Fuck You, Sean Lebowicz

You remember the early nineties? Tekkaman Blade on Saturday mornings, Highlander in the afternoon? Two different Mortal Kombat movies? Back before you discovered you could cook bacon any time you wanted and the subsequent health problems that epiphany has (or will eventually) cause? When Clinton was in office, but before we all discovered his horrify fetish for fat Jewish chicks and took turns berating him in public for lying to the American people and snickering in private about what bet he’d lost to make him dive on the grenade until we found out it wasn’t a grenade he’d dived on but more like a tub of fat feminine Jew-gold he’d cannonballed into intentionally like Scrooge from DuckTales?

That’s about when Scarface: The World is Yours came out. And damn, does it sound like it.

Hip-hop has come a long way in the last damn near twenty years. Rhyme-writing has gotten a lot more complex. More sophisticated tools have been designed to create, record, and modify instrumental tracks. ‘Gangster’ is now an adjective, in addition to a noun. All that had to be taken into account once I started jamming this album.

I’m not trying to say it sucked. I am saying it’s a period piece. Like Shakespeare.

Like motherfuckin Shakespeare.

So this is Gangster-Rap, and I mean that to say that it’s carrying on an ancient tradition of warrior-poets, where you go out and kill some bloodthirsty savage from another tribe, then fuck his wife and take his loot, and then brag about it, and whoever can brag about it the best gets mad props from all his friends. These are, for the most part, collages full of brags, boasts, toasts, roasts, jokes, punch-lines, and putdowns. Scarface nails that, really highlighting (as narrators are wont to do) his own invincibility and omnipotence.

That said, he doesn’t say it in a particularly amazing or original way. His rhythm is somewhat monotonous, sticking with the beat instead of dancing around it (as was par for the time, with certain notable exceptions). In fact, he mostly gets by on his incredible enthusiasm and a complete lack of self-consciousness in saying absolutely ridiculous things. The enthusiasm probably explains why he’s so popular- the rhymes are simple, but the delivery is so honest and powerful that it’s not for a while until you’re like ‘hey… wait a minute… all these songs are about him randomly killing people and selling drugs.’

He has some legitimate points on his more thought-intense songs, and certain criticisms of the drug game, but it could be that I’m reading more into his ‘anti-police’ vibe than is there.

“Niggas gettin caught, doin time, so they snitchin
They pickin niggas up on a funky ass suspicion
We'll be goin down for some questioning we think
And end up gettin hit with the fuckin kitchen sink"

I mean, from a realistic perspective, doing drugs is, technically illegal, and if the Mr. Scarface character was really interested in avoiding the police, I don’t think it’d be going TOO far out of his way to… you know… not be involved in illegal activities? I mean, fight the power, sure, I’m all about fighting the power. I guess just not too much.

Literally, the high point of the album is ‘Funky ‘lil Nigga’, featuring 2Low. Mostly because he’s thirteen, and he’s spitting lines like:

“I got my street sense from these muthafuckin streets, bitch
And I'm comin real, cause I ain't fuckin with that weak shit
Pass me the joint and let me kick it for the old folks
All the O.G.'s back in the hood that once sold dope”

It’s probably the funniest thing I’ve seen since Afro-Ninja. He just doesn’t get how much he doesn’t get. The overly expletive-filled language, the too-easy familiarity with the signs of rebellion of the age just older than he is paint him as the kid trying too hard to be cool. Like when you were in middle school and your friend, Sean Lebowicz, was bragging about having sex with his girlfriend that lived two towns away and she was a model and he only had pictures of her that he clipped out of magazines and he was trying to describe it and every time you asked for more specific details he told you couldn’t remember it really well but it was awesome and he was sweating the whole time he was telling the tale and then it turned out he was just flat-out lying.

It’s probably not that pathetic, because if 2Low’s hanging out with Scarface, there’s probably some partying like a rap-star going on (rap stars are not known for their judgment), but the false bravado is probably just as clear a sign of immaturity.

On a one-to-five scale, I rate this a high school ex-girlfriend. It’s not perfect, but it was pretty good for that time in your development where you were just excited to get what you were given, and were amazed that her cooch was so similar to what Sean described that for a moment you thought he might have actually been telling the truth until you remembered you read his rant almost word-for-word in a back-issue of penthouse once you finally got around to torrenting them.

Fuck you, Sean. We used to think you were cool.