There’s something wrong with whatever system I use to analyze the music I’m listening to. My notes for the first run-through of Z-Ro’s Z-Ro vs. The World – invariably my most honest criticism- wrote the work off as thug-rap so one-dimensional it hadn’t yet recognized misogyny and drug-dealing as topics of merit. Upon subsequent listenings, my harsh sentiment had softened to the point where I used the CD as a pick-me-up on my way home from a poor job- interview.
Which leads me to suspect that I don’t give a lot of these rappers anywhere near the shit they deserve for putting out horrible albums. ‘Cuz… some of these albums are songs only a mother could love. A mother that raised a thug like Z-Ro.
Z-Ro’s work is uncompromising and bleak. Its favorite (almost exclusive) topics are crime, poverty, and being a gangster; camaraderie, violence, and competition. He does it with a humorless anger, taking breaks only to commiserate on the empty wonders of well-deserved success. At the time of the publishing of the album, he was the same age I am now.
Z-Ro’s work is different from others in the Houston area, specifically those in the SUC (Screwed Up Click, the remnants of a rag-tag band of fans of DJ Screw). Paul-Wall almost never mentions violence, preferring to spend his time discussing the merits of working hard in order to make a lot of money. Chamillionaire’s favorite topic is how much better of an MC he is than everyone else and how successful he’s been selling his records. Scarface is probably most similar in vein to Z-Ro, but due to his age and veteran status has a wider range, including ideas of psychosis and family, and takes breaks from shouting out harsh threats to hang out with 2Low and let him say things no 13 year old should say. Z-Ro is straight gangster-shit. And while the lazer-like focus leads to a more authentic sound, it also leads to burnout with a quickness. Well, that and the fact that it's hard to listen to.
Apparently, somewhere along the way whoever was mixing the CD decided it was a good idea to down the volume on the instrumentals to a point where you can’t hear them if there’s significant background noise. I think they did this because they realized they were actually using canned sound-effects and non-ironic-synthed-attempts-at-instruments instead of the real thing, and so decided to cleverly disguise their mockery of the ancient art of DJing by convincing an unwitting public that rappers can sing too. Thus, the repeated use of sung hooks and shitty instrumentals.
‘Dirty 3rd’ has Houston’s nigh-patented drum-track beat, with a simple scale synth and a couple suspensenoises I recognized from GoldenEye 64 thrown on the track for variety. ‘Hustling Is All I Can Do’ has what has to be an 8-bit game-system bassoon with a couple of legitimate piano chords thrown in for good measure. ‘Gonna Get Easier’ takes a slower approach to the beat, but still ends up with an early-90’s Dre-like keyboard effect overlaid with a major chord progression. It’s not so much that they sound the same, so much as the tracks sound… simple. This is truly tragic, as Z-Ro’s style, while not being A-quality work, still makes the B-range by sheer virtue of its grit, tenacity, and willingness to vary rate and rhythm.
Z’Ro Sounds gangster. This is really important, because there actually are a lot of rappers out there who can’t quite make the gangster-sound believable (Soulja boy, Akon, Cypress Hill… Snoop Dogg), and it’s usually because their voices lack the appropriate bass quality and aggressive timber. Z-Ro has those, along with the ability to vary his speed, and it makes for a solid performance. He can also sing, and by that I mean he can hit notes on the note, and not slide around or screw up the scale. His singing voice sucks though (see paragraph above as to why this matters). Humorously, the same inflexibility that makes him a good rapper makes him a poor singer. Poor guy.
On my scale from Fresh to SuperCockSucker, I give this album a rating of ‘the fat bitch at the club’. It’s not my first choice, due to its one-dimensionality and the fact that I can’t get really into it, but if it’s the only CD left in the world, yeah, there ain’t nothing wrong with it. Besides, it’s good to curl up to, and if I wake up the next morning it better be making me some damn eggs and bacon or I’m kicking it out of my iPod so fast I’ll leave bootprints on its ass.
Make sure to join me next week as I re-enter the slog of the early 90's with Scarface's 'Mr. Scarface Is Back', if for no other reason than to finally hear the third song in the saga of Mr. Scarface's self-titled tracks.
Monday, July 12, 2010
Sunday, July 4, 2010
GIRL THIS DICK IS SO CLEAN…
…You could boil it in some collard greens.” Is probably one of the more hilarious one-liners off Devin the Dude’s 2007 album Waiting to Inhale. The entire album is filled with them. ‘Matter fact, its gonna be five-hundred for some dick” and “I’d sweep you off yo feet with a box of chocolates but watch it, because it’s really balled up hog-shit”. Honorable mention goes to a lot of quotables on the CD, but nothing really gets vegan chicks so skinny their bikini clad beach-bodies are publically mocked for actually being young boys having lost a dare like referring to your penis being boiled with some veggies that are typically fried afterwards. I mean, when I think about that, it doesn’t even make sense. And that’s really the beauty of it.
