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Archive for the ‘Dipset’ Category

How Big Is Your World? Good, Recent Rap Songs

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-8 Ball & Devius ‘Jus’ Ridin’
Click here to download ‘Jus Ridin’.
Nielsen of A Little DMX Under a Full Moon wrote about this song already, but letting me go crazy over it for a bit…this song’s off of the recently-released ‘The Vet & The Rookie’ album by 8 Ball and some new guy who isn’t great but gets the job done, named Devius. ‘The Vet & the Rookie’ is a pretty solid album and a lot of that has to do with the really great beats, many provided by Tennessee’s Montana Trax. ‘Jus’ Ridin’ is probably one of the greatest songs ever made, the sort of song that makes sense the first time you hear it. These super-clean kinda hard-ass guitars that play under the chorus, complemented by some typical Southern rap drums and an even cleaner sounding acoustic sound, with 8 Ball and Devius trading a few verses back and forth, it’s really simple and straightforward and great. The drums slightly change during each verse or an instrument is dropped-out, especially during Devius’ last verse, when its just drums and a slightly different acoustic part, it all makes the return of that riff even more exciting.

Plenty of straight rapping on this too. 8 Ball’s voice just gets deeper as he grows older and fatter, sounding like Baron Harkonnen should sound like or something, this angry, smart, decadent fat guy dropping classic lines. Devius is a good counterpoint as he raps with a youthful but still self-aware voice but he has more enthusiasm (“You know today look good”) and sounds like he’s having fun. I like Devius’ line about laughing at the chick he and his friends “ran a train on”. Also, Devius refers to himself as “Ted Deviase” or something like that, in reference to Ted “Million Dollar Man” Dibiase.

-Cam’ron ‘Glitter’
Click here to hear ‘Glitter’.
I already talked about this song on Wednesday but it fits with the general sound of the other songs here and I didn’t really discuss the beat on any level other than it being kind of downbeat and depressive (which is good). Every once in a while, a song will get this really great, warm, organic, ambient kind of sound that is like the sound equivalent of painkillers. ‘Glitter’s drums are sort of stiff and dull, they certainly don’t knock but they have a near-Primo tightness to them that anchors the song and allows for all those crazy synth stabs and chimey sounds to sort of fumble around in the background.

I really like how both of the new Cam leaked tracks are not statements on any level. They ignore all of those manic, banger-type beats we’ve come to expect from the Dips which, if you go along with the bullshit I said on Wednesday, makes sense because Cam is sort of mining this dark, depressed, over-the-hill territory. Instead of trying to remake ‘Dipset Anthem’ and ‘Get Em’ Girls’ he’s going for the sound on ‘Harlem Streets’ or ‘I.B.S’, this will disappoint a lot of fans but I like it a lot.

-Young Buck featuring Outlawz ‘Driving Down the Freeway’
Click here to download ‘Driving Down The Freeway’.
This song gets a lot of play on Sirius rap stations and Morgan State’s rap show ‘Strictly Hip-Hop’ but it’s too legitimately soulful and laid-back to become a real hit. See, people like fake chilled-out music they don’t want stuff that is like this song. What it celebrates is too minimal (just driving) and it’s energy-level too complacent to really make it in this current, utterly moronic rap radio climate. The song is produced by Hi-Tek and has the same weary but uplifting sound last heard on ‘So Tired’ from ‘Hi-Teknology 2′.

Young Buck seems to often fall-back or downplay aspects of his persona- no doubt in deference to his G-Unit goons- but here, his voice seems even more Southern than usual, as if he stopped trying to vaguely hide his accent. It also seems even more strained and booming, listen to that part where he says “Holla back baby”; he’s tapping into like, Willie D territory here, if not in content, at least in vocal performance. Of course, the real star here is that great chorus which sounds like D’Angelo if his influences were Willie Hutch and Al Green instead of Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder. That chorus conjures up images of magic hour drives down the interstate; it’s careless but not empty as it is palpably soulful, even beautiful.

