Brooklyn where he "revisits" Brooklyn hip hop classics. The only song confirmed so far is "Who Got The Props 2008" and the only audio available is Buckshot's new verse from that song. This mixtape will be the true test to see if Wayne can hang on to all of his internet dicksuckers. On one hand, it's the first thing Wayne has done that I cared about hearing, and on the other hand, all of the current people hanging from his nuts will have to decide whether their carnal love for all things Wayne will override the pre-programmed internet opinion that you cannot revisit previous East Coast classics unless they contain scrapped Biggie verses that were locked up in a vault somewhere.
I think a lot of people forget that Cam'ron was once in Wayne's spot, and as far as I'm concerned, Cam put out the mixtape of the year last year, and there was nary a peep from internet thug rap sympathizers because they were too busy waiting for leaks from Drought Carter VII to show up on a blogsite. Both Cam and Wayne were rappers previously written off as fads and flashes in the pan before their resurgences as "Greatest Rappers Alive", so the real question is, who's going to take Wayne's spot? Drag-On? Magoo? Red Hot Lover Tone? Only time will tell.
#8: THE RELEASE OF THE LAST AIR JORDANS
JD: Being the resident sneaker freak, now is a big time in that realm because Nike is now releasing the last of the true Air Jordans, the Jordan XX3. Normally, this would be a big deal, but with Jordan being retired and the general dislike towards the Jordan Brand by the sneaker community, it is barely causing a blip in the mainstream sports/hip hop world.
I am not sure if any of you people heard of this website called gamefaqs.com? Basically it is the cauldron of all video game nerds; every dorky detail of that culture can be unearthed by going through those gamefaqs message boards. I find alot of similarities between that world and the world of the sneaker collector. From browsing places like uptempoair, ISS, and Niketalk, to the non-sneakerhead, the place can be just as dorky as people talking about video games. There are threads about keeping your sneaker crease-less, pictures of the sneakers people bought and own, and general bitching about the quality of what is being released. Most importantly, I think the people who are mainstays in both of these geek factories are more similar than you think. The video game shit is older dudes who shouldn't care that much about video games, or kids who are just into it to the point where they come off as huge speds. The sneaker forums are older dudes who spend the electricity bill loot on the $185 new Jordans, or suburban thug kids who have mommy and daddy drive them across the state to the one Finish Line that carried the Flint/gray XX3s that were carried in only 23 stores and cost around $300.
Being an older guy with a wife, potential career, and trying for a kid, I have become a voyeur to the sneaker game. It is funny to see kids shit their pants over Jordans I used to buy when I was 13 and end up wearing to cut the grass after a few months. But don't think this "last" Jordan is going to be the end of the Jordan Brand. I am sure there will be generations of Filipinos who will be locked in a windowless factory sewing into shoddy leather making retro Jordans that will retail for $300 when it takes about $7 of man power/material to make.
RM: Honestly, the one thing I have never understood, and this was probably due to necessity as a broke ass kid, was high dollar clothing trends. My parents were younger than fuck, drunker than fuck, and broker than fuck, so the pimpest pair of shoes I had as a youth was a pair of sky blue Kangaroos that I equipped with matching fat laces. No matter how hard I'd beg and plead, my parents just didn't understand, and I was usually sporting the most derivative bobos to be found. In fact, I had the bobos version of the first Air Jordans, which of course, as Bobos are apt to do, only looked good for like four hours. And being in a predominantly black school, wearing bobo Air Jordans just led to mad clowning during P.E. (Haha, at least I didn't live in the projects, although I guess my grandmother was forced by her own racial intolerance to move into a trailer park and out of the projects.) After a little wear and tear, the bobo Jordans went from high top to low top, because the upper shell part just sort of started ripping, so I just tore it off and trimmed them up with a boxcutter. They looked relatively cool then, but more from a degenerate metalhead kid perspective than a put a toothbrush to it to keep it clean fresh kid perspective.
The funny thing is, knowing how twisted and perverse the internet is, I bet there's little circles of people who collect bobos and show off their shit amongst each other, claiming bobos are better because they were less cared for and more likely to be gone now, so ultimately it's a more pure form of sneaker, all talking down on each other for wearing Nikes, and having signature pictures of photoshopped Chuck D holding up some bobos with his power fist and the words "I like Nike but wait a minute!" Fucking fruity ass internets.
#9: MURS "BETTER THAN THE BEST" VIDEO/SONG
RM: I would assume this has been in circulation for a long minute, but I guess the "official" release of MURS first major-label song/video just happened this past week, and I used my internet welfare for about 40 minutes to dl the video off of Youtube, just to see what was going on. I slept on MURS but got into him well enough late, and never really understood the move to a major label. Like, what did Warner Brothers see in him that separated him from whatever else was out there amongst the three million competent ass rappers there are to make them think they could recoup some money off him in a day and age when no one sells records anymore?