Devin the Dude apparently smokes a lot of weed. And when I say a lot of weed, I mean ‘…I bought a whole quarter pound, but that was just today and now I’m down to a dime[bag]’. Most of his lyrics, and all of his songs*, revolve around getting high, or getting laid. Ordinarily, this is a combination I would turn my nose up at like a sexy redheaded Tolnedran princess, but the fact is that Devin’s got the attitude and the self-consciousnessless to make it work for him. The album is really funny.
It is a tribute to his ability to function in society that its humor does not require the listener to be blazed while listening in order to feel like he's in on the jest. Much of it actually revolves around irony. In ‘Just Because’, he outlines a series of awkward ways to kill a woman set to a Barry-Manilow-esque soundtrack, complete with jazz saxophone and airy-keyboard. In ‘She Useta Be’, he describes meeting this super hot chick from high school “150 lbs and 10 years later”… and he still hits that “Because of how she used to look, you know?” ‘She Want That Money’ starts out with him deciding to live within his means AND get laid by propositioning a prostitute… and not paying her.
There’s some good flow, but it’d be a mistake to argue that Devin the Dude shows amazing technical ability or style. He’s not monotonous or tiresome by any means, it’s just that his hooks and lines aren’t his draw; he neither dazzles with dexterity nor baffles with bullshit. Instead, the poetry is really just a canvas for his humor, and his voice.
He sounds Katt Williams had a baby with Mitch Hedberg, midwifed by Dr. Dre and birthed from the womb of none other than Mary Jane herself.
And it's that thin, weak and emasculated voice that angles that extra notion of ‘did he just say…’ into his lyrics to make them funny. It sounds shy and introverted. And then you realize he just inferred he choked a bitch to death with his cock. And not in the ninja way, either.
That said, his instrumentals leave me with the suspicion that, while he spent some time in the studio setting off smoke alarms and then not being able to find them to turn their obnoxious noise off, he spent the rest of the time playing haki-sak with some white kids at a Dave Matthews tribute circle-jerk and accidentally mated one of their acoustic guitars with his sampler-board. A quarter of the beats on this CD have this strangely soothing guitar on them, which leads me to believe that guitar trait is recessive and the sampler was a carrier** for the gene. The rest of the instrumentals are cool though. ‘She Want That Money’ features some electric guitar modding that is as ska as it is minimalistic; “She Useta Be” has this loose saxophone segment that perfectly complements the husky voice of the woman they got to sing the fat bitch's segment; ‘Somebody Elses Wife’ has a Nile-smooth-jazz beat and the only tasteful, non-ironic, actually-useful, seriously-improving-the-song, what-am-i-saying-dear-heaven-strike-me-down-now use of autotune ever.
Seriously. There’s autotune, and it doesn’t suck. I don’t know what to make of it. It’s reserved for choruses and other special moments on the CD like bar mitzvahs and the birthing of first-born sons, but when it does show up, it benefits the work by adding a hypnotic, otherworldly feel to it.
You know what did suck though? ‘Lil Girl Gone’. It’s a song about a pre-pubescent girl running away from home and growing up on the streets in poverty and despair. To say that it clashes with the rest of the album is to imply the asteroid that smashed tons of soot into the earth’s atmosphere 65 million years ago and killed off all the dinosaurs Jesus himself didn’t personally ride into Noah’s ark was in fact a mere ‘boink’ on the earth's crust with a loose bit of space debris. As in: yeah, and then some.
It makes you wonder if someone put him up to this, because Devin only sings the refrain, and I have difficulty believing he didn’t realize it’s totally out of place with the ‘it’s just jokes’ mode of the rest of the album. My honest opinion was that they got to the end of the album and were like ‘damn, we didn’t say nuthin that wasn’t deeper than the papers we usin to roll this blunt with. What should we do?’ and they combined the elements of a country-song to play the heart-strings of the hip-hop community into thinking Devin and crew could reflect on things and think… and feel feelings and shit.
I’m not buying it.
On a one to ten scale, I give this Space Invaders. You know, the video game? It’s fun and enjoyable, but more or less impossible to take seriously. It blunts the sadness when you’re feeling down, it gives you something to laugh at when you’re already smiling, you can jam out with it for hours (by the end of the album, you’ve forgotten what the beginning felt like), and the high score is over 9000 by this point. Expect light-hearted fun, mild to moderate chauvinism, little substance and great levels of substance abuse.
But not nearly as much substance abuse as I'm going to have to perform in order to get through next weeks review: Z-ro's Z-ro vs. The World. Tune in next Friday for more of your weekly hip-hop dose of dope, hope, toasts and mind-numbing run-on sentences.
