(1st round match-up 14 of 27)
Work is some funny shit in this late capitalism epoch
pending fail. All these motherfuckers involved in this project essentially
“work” at making music, in an era where the sales of music is harder to
accomplish than it once was. But much like the movie industry (and larger
economy), the top was not squeezed and still does very very well for itself.
But the middle got choked the fuck away. So all these guys, using their “work”
skills, as well as the devil math algorithmic mass engineering firms of their
respective music industry label brands, tries to maintain a fat spot on an ice
block suffering from global geopolitical warming. It’s all really odd.
I’ve been struck recently by old dudes working shitty labor
jobs a lot lately. I mean, nobody wants to work shitty jobs, ever, much less
when you’re getting older. But there’s a lot of dudes doing just that.
Additionally, I’ve been struck at how weak and soft many young white men are, a
direct relation to most of the shitty labor jobs being performed by immigrants.
(This is not a condemnation of that process, in fact I’d much rather live next
to immigrants than people flying confederate flags with a spotlight on it, like
I do now.) These fuckers don’t know shitty work at a young age now, and yet
still expect a certain level (middle class) of comfort. It’s only going to get
worse.
I say all this because two of these three albums in this
trio are cosplay albums. There’s nothing real about them whatsoever, and I
imagine as IRL realities become harsher and harsher as the fat ice chunks of
the Great American Empire continue to melt at an alarming rate, we’re going to
get more and more pharmaceutically foggy music delivering delusional fantasies
to us. Or memes and vines and snippets of video to keep us distracted. But the
lights gonna go out one time, and be out long enough the battery power runs
out, and you gonna have a lot of idle motherfuckers, both able to work and not
able to work, both expecting shit and also not expecting shit, and they all
gonna sit around too long like that with no distractions, and I don’t know man,
that’s gonna be a good thing ultimately but it’s also going to be very very
ugly, and we ain’t gonna like seeing it. But whatever. HERE IS SOME MUSIC…
Drake – Take Care
(released November 15, 2011; #8 on 2011 Pitchfork Albums of
the Year list)
Drake is cosplaying being not only a rapper but a somewhat
hard human being on this. And yet he also mixes in a bunch of corny songs to
pretend women which I imagine successful comfortable females (and males) have
jogged to in suburban levels of hell ever since Drake became a thing. Women who
consider themselves a milf inside but would act mad and indignant at you for
calling them that, jogging the pretend planned communities nationwide, bumping
Drake.
Look, I can throw aside the child actor shit, the being from
Toronto so how gangsta can you actually be shit, the soft butter ass content
shit… but on top of all this Drake is a pretty shitty rapper. And yet he
allegedly also has a staff of ghostwriters. I simply cannot understand this.
How do you have people paid to write raps for you, and still remain such a
shitty rapper? I mean I figure it’s like an ad agency and you hire all these
weird creative fuckers who are very much weird and creative as fuck in their
outside lives, and you give them plenty of nice snacks and a game room at work
and an espresso machine and it seems nice, but ultimately when they have to use
their weird and creative talents at work, it’s for shitty things. This is
likely how it is for Drake’s writers. “Write me a song about how independent
this woman is but we still like to fuck!” It’s horrible. I was listening to
this riding the train through southside Chicago, looking at the dilapidation of
a slowly built world coming apart at the frame, literally, getting trashed
little by little, not so much by neglect of those living in the area but the
neglect of those living outside the area. It made Drake seem seventeen times
more irrelevant to be honest. Somebody should stab him in the face. ONE STAR
(*) because I guess that’s the minimum cover charge now.
Rick Ross – Rich Forever
(released January 6, 2012; #42 on 2012 Pitchfork Albums of
the Year list)
Rick Ross cosplays a wealthy fucker. It gets tired real
quick. I transitioned to this while sitting on the train in southside Chicago,
waiting a half hour for the tracks to clear so we could get dropped off at
Union Station. It made Rick Ross seem not only irrelevant but immoral. You can
rap about shit like this if you want, but fuck man, I hope angry people rise up
and kill the hip hop bourgeoisie at some point. Also ONE STAR (*) because it is
the minimum.
ScHoolboy Q – Habits & Contradictions
(released January 14, 2012; #25 on 2012 Pitchfork Albums of
the Year list)
One of the strange things about listening to these all the
way through is hearing all the shit I skipped. A couple tracks off Habits &
Contradictions, in my standard playlist chaos mode of the past decade, were
heavy players. “Hands on the Wheel”, “Nightmare on Fig Street”, and a couple
others are song I know beginning to end, and every drum kick as well. So I have
mistakenly told people, “yeah, that tape is a classic!” But fuck, listening to
the whole thing, there’s some serious dead weight in here. (Not as much so as a
mixtape for the next trio, but still, there’s some unnecessary weak shit on
this mixtape too.)
Still though, Q was running a race against himself in this
trio. The other two red-lighted (to use drag racing parlance) and all Q had to
do was stumble to the finish line, to outrace trash. THREE STARS (***)!
THE WINNER: Habits & Contradictions, because it is not
complete and total trash like the other two albums. Pitchfork called the Drake
album the #8 album of that particular year, which is as trash an opinion as one
could have (unless ranked higher). Perhaps that is what this project has done
best for me – confirm how trash Pitchfork is, but I guess it’s part of
continuing the myth of musical meritocracy so that the upper crust of music
industry makers and behind-the-scene exploiters can continue manufacturing
wealth off a dying American empire.
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