-Kristmas “Dopeman Girlfriend”
Reason number 1,0781 why the music industry failing is a bummer: If these incredible motherfuckers in Huntsville were doing this in say, 1995, a dude like Kristmas’d have a minor victory masterpiece album out, and not a couple of mp3s floating around. Notice how despite the “spoiler alert” title, Kristmas spends the entire first verse building to the revelation that indeed, he’s “fuckin’ the dopeman girlfriend”. Verse two focuses on the why’s of it, namely framed around the ways said dopeman’s girlfriend is ignored–implicitly elaborating on the thing NPR types would often cite about The Wire, that indeed dope-dealing is a full-time job.There’s even a cool sense of complex morality to Kristmas’ tale, when he devilishly admits in verse three that he “know[s] every stash spot in the house” (and apes Mims’ “This Is Why I’m Hot” flow for some reason?) but adds, “[he] could rob the nigga but that’s not what [he's] about”. That’s a kind of Goines-ian understanding of the roundabout morality amongst thugs. And lastly, there’s a level of suspense throughout the song. Because it’s totally of the gangsta rap storytelling tradition, you’re waiting for the twist or the part where it goes bad–it’s especially ratcheted-up when he mentions going out to get “a bite to eat” with her–but it never comes, though you assume it will eventually. It isn’t often that a rap song has a life beyond the start and end of the beat, but “Dopeman Girlfriend” does. Word to Traps ‘N Trunks for putting Huntsville, AL: Rocket City together.
-Lil Wyte “I’m Da Bad Influence”
Alright! New Lil Wyte–which means weirdo white-trash reality raps and a bunch more beats from DJ Paul and Juicy J. This one’s hardly an evil synth stomper or an ugly-elegant Willie Hutch flip, it’s a kind of blissed-out, on-painkillers whine of 70s Zombie movie synths. Or like, Boards of Canada in a slowly-dying cassette player. Or the music from some old-ass PBS documentary peppered with skittering drums. Seriously, the sample’s gotta be one of those three or Paul and Juicy spent some syruped-up night fucking with filters on a keyboard until it sounded like any or all of the stuff described in the previous three sentences.And Lil Wyte brings some funny and poignant lines to this thing, in his deceptively unlistenable flow–that’s to say, if you power through your first listen, you’ll really dig his cracker shout rap. Doesn’t he beat Drake and Kanye and Wayne and all these faux-cocky rappers at their own game when he croaks out, “When I make 10 million, I’m gonna turn into a fuckin’ jerk”? Is he even bragging there? He’s sort of just saying it as an inevitability or like, a fairly deep understanding of his–and most people’s–low-brow fate. This is that kid that your bus in middle school had to go way out of its way to pick-up all, the kid you fuckin’ clowned for wearing Spaldings and not Nikes, grown up and rapping desperately.
-Beanie Sigel ft. Omilio Sparks & Freeway “Where’s My Opponent?”
A song all about the build-up before heads are cracked, literally or figuratively via hard-ass raps. Contained quiet before the storm. The clacking about-to-pop-off beat is there enough to sound ominous and shit, but spare enough that Sparks, Freeway, and finally Beans, can rap however they like around it. Sparks, well he raps like Sparks, Freeway predictably ups the energy though he’s wisely reserved a bit, gritting his teeth and then Beans almost whispers kill-you lines–all three verses punctuated by a regal, mob boss rhetorical, “where the fuck is my opponent?”.The genius of this track is how it never explodes or even comes close, energy-wise. It peaks with Free, his dependable fervor supported on each side by quiet, seething, James Caan grimacing before he pops you, Deniro staring straight ahead as “Sunshine of Your Love” plays, verses from two buddies from the Roc days. There’s the feeling of a cipher on the track, which is all a “posse cut” has to have–it doesn’t need to be an event or even a “banger”, it just needs to sound awesome and be scary and destroy.