*See paragraph 9, which starts ‘You know what did suck though…”
**Punnett square
Devin the Dude apparently smokes a lot of weed. And when I say a lot of weed, I mean ‘…I bought a whole quarter pound, but that was just today and now I’m down to a dime[bag]’. Most of his lyrics, and all of his songs*, revolve around getting high, or getting laid. Ordinarily, this is a combination I would turn my nose up at like a sexy redheaded Tolnedran princess, but the fact is that Devin’s got the attitude and the self-consciousnessless to make it work for him. The album is really funny.
It is a tribute to his ability to function in society that its humor does not require the listener to be blazed while listening in order to feel like he's in on the jest. Much of it actually revolves around irony. In ‘Just Because’, he outlines a series of awkward ways to kill a woman set to a Barry-Manilow-esque soundtrack, complete with jazz saxophone and airy-keyboard. In ‘She Useta Be’, he describes meeting this super hot chick from high school “150 lbs and 10 years later”… and he still hits that “Because of how she used to look, you know?” ‘She Want That Money’ starts out with him deciding to live within his means AND get laid by propositioning a prostitute… and not paying her.
There’s some good flow, but it’d be a mistake to argue that Devin the Dude shows amazing technical ability or style. He’s not monotonous or tiresome by any means, it’s just that his hooks and lines aren’t his draw; he neither dazzles with dexterity nor baffles with bullshit. Instead, the poetry is really just a canvas for his humor, and his voice.
He sounds Katt Williams had a baby with Mitch Hedberg, midwifed by Dr. Dre and birthed from the womb of none other than Mary Jane herself.
And it's that thin, weak and emasculated voice that angles that extra notion of ‘did he just say…’ into his lyrics to make them funny. It sounds shy and introverted. And then you realize he just inferred he choked a bitch to death with his cock. And not in the ninja way, either.
That said, his instrumentals leave me with the suspicion that, while he spent some time in the studio setting off smoke alarms and then not being able to find them to turn their obnoxious noise off, he spent the rest of the time playing haki-sak with some white kids at a Dave Matthews tribute circle-jerk and accidentally mated one of their acoustic guitars with his sampler-board. A quarter of the beats on this CD have this strangely soothing guitar on them, which leads me to believe that guitar trait is recessive and the sampler was a carrier** for the gene. The rest of the instrumentals are cool though. ‘She Want That Money’ features some electric guitar modding that is as ska as it is minimalistic; “She Useta Be” has this loose saxophone segment that perfectly complements the husky voice of the woman they got to sing the fat bitch's segment; ‘Somebody Elses Wife’ has a Nile-smooth-jazz beat and the only tasteful, non-ironic, actually-useful, seriously-improving-the-song, what-am-i-saying-dear-heaven-strike-me-down-now use of autotune ever.
Seriously. There’s autotune, and it doesn’t suck. I don’t know what to make of it. It’s reserved for choruses and other special moments on the CD like bar mitzvahs and the birthing of first-born sons, but when it does show up, it benefits the work by adding a hypnotic, otherworldly feel to it.
You know what did suck though? ‘Lil Girl Gone’. It’s a song about a pre-pubescent girl running away from home and growing up on the streets in poverty and despair. To say that it clashes with the rest of the album is to imply the asteroid that smashed tons of soot into the earth’s atmosphere 65 million years ago and killed off all the dinosaurs Jesus himself didn’t personally ride into Noah’s ark was in fact a mere ‘boink’ on the earth's crust with a loose bit of space debris. As in: yeah, and then some.
It makes you wonder if someone put him up to this, because Devin only sings the refrain, and I have difficulty believing he didn’t realize it’s totally out of place with the ‘it’s just jokes’ mode of the rest of the album. My honest opinion was that they got to the end of the album and were like ‘damn, we didn’t say nuthin that wasn’t deeper than the papers we usin to roll this blunt with. What should we do?’ and they combined the elements of a country-song to play the heart-strings of the hip-hop community into thinking Devin and crew could reflect on things and think… and feel feelings and shit.
I’m not buying it.
On a one to ten scale, I give this Space Invaders. You know, the video game? It’s fun and enjoyable, but more or less impossible to take seriously. It blunts the sadness when you’re feeling down, it gives you something to laugh at when you’re already smiling, you can jam out with it for hours (by the end of the album, you’ve forgotten what the beginning felt like), and the high score is over 9000 by this point. Expect light-hearted fun, mild to moderate chauvinism, little substance and great levels of substance abuse.
But not nearly as much substance abuse as I'm going to have to perform in order to get through next weeks review: Z-ro's Z-ro vs. The World. Tune in next Friday for more of your weekly hip-hop dose of dope, hope, toasts and mind-numbing run-on sentences.