-Lil Wayne ‘Too Comfortable’
Click here to download ‘Too Comfortable’.
Lil Wayne does Yoga or some shit to this song. Kanye’s must’ve dug into his archives for those kinda shitty and flat ‘College Dropout’ era drums that everyone pisses on but I totally love. Putting these like “Pure Moods” new-agey strings and this fuzzy Babyface sample under it, makes it probably terrible in everybody’s mind but mine. If ‘Jus Ridin’ is the sound of painkillers, this song is what heroin sounds like or at least, painkillers with too many shots of liquor…blissed-out, hazy, and about to fall apart at any moment.

Wayne’s weirdo raps are what most people get excited about, because it’s easy to get excited about weirdo raps, but I like when he sort of gets dorky and sensitive and addresses the issues that a like, thinking twentysomething worries about. Taking his cue from that sampled chorus, he raps about the thing that I think any guy concerned about commitment with a girl worries about: That awful point where it turns from fun and perpetually new to predictable, the point where the chick gets well, too comfortable. His signature croak, works for the track, as he’s yelping out his lines of urgency, but instead of them being about eating rappers, he’s yelping about near-emo fears of a chick getting emotionally lazy. I love the part of the first verse where all the lines are questions that begin with “Don’t?”, like his reputation as a decent guy is on the line. At the same time, it’s not this pussy “baby don’t go” thing but this like real warning that if shit goes wrong, she can get the fuck out and he’ll find some other girl pretty easily. The chorus and verses become as much a threat as a declaration.

-Oren Ambarchi ‘Inamorata’
Click here to download ‘Inamorata’.
My obligatory non-rap song that I plan to toss-in for these “good rap songs” lists. From Electronic musician and guitarist Oren Ambarchi’s recent album, the pretentiously-titled ‘In the Pendulum’s Embrace’. If ‘Jus’ Ridin’ was painkillers and ‘Too Comfortable’ heroin, well this is your dead, drugged-up body in that moment where you can’t move but your heart is still beating and you’ll probably die. It starts out with some light, electronic pops and resonating buzzes that sort of slowly come together, held for longer amounts of time, and subtly increase in volume. The best thing about electronic music like this is that it’s all production, so you can sort of bliss-out on it and really focus on the details. About four minutes in, some longer drone-ish tones enter as do some metallic rumbles that move the song half out of intellectual abstract artiness because it sounds genuinely creepy. A minute or so later, strings come in, sort of swelling (as strings are wont to do) and underscored by what sounds like an organ and it becomes a pretty overwhelming listen. It’s pretty stupid when those go away and there’s still two minutes of the song left, but what are you gonna do? Hardly perfect and as I said, it’s instrumental, avant-garde-ish music that never totally breaks free of its intellectual restraints but still a moving piece.

Written by Brandon

November 2nd, 2007 at 5:20 am

The Quiet Return of Cam’ron

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If there was any doubt as to who is the true weirdo of Dipset, Cam’ron’s recent return in the form of a weird, near-Andy Kaufman-like video and two equally bizarre songs (‘Glitter’ and ‘Just Us’) should settle things. Jim Jones is hanging out with Rick Rubin and Juelz Santana is showing up on good but sorta “meh” songs like DJ Khaled’s ‘Brown Paper Bag’. Other than Hell Rell’s wonderfully retarded album cover, the obnoxious flair that made me love Dipset is gone, until now, with this recent wave of purposefully underwhelming and depressive Cam stuff.

In the aforementioned video, Cam literalizes his absence by compiling a bunch of faked “Cam sightings” videos, making himself like some kind of Rap Sasquatch or something. The videos are obviously fake and really hilarious as the cameraman in pretty much everyone of them, is like “Yo, that’s Cam!”. Be it Cam talking to a friend at like 1 in the afternoon next to a kinda crappy car or grabbing the ass of a kinda fat chick, this is obviously supposed to be funny. Later in the video, the cameraman chases Cam to a rooftop and Cam proceeds to pop-up like the goddamn Batman and shoot the guy! Perhaps the best part is towards the end, as we see Cam’ron in Halloween-style Army Fatiques (with helmet!) aimlessly wandering around a graveyard, as a chopped-up-so-he-says-bad-things audio file of the President plays and then segues into the fucking theme from the A-Team! It’s really great and it’s also fun in the way that it really plays around with Cam’s image as a fallen rap-soldier and a guy who has lately, out of embarrassment avoided the spotlight.