This first video and song is okay - probably to the average human ears it outshines all the wack anabolic steroid ass TV title rappers in heavy rotation (but then again the average ears probably love that stupid shit), but I'm not sure what makes it super awesome to make some skater kid in rural Indiana go drop fifteen bucks on a CD. I guess at this point, as the recording industry continues to self-destruct, I assume they would have some grand vision to trick people into giving up their money again. But instead it seems like they kind of want a new Pharcyde dude, but without all the crack addiction, and therefore not quite as amusing. Props to MURS though. I hope he makes enough money back that he's not owing those Jews his guarantee back for the next twenty years of his life.
JD: Back when we did the Top MCs thing at another website what seemed like a thousand years ago, MURS was upset in the first round by Eminem. This was back before we officially started doing these EWA blurbs, and before I really held major resentment towards the average hip hop internet fan. In my early "trying to be some underground cool guy" days, my then-girlfriend, now wife, would make me mix CDs of random tracks of underground dudes, to which I would go home and listen to in my Discman becuase I had not yet stepped into the iPod generation. One of the many reasons I married her was that she was hip enough to my desire to be hip to go out on the internets herself to find the name of "underground" dudes she would put on the CDs. She would also make these cool CD covers with shit that I liked like John Stockton, Doug Gilmour (the St. Louis Blues version), sneakers, and like pictures of graffitti.
Once I became a full-fledged white man on the internet, I went out and got every MURS track I could find. I had a promo version of Why Ask Why? for the longest fucking time that I would force myself to listen to because I can't stand that promobot voice.
It seems out of place MURS is now signed to a major label and is on the cover of magazines. Shit, he even has a number you can dial to get MURS updates. Honestly, like Raven said, I hope he recoups all the loot he is dropping out of his own pocket to pimp this upcoming album. But with the way the world spins, the same time he drops that solo album, Eminem will come out with his new fat, bloated record that all the same people who thought he was a better MC during our stupid poll, will go out and buy that shit while MURS is buried behind the person who finished third on American Idol's solo album.
#10: IN DEFENSE OF T-PAIN
RM: You know, it's common meme to hate on T-Pain for his bionic microphone, and fair enough. But for people to go so far as to be like, "Snoop did it on his stupid song and it's just as good," or "Madd Skillz did the same shit on his 2007 wrap-up song," it's stupid. Yeah, anybody can sing into a robot, but they can't have T-Pain's pre-robot voice to make the same robot effect. He's the one who came out with this in the latest incarnation of the robot voice schtick, and he's the one who's best at it. The fact he looks like a crack dealer's teddy bear only makes it greater.
Honestly, it's not even an affront to rap music because it's straight pop. And more than that it's a variation on a straight pop music staple - the string arrangement. Music can have all sorts of subliminal effects with dissonance and all that corduroy patch egghead music theory bullshit, but usually pop music is considered "bubble gum" because it's that - stupidly pleasing. You get things stuck in your head you never knew were there. But the old '60s pop music, '70s pop music, a lot of stupid pop shit has hidden soothing strings. Dre uses them a lot. Fucking "Crazy" by Gnarls Barkley was soaked with strings, and it's always nice calming background strings. What I'm getting at here is T-Pain's voice is basically a shitty R&B voice played through the robot with a string effect on it, which is why it works. Rick Ross' "The Boss" and Twista's "Creep Fast" are two songs I really shouldn't like nor do I want to like, but they get in my head. Which is what T-Pain's subliminal stringed voice is supposed to do, and that works its way into my brain and soothes me, against my will. Which is probably for the best. I mean, if it was all conscious lyrics over top of El-P beats, I'd be far too aware how I'm a motherfucking mindless zombie stumbling through my whole life, never moving anywhere ahead of the stagnancy I'm blackened heart deep in, and I'd probably have a blaze orange boxcutter up against your throat, hoping I can find gold inside your blood. You motherfuckers ought to be thankful for T-Pain.
MD: I cannot figure out an angle ("angle" is a fancy word for a pre-conceived lie that you plan to work the public with, i.e., our entire website) to approach Raven's T-Pain revelation from. My first reaction is that he's bullshitting like he always does, but then again, he wrote this a while ago, and with our new approach to list writing, we have no deadlines, so he wasn't trying to make our deadline, so maybe he is really sincere about his feelings for T-Pain.
Personally, I can't stand the guy. Out of all the robot R&B singers, he is by far the worst. He's the only one who definitely has no sort of singing voice outside of studio effects, which is why I have such a problem trying to figure out how the guy got a record contract in the first place. I mean, at some point in his life, he had to have some kind of demo that wasn't so layered in effects as his current product is. The only thing I can think of is that he is a guy that got his deal by literally sucking dick, which I guess isn't too hard to imagine. I am sure that's how most people get record contracts now. It's like that old Mr. Show skit where the one lawyer wanted to become a partner, but first he had to suck all of the other partners' dicks. That is what the mainstream music industry has devolved to: a bunch of old rich elite men getting their dicks sucked by young hungry muscular black men. Perhaps this Mandingo fantasy is what makes Raven like T-Pain. I don't know.
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