*See paragraph 9, which starts ‘You know what did suck though…”
**Punnett square
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Friday, June 18, 2010
SwisherSweets + SwishaHouse = The Smackdown
Paul Wall’s The People’s Champ is a nigh twenty-track virtuoso of the full-blown glory of Houston Rap. Released in ’05, it features many of the biggest names in the southern scene, from Bun B to Three Six Mafia to T.I. It’s low on message, low on content, high on materialism, and really fun to listen to. The tracks are slow, the Houston Rep is high, and the overall effect makes you want to drive through traffic with a couple twelves in your trunk, ten layers of candy-paint on your oversized truck and let the rest of the city know just how long its been since Pimp C was found dead.
This might not be the CD that put The South on the map, but it was the CD that put The South on the map for me. Which was a surprise for me, because I was expecting it to be a chore. Coming from a couple of weeks of Geto Boys, I figured all Houston rap artists would make me break out my thesaurus to look up new and interesting ways of saying ‘It’s good… if you’re into that sort of thing’. But The Peoples Champ is both distinctly Houston and distinctly awesome, as much as Mai’s, Frenchy’s, or Miller Outdoor Theatre.
Houston production revolves around the chopped/screwed style, pioneered by the late DJ Screw, which involves dropping the pitch down into vocal numbness and blatantly repeating specific lines/words/phrases on the vocal track while letting the beat continue unabated. The use of this technique on Paul Wall’s album is tasteful, and adds to the production value without interfering with the vocalistic integrity of the work, which was the point in Screw’s actual work.
Starting with ‘They don’t know’, The People’s Champ references singularly Houston phenomenon, from Timmy Chan’s chicken wings, to candy painted cars, drank/syrup, and the 59 freeway. This technique is really simple, but its importance can’t be overlooked; while major-label artists have a fan base so wide they’re above throwing out bones to the local crew, southern artists, particularly Houston, get little love on the national stage, and so are forced to find other ways, such as this, to expand their market. The local populism fuels the rappers popularity until they’re doing mixtapes with artists in other districts. It’s like networking, for professionals.
That said, when I say this CD is low on content, I mean… holy fuck. There’s really no thematic play, aside from ‘I have a car/it looks cool/I live in Houston/DJ Screw.’ I swear to God, the phrase ‘candy paint’ appears on this album 44 times. ‘Sippin drank’ shows up 52. The CD’s message is about as deep as the leather interior in a classic Cadillac. Which is absolutely perfect.
It’s easy to want to hate the narrowness of the Wall’s topics. Life is more than getting paper, getting laid, candy paint, and sippin’ drank. And yet, to be able to put out a CD that entirely revolves around that, with an hour of music, and have it sound good is a feat that requires nothing short of muse-like inspiration and bacchanal endurance.
If there is a more sublime theme, it slips in by accident, and it’s the protestant work-ethic that drives urban youth to hard work. There’s the assumption throughout the scene (as in, not just Mr. Wall) that in order to obtain success, there has to be work involved; success is neither given by God, nor delivered by luck. This mirrors real life, in the fact that most rappers start out as entrepreneurs and salesmen, develop contacts with the scene, promotional materials, and make numerous, numerous attempts to sell and sell and sell before finally succeeding. I see it as proof that they understand the numbers game.Its one of those lessons life teaches you, that they apparently learned early enough to become successful. Well done, guys.
On my scale of awesome, I grant The People’s Champ a ranking of The People’s Eyebrow. It towers above the rest of the audio of the Houston scene, is an important record for one of the most electrifying acts in rap entertainment today, while simultaneously doing and saying nothing of substance. Paul Wall deserves to be sittin’ sideways while driving slow, because they don’t know.
This might not be the CD that put The South on the map, but it was the CD that put The South on the map for me. Which was a surprise for me, because I was expecting it to be a chore. Coming from a couple of weeks of Geto Boys, I figured all Houston rap artists would make me break out my thesaurus to look up new and interesting ways of saying ‘It’s good… if you’re into that sort of thing’. But The Peoples Champ is both distinctly Houston and distinctly awesome, as much as Mai’s, Frenchy’s, or Miller Outdoor Theatre.
Houston production revolves around the chopped/screwed style, pioneered by the late DJ Screw, which involves dropping the pitch down into vocal numbness and blatantly repeating specific lines/words/phrases on the vocal track while letting the beat continue unabated. The use of this technique on Paul Wall’s album is tasteful, and adds to the production value without interfering with the vocalistic integrity of the work, which was the point in Screw’s actual work.