Cam has totally embraced the image everyone now has of him, as this wounded, in-over-his-head rapper that maybe ruined his career in un-winnable beefs, embarrassing Youtube taunts, and silly ‘60 Minutes’ interviews. God only knows what is truly in the heart of Cameron Giles but all of that stuff to me, seemed like classic Dipset pranksterism that because people took it seriously at all, got a little out of control and now, rather than fight it or try to over-explain himself, Cam’s “comeback” is in the form of playing off his damaged ego, dodgy musical output, and hints of being batshit crazy.

On that first leaked track ‘Glitter’, he’s heard ending his chorus with “I shine…” in a way that’s like Al Bundy recalling his Polk high days without totally giving in to resignation because it’s still “I shine” and not “I shined”, you know? The chorus, spoken by “a two year old in a diaper…filled with shit” who asks why he’s wearing so much jewelry is a pretty weird way of reminding listeners that he’s got a lot of diamonds: To a two-year old, diamonds and shit probably look pretty silly, so it’s sort of subtly mocking. The detail that the diaper is “filled with shit” is unnecessary but adds a reality that plays against but ultimately works along with Cam’s cartoonish persona. For the first leaked track from your mixtape, to sound so down and continually return to this image of something filled with shit all over a really great beat, that is sort of slow, almost ambient-sounding with drums that certainly sound defeated, is telling.

The track that seemed to pop-up yesterday, ‘Just Us’ sounds even more desperate, based on a sample of Journey’s ‘Don’t Stop Believing’. The Journey song has been forever recontextualized by the series finale of ‘The Sopranos’ and Cam is playing into that at least a little bit…this image of a getting a little older, made too many mistakes, sorta paranoid Tony Soprano would certainly resonate with Cam. At the same time, it fits right in-line with Dipset’s long history of sampling out-there, super-obvious songs. A few people made snarky jokes about how it probably wasn’t a good idea for Cam to name his first leaked track after a song that is synonymous with Mariah Carey’s initial fall from grace but again, I can’t help but think Cam’ron is aware of this and playing off of it; Cam is either in or creating the image that he’s in his ‘Glitter’ period.

On ‘Just Us’, Cam somehow reaches into that Journey song and pulls-out an appropriate amount of sadness. Jones, Juelz and whoever else is/was in Dipset can all make good or fun songs and they can do hilarious or weird but it’s really only Cam that has the talent or the awareness to throw in some really affecting stuff as well. The image of it just being “just us” contains that heart-on-the-sleeve, end-of-the-world romance that Journey lifted from Springsteen and moved it into the world of melodrama, Cam grabs onto it and takes it even further. That first verse where he describes meeting the woman “who hates a pusha” is straight out of Lou Reed’s ‘Berlin’ or something and Cam’s lists of the woman’s problems are well-wrought: breast cancer, son has sickle cell, etc. The whole song is full of lines and details like this that I won’t take the time to explain (just listen to the song!) but it’s all weirdly affecting and darkly funny. The emotion and comedy is best conflated when he describes Brenda, who is 31 (is there a sadder, more-real age than 31??) and then says he “gave her a sanchez, yeah a dirty one” and like that, anything you maybe felt about the song is changed. Cam is purposefully making himself look like an ass, playing with recent pop-culture images of self-destruction, and his own mistakes and making failure a new part of his persona.

Written by Brandon

October 31st, 2007 at 7:33 pm

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A Cam-less Dipset?

(no homo!!)