-Jay Z ft. Kanye West & Rihanna “Run This Town”
Best use of bird squawks in a rap song since The W’s “Protect Ya Neck (The Jump Off)”. Anyways, obviously putting a Beans song with some old Roc members on it right above this half-successful jam makes a statement about what in the fuck Jay Z is or isn’t doing in 2009–there’s also a Jay diss on the new Beanie by the way–but it’s important to realize this is still a fairly thrilling rap song for the radio. That Rihanna almost works on a militant clomp of a beat (pianos pounding, some Rave-esque wave of vocals, clunky guitar) like this is something and a reminder of how weird pop music is right now. Really everybody, there’s a thing called radio and most American popular music listeners still get their music that way and you should listen to it every once in a while, if only for that reason.For about the fifth time in the past year, Kanye runs away with someone else’s song, capturing the kind of bitter feeling of victory that Jay Z once embodied and rode for an entire album on The Black Album but now only does in interesting ways on internet teasers for MTV specials from the backseat of some presumably, fly-as-fuck car–oh wait, that clip’s from 2001. Back to Kanye, who has never been a great rapper but seems to be interested in having his words rhyme and embracing the very special ways that rap can hold up two disparate ideas at once. The line about requesting “no photos” while he’s in church is really loaded and just good writing–hinting at a particularly grotesque violation of privacy, even as he brags about fucking girls just a few lines before.
-Barnes “5 In the Mornin”
A whole thesis on the shifting concerns of hip-hoppers could stem from Baltimore rapper Barnes’ rewrite of the Ice T classic–Barnes drops “a bag of Indo”…Ice T lamented not having time to grab his “old-school tape”. But not really, because the whole song’s basically about what that fucking dropped bag of indo means to the dude. The repeated line that builds in meaning is, “I never had no motherfuckin’ indo to smoke”.”5 in the Mornin” is about how this 5am arrival of the Feds forces him out the back window, resulting in the dropped bag of weed, which is not only a bummer for the obvious reasons but because it represents like, awful, terrible waste to him.That’s to say, even at his relative level of wealth, Barnes remembers back when he was “broke” and “never had no motherfuckin’ indo to smoke” and so, dropping it is like palpable waste, which is quite different than the “blow” that’s flushed out of necessity, or the girls he proudly refuses to “give a fuck” about. It’s all about that dropped indo–as it should be. This is a weird song because it’s so brief and it’s barely even a structured rap song–just a series of terse, repeated, rhyming couplets that resonate through repetition with a forgettable, kinda-verse sandwiched between them. It works though. From the first installment of AllBmoreHipHop’s “Block Work” mixtape series.
further reading/viewing:
-”Thursday, August 30th, 1923″ by Virginia Woolf
-”Three 6 Mafia’s Cracker Protege Returns” by Tom Breihan
-Zach Baron from Sound of the City on Jay Z’s “Off That”
-Scene from Thief
-Scene from Goodfellas
-Newsarama Interview with James Stokoe
The intersection of movies wrestling with atrocity and the top-grossers of the week’s a rare occurence, but Inglourious Basterds and District 9 occupy the #1 and #2 spots respectively, while swiping some of pulp’s grammar to engage with the Holocaust and South African Apartheid.
So, I was asked by a paper to attend the ‘America’s Most Wanted’ tour and review it, but then the piece never ran and no one will tell me why, so here it is. It’s a good reminder of why, despite rawk-star trappings right now, Wayne’s still wonderfully weird and the only guy to pull something like this off.-b
Noticed that Madlib’s on the cover of the latest issue of Wire magazine and this, coupled with the hub-bub about Passion of the Weiss’ whatever whatever “Top 50 Rap Albums of the 2000s” list has me thinking it’s 2003 again–when you know, making an argument for why rap that wasn’t exactly capital-R rap was just as awesome was a new enterprise or something. When I’d have to explain to people that got in my car that indeed, my enjoyment of Three-Six Mafia wasn’t just because I hadn’t yet been exposed to El-P and The Roots. It was years-festering frustration with that sort of thing that really got this blog rolling.
Upon hearing of Drake’s tumble, flashes of a kind of Putney Swope absurd, Wag the Dog cynical set-up rushed through my head: Drake never gets up from his fall, becomes a wheelchair-bound rapper, and the divide between actor Aubrey Graham, his character Jimmy Brooks, and his rap persona Drake completely melt away and he becomes an even bigger star. And really, a few days later, that sequence of events doesn’t even seem that far-fetched. The problem with Drake’s not that he isn’t very good, but that his every career move seems wrapped in the quietest of controversies and hype-building–never enough to alienate, just enough to maintain that crucial “buzz”.
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