Starting with ‘They don’t know’, The People’s Champ references singularly Houston phenomenon, from Timmy Chan’s chicken wings, to candy painted cars, drank/syrup, and the 59 freeway. This technique is really simple, but its importance can’t be overlooked; while major-label artists have a fan base so wide they’re above throwing out bones to the local crew, southern artists, particularly Houston, get little love on the national stage, and so are forced to find other ways, such as this, to expand their market. The local populism fuels the rappers popularity until they’re doing mixtapes with artists in other districts. It’s like networking, for professionals.
That said, when I say this CD is low on content, I mean… holy fuck. There’s really no thematic play, aside from ‘I have a car/it looks cool/I live in Houston/DJ Screw.’ I swear to God, the phrase ‘candy paint’ appears on this album 44 times. ‘Sippin drank’ shows up 52. The CD’s message is about as deep as the leather interior in a classic Cadillac. Which is absolutely perfect.
It’s easy to want to hate the narrowness of the Wall’s topics. Life is more than getting paper, getting laid, candy paint, and sippin’ drank. And yet, to be able to put out a CD that entirely revolves around that, with an hour of music, and have it sound good is a feat that requires nothing short of muse-like inspiration and bacchanal endurance.
If there is a more sublime theme, it slips in by accident, and it’s the protestant work-ethic that drives urban youth to hard work. There’s the assumption throughout the scene (as in, not just Mr. Wall) that in order to obtain success, there has to be work involved; success is neither given by God, nor delivered by luck. This mirrors real life, in the fact that most rappers start out as entrepreneurs and salesmen, develop contacts with the scene, promotional materials, and make numerous, numerous attempts to sell and sell and sell before finally succeeding. I see it as proof that they understand the numbers game.Its one of those lessons life teaches you, that they apparently learned early enough to become successful. Well done, guys.
On my scale of awesome, I grant The People’s Champ a ranking of The People’s Eyebrow. It towers above the rest of the audio of the Houston scene, is an important record for one of the most electrifying acts in rap entertainment today, while simultaneously doing and saying nothing of substance. Paul Wall deserves to be sittin’ sideways while driving slow, because they don’t know.
Apparently, Juggalos Like Dexter
The Jewddhist and the Druid invited me out for a night of raucous merriment, and a nerdcore-concert headlined by MC Lars and that guy with that song about Boba Fett’s Corvette. Arriving only a couple of hours late, I was surprised both at the fact that the second act was on his last song and that the sweltering heat and sweat-humidity from the huddled masses of young black-clad emo-hipster nerd-rock wannabes reminded me uncomfortably of certain market streets in Vietnam. I moved my wallet to my front pocket, kept my hand over it, and complained loudly about bands starting on time. I mean, really, WTF.
MC Chris was the headliner, and the fucker legitimately packed more of a punch in his show than you’d expect from his hobbit-frame/leprechaun-voiced deportment. Seriously, he looks and sounds like a svelte dwarf who just got finished mainlining helium into his alveoli, which I don’t even think is possible. The point is, it was a badass show; two parts hip-hop, one part nerd-comedy routine.
I’ll give props- this guy isn’t Aesop (you’re all familiar with my unbounded and unfettered devotion to all things Aesop), but is in the same vein of white rap-artists who bend the genre into contortions so odd you think they’re doing yoga until you see the cock and realize they’re actually having sex in that pose. His beats are consistently fast, and filled with synth- there’s very little rock or traditional jazz in here. His delivery matches that speed, frequently delivering a veritable avalanche of internal rhyme. Nevertheless, he’s unafraid to experiment with tempo or use big-words. His main calling-card is nerd-culture, so he deals with a lot of Star-Wars, ninjas, action figures, jedi, Street Fighter, storm troopers, and things like that. What makes him stand out is his humor though.
Consider his introduction to ‘Hoodie Ninja’
‘This song is about a boy who sneaks out one night to climb a tree to masturbate to a redheaded classmate of his getting undressed. And on the way home, he takes a shit on his gym teacher’s front porch.’
Or his somewhat longer introduction to a song about the Clone Wars:
“Fuckin Fridays are the best, you know why? ‘Cuz CLONE WARS IS BACK! FUCK YEAH! But as badass as it is, somewhere there’s a guy out there whose kid really loves this show. Fuckin loves this show, man. And he comes up to his dad, and he’s like ‘Hey dad, fuckin Clone Wars is awesome. Obi-Wan and Anakin are such great friends they’re gonna be heroes and friends forever. And the clone troopers? These guys have got to be the best troopers ever because they've always got each others' backs and people say they’re all the same but whatever they have different hair and they talk different and one guy painted his ‘craft to look like a shark. A fuckin shark. These guys are awesome and they do such a good job doing every awesome and I love it.’”
“And you’re gonna be like ‘Ah, shit. Look, Timmy… Ah… I knew this day would come … Ah… Look, all the clone troopers die off when they fight the Jedi when Palpatine unleashes his evil plan for domination and Anakin turns to the dark side and Obi-Wan slices of three fingers of his hand and his arm on a volcano planet and he turns into a robot cyborg that kills the Jedi starting with the children. The fucking children.’”
"That’s like saying ‘You know how Bert and Ernie are best friends? Well Bert slashes Ernie’s arm and three fingers off, and Ernie turns to the dark side and becomes half-machine and kills everyone on Sesame Street. Starting with the viewers.’”
There’s three more iterations in that skit, but that’s pretty representative. And his delivery is impeccable; great tempo, great timing.
What I was looking for was connection though, how the artist connects with the crowd. MC Chris jumped on-stage and didn’t even go into his act, he played some bullshit country song and tried to sing along with the words and failed- turned out it was a joke, because, you know, Texas likes country music, and stuff. During his actual set, he got the crowd moving, arms in the air, side-to-side, even got us dancing a little bit, which I thought was amazing. The crowd was already warm, but what put them over the top was the fact that his hobbit-like antics were so ridiculously charismatic. He’s funny, he’s loud, I’m guessing chicks dig him because they like any dude with a mic on the stage, and he acted completely without hesitation. The man radiated confidence, and I think that’s the source of where people are willing to follow his lead.
Curiously though, he had to open up to eye-contact. The first couple of songs he mostly rapped to himself with his eyes closed, either from an incomplete warm-up or too much pot beforehand, I don’t know. He grooved more eye-contact into his work towards the latter end. Just something I thought was of-note.
One a won to tin scale, I give this a rating of Warhammer 40K. Its better than a sharp stick in the eye, but I couldn’t really make out the words to what he was saying (I’ve never been able to, at any show), so you kind of have to have listened to the album, and the only song I’d heard him perform was the Boba-Fett-‘Vette song. Also, Jesus tap-dancing torrent-bashing Christ, it was hot in there. My pants and shirt are all a solid color- there’s not a single spot that didn’t completely soak through the fabric. Even the denim. Denim. Denim was soaked through. How is that even possible?
Also, I paid $10 for a CD. CD has seven fucking songs on it. I’m so DLing his discography guilt-free.
But it wasn’t a bad show. In fact, it was a very good show, I just wasn’t prepared for it, and I’m not really into nerd-core. I have too much violence in my heart to really enjoy the collecting, the cathecting, the cosplay and the complete isolation involved in actually being a nerd. I’ve been there, got the T-shirt, probably have a few character sheets lying around here somewhere, but I’ve moved on. It’s good to look back though. Like XKCD, I feel like part of a special club when I get the jokes
MC Chris was the headliner, and the fucker legitimately packed more of a punch in his show than you’d expect from his hobbit-frame/leprechaun-voiced deportment. Seriously, he looks and sounds like a svelte dwarf who just got finished mainlining helium into his alveoli, which I don’t even think is possible. The point is, it was a badass show; two parts hip-hop, one part nerd-comedy routine.
I’ll give props- this guy isn’t Aesop (you’re all familiar with my unbounded and unfettered devotion to all things Aesop), but is in the same vein of white rap-artists who bend the genre into contortions so odd you think they’re doing yoga until you see the cock and realize they’re actually having sex in that pose. His beats are consistently fast, and filled with synth- there’s very little rock or traditional jazz in here. His delivery matches that speed, frequently delivering a veritable avalanche of internal rhyme. Nevertheless, he’s unafraid to experiment with tempo or use big-words. His main calling-card is nerd-culture, so he deals with a lot of Star-Wars, ninjas, action figures, jedi, Street Fighter, storm troopers, and things like that. What makes him stand out is his humor though.
Consider his introduction to ‘Hoodie Ninja’
‘This song is about a boy who sneaks out one night to climb a tree to masturbate to a redheaded classmate of his getting undressed. And on the way home, he takes a shit on his gym teacher’s front porch.’
Or his somewhat longer introduction to a song about the Clone Wars:
“Fuckin Fridays are the best, you know why? ‘Cuz CLONE WARS IS BACK! FUCK YEAH! But as badass as it is, somewhere there’s a guy out there whose kid really loves this show. Fuckin loves this show, man. And he comes up to his dad, and he’s like ‘Hey dad, fuckin Clone Wars is awesome. Obi-Wan and Anakin are such great friends they’re gonna be heroes and friends forever. And the clone troopers? These guys have got to be the best troopers ever because they've always got each others' backs and people say they’re all the same but whatever they have different hair and they talk different and one guy painted his ‘craft to look like a shark. A fuckin shark. These guys are awesome and they do such a good job doing every awesome and I love it.’”
“And you’re gonna be like ‘Ah, shit. Look, Timmy… Ah… I knew this day would come … Ah… Look, all the clone troopers die off when they fight the Jedi when Palpatine unleashes his evil plan for domination and Anakin turns to the dark side and Obi-Wan slices of three fingers of his hand and his arm on a volcano planet and he turns into a robot cyborg that kills the Jedi starting with the children. The fucking children.’”
"That’s like saying ‘You know how Bert and Ernie are best friends? Well Bert slashes Ernie’s arm and three fingers off, and Ernie turns to the dark side and becomes half-machine and kills everyone on Sesame Street. Starting with the viewers.’”
There’s three more iterations in that skit, but that’s pretty representative. And his delivery is impeccable; great tempo, great timing.
What I was looking for was connection though, how the artist connects with the crowd. MC Chris jumped on-stage and didn’t even go into his act, he played some bullshit country song and tried to sing along with the words and failed- turned out it was a joke, because, you know, Texas likes country music, and stuff. During his actual set, he got the crowd moving, arms in the air, side-to-side, even got us dancing a little bit, which I thought was amazing. The crowd was already warm, but what put them over the top was the fact that his hobbit-like antics were so ridiculously charismatic. He’s funny, he’s loud, I’m guessing chicks dig him because they like any dude with a mic on the stage, and he acted completely without hesitation. The man radiated confidence, and I think that’s the source of where people are willing to follow his lead.
Curiously though, he had to open up to eye-contact. The first couple of songs he mostly rapped to himself with his eyes closed, either from an incomplete warm-up or too much pot beforehand, I don’t know. He grooved more eye-contact into his work towards the latter end. Just something I thought was of-note.
One a won to tin scale, I give this a rating of Warhammer 40K. Its better than a sharp stick in the eye, but I couldn’t really make out the words to what he was saying (I’ve never been able to, at any show), so you kind of have to have listened to the album, and the only song I’d heard him perform was the Boba-Fett-‘Vette song. Also, Jesus tap-dancing torrent-bashing Christ, it was hot in there. My pants and shirt are all a solid color- there’s not a single spot that didn’t completely soak through the fabric. Even the denim. Denim. Denim was soaked through. How is that even possible?
Also, I paid $10 for a CD. CD has seven fucking songs on it. I’m so DLing his discography guilt-free.
But it wasn’t a bad show. In fact, it was a very good show, I just wasn’t prepared for it, and I’m not really into nerd-core. I have too much violence in my heart to really enjoy the collecting, the cathecting, the cosplay and the complete isolation involved in actually being a nerd. I’ve been there, got the T-shirt, probably have a few character sheets lying around here somewhere, but I’ve moved on. It’s good to look back though. Like XKCD, I feel like part of a special club when I get the jokes
Tuesday, June 8, 2010
Gripping It!
My first memory of Geto Boys' Grip It! On That Other Level comes from burning my buddy’s CD collection. They made it into my CD player by having the grace to have ‘Assassins’, covered by the Insane Clown Posse (a rap group so ludicrous, not only do they believe in magic, they do not believe in electromagnetism). So when I found an album put out by these guys that got a shout out by someone I was willing to follow into hell (or, Detroit, as the case may be), I figured I’d give them a shot.
Turns out I thought they sucked, and so I only jammed them when I needed an interlude in between Biohazard and Perfect Circle.
With music tastes that confusing and conflicting, it’s a wonder I’m still alive today.
One neat thing about the album is that it’s pulp; you can't take it seriously. Like pulp-fiction (the genre) everything is exaggerated. The protagonists are not just murderers, they’re rapist thugs with a perplexing level of psychological problems that went curiously uncorrected by granny’s switch or momma’s ‘tussin during their youth. They don’t just bang hos, they bang them until their body looks like swiss-cheese and then give her over to their boys while they go and get another. And they don’t just sell drugs; they are, in fact, made of drugs.
While the esteem of the artists is somewhat enthralling, it doesn’t remove a greater fault – that it all sounds the same. It’s not just the 4/4 beat, with keyboard wounds added in for effect, high snare and low bass. It’s not just the monotonous delivery (from all except Scarface). It’s not just the Godfather/Scarface samples. It’s all that… and the fact that you can probably take any 4 bars from any song, put them into another song, anywhere in that song, and have it fit seamlessly.
Example: contrast the following from ‘Read These Nikes’:
When I hit ya in your goddamn mouth
And show you what a real nigga's all about
When I dispose of your ass like waste
And nothin but my shoe is in your muthafuckin face
With the following from ‘Size Ain’t Shit’
So if you wanna try your luck
C'mon...play pussy'n'get fucked
Asshole snicker and get beat
Your a bad motherfucker if you dare to compete
It’s like they only had enough creativity between the three of them for four songs- ‘Do It Like a G.O.’ (not a typo), ‘Let a Ho be a Ho’, ‘Mind of a Lunatic’, and ‘Seek and Destroy’. The first is your quintessential thug-anthem, the second is a comedic rendition of how easy pimpin ain’t, the third is a long flirtation with horror-core, and the last is… a lot like the first, but with Scarface unafraid to experiment with tempo.
They strung those four songs into twelve.
On a closely related note, last week I reviewed the song ‘Scarface: Pt. II’ off The World Is Yours. Pt. I is on Grip It!, and is, in fact, the exact same story. Scarface deals some raw, raw-dogs a girl, is shot at during the act, grabs his ratchet and goes Vietnam Tom on some enemies. Both were good to listen to; Scarface has a talent for exaggeration and self-aggrandizement that is nothing short of demigodly. Although, if this actually keeps happening to him, he should probably stop. And if not, why make up the exact story twice? For a fan of The Godfather, Scarface sure forgot to make the sequel an improvement.
On a one to ten scale, I give this album a rating of ‘Power Rangers’. It’s from the early 90’s, its violent, its filled with some fucked up noise, but not enough to give an erection to the kids who’re into that sort of stuff. But mostly, ‘cuz its just the same shit over and over. It’s not a complete waste - millions of kids loved that show before they grew up enough to realize it was one of the worst television shows ever. And Amy Jo Johnson was smoking. And the Green/White/Rainbow ranger actually uses his morphin-super-powers when he’s in the octagon.
Morphenomenal!
Turns out I thought they sucked, and so I only jammed them when I needed an interlude in between Biohazard and Perfect Circle.
With music tastes that confusing and conflicting, it’s a wonder I’m still alive today.
One neat thing about the album is that it’s pulp; you can't take it seriously. Like pulp-fiction (the genre) everything is exaggerated. The protagonists are not just murderers, they’re rapist thugs with a perplexing level of psychological problems that went curiously uncorrected by granny’s switch or momma’s ‘tussin during their youth. They don’t just bang hos, they bang them until their body looks like swiss-cheese and then give her over to their boys while they go and get another. And they don’t just sell drugs; they are, in fact, made of drugs.
While the esteem of the artists is somewhat enthralling, it doesn’t remove a greater fault – that it all sounds the same. It’s not just the 4/4 beat, with keyboard wounds added in for effect, high snare and low bass. It’s not just the monotonous delivery (from all except Scarface). It’s not just the Godfather/Scarface samples. It’s all that… and the fact that you can probably take any 4 bars from any song, put them into another song, anywhere in that song, and have it fit seamlessly.
Example: contrast the following from ‘Read These Nikes’:
When I hit ya in your goddamn mouth
And show you what a real nigga's all about
When I dispose of your ass like waste
And nothin but my shoe is in your muthafuckin face
With the following from ‘Size Ain’t Shit’
So if you wanna try your luck
C'mon...play pussy'n'get fucked
Asshole snicker and get beat
Your a bad motherfucker if you dare to compete
It’s like they only had enough creativity between the three of them for four songs- ‘Do It Like a G.O.’ (not a typo), ‘Let a Ho be a Ho’, ‘Mind of a Lunatic’, and ‘Seek and Destroy’. The first is your quintessential thug-anthem, the second is a comedic rendition of how easy pimpin ain’t, the third is a long flirtation with horror-core, and the last is… a lot like the first, but with Scarface unafraid to experiment with tempo.
They strung those four songs into twelve.
On a closely related note, last week I reviewed the song ‘Scarface: Pt. II’ off The World Is Yours. Pt. I is on Grip It!, and is, in fact, the exact same story. Scarface deals some raw, raw-dogs a girl, is shot at during the act, grabs his ratchet and goes Vietnam Tom on some enemies. Both were good to listen to; Scarface has a talent for exaggeration and self-aggrandizement that is nothing short of demigodly. Although, if this actually keeps happening to him, he should probably stop. And if not, why make up the exact story twice? For a fan of The Godfather, Scarface sure forgot to make the sequel an improvement.
On a one to ten scale, I give this album a rating of ‘Power Rangers’. It’s from the early 90’s, its violent, its filled with some fucked up noise, but not enough to give an erection to the kids who’re into that sort of stuff. But mostly, ‘cuz its just the same shit over and over. It’s not a complete waste - millions of kids loved that show before they grew up enough to realize it was one of the worst television shows ever. And Amy Jo Johnson was smoking. And the Green/White/Rainbow ranger actually uses his morphin-super-powers when he’s in the octagon.
Morphenomenal!
Thursday, June 3, 2010
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.
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.
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