So, according to Miss Info, Cam’ron is out of Dipset, probably, maybe, or something…as every “major” development in the rap world is suspect, I must preface this with: “assuming this isn’t a publicity stunt…” So, assuming this isn’t a publicity stunt, it’s pretty strange. Does Dipset even mean anything without Cam’ron? Part of my love and arguably, anybody’s love of Dipset comes from their craziness, their inconsistencies, all of which is best, that is least embarrassingly exemplified by Cam’ron. When he showed up on ’60 Minutes’ clowning scare-monger Anderson Cooper, I loved it even though I disagreed with everything he said because Cam stuck to his guns. That’s what Cam is supposed to do. His apology a few days later seemed sad and pathetic because Cam is supposed to not give a fuck. Why Cam why? Now this. Say it ain’t so guys…say it ain’t so. Well, it isn’t really so as the updates on the Miss Info link suggests…

Since Jim Jones became the greatest rapper alive (or something), Cam has kept a relatively low profile or at least one kind of separate from his fellow Dips leading some suspicion that Cam was on the outs. Cam wasn’t on the ‘We Fly High (Remix)’ and didn’t even pop-up in the video. His idiotic 50 beef has been more Cam than Dipset. I was super-excited about ‘Dipset X-Mas’, expecting some classic Cam retardo-genius but instead it was just Jim Jones…so Cam is out of Dipset? If it isn’t a publicity stunt in the sense of being orchestrated, it’s still a publicity stunt in the sense of its Jim Jones running his mouth. Does this even matter? Not really. Especially not to most people who have nothing but disdain for the Dips but even for myself, an unabashed Dipset fan, I don’t really care.

When ‘We Fly High’ got really popular for some reason, my friends and I joked about the end of Dipset because Jim Jones is too much of an idiot to be humble and his pseudo-success would give him a big head. Is this what happened? Probably. I think this will be more like Jim Jones ends up being out of Dipset…which isn’t a loss really. ‘Summer Wit’ Miami’ would make my list of 100 favorite rap songs but I don’t imagine a second spot on that list for Jones anyways…I’ll miss Jones’ amazing perm he had circa 2000 but he doesn’t have it anymore and I’ll mourn the loss of Jones’ ‘H & M’ clothing style but that too exists in videos of days gone by. Would the rest of the Dips really side with Jim Jones? What does it mean for Dipset to be Cam-less? They aren’t even Dipset without Cam. Dipset become the Beach Boys that come to the state fair each year.

My intentions for this entry were to discuss the greatness of Dipset in spite of (or whatever) this recent hoopla but I already did it, so I’m just re-posting it. This post also had a weird life on a few message boards, which was sort of cool…Re-posting. It’s cheap I know, but I happen to like this entry a lot…

Why I Love Dipset.

So, Dipset are at it again. If you haven’t read, according to Nah Right, someone Dipset-ized Tru Life’s Myspace. Among the changes, the main image is (was) a reversal of that lame Tru Life mixtape cover and the top four friends are (were) listed as Jim Jones, Juelz Santana, J.R Writer, and Duke Da God. The most hilarious change is Tru Life’s ‘About Me’ section. I copied the text from the screenshots on Nahright, so all weird grammar, spelling, punctuation etc. is kept intact.

“I want to apologize for disrespecting The Whole Dipset especially Jim “capo” Jones. I’m just a tad upset with my situation at rocafella, Jay Z spends all his money on beyonce, and doesn’t leave much for any of his broke Rocafella artist Like me Young Gunners, Memphis Bleek and Peedi Crakk; especially for his dust smoking habits.. I’m driving around the lower eastside in my 96 Windstar Caravan with my broke friends not really doing much. I don’t know when my album gonna drop, I’m still living off Jewelry I stole from Mobb deep and I’m down to my last dollars. I really want to say thank you to Geno, end of the day I know he is my muscle, and the only reason niggas aint swerve on me yet”

96 Windstar Caravan? Spends all his money on Beyonce? This is why I love these guys! This whole hacking thing is presumably a response to the Tru Life mixtape that shows Jones’ head photo-shopped onto Borat-in-a-wrestling-singlet and Cam’ron photo-shopped onto a woman’s body. While we’re at it, the woman’s body with Cam’ron’s head looks disturbingly close to Jamie Foxx’s Wanda character from ‘In Living Color’…anyways, this whole Dipset/Jay-Z beef was absurd from the beginning and as many others have said, it’s only become more ridiculous because Jay-Z has given it the time of day and worse, seems to be taking it seriously.

What makes Dipset so great is how they will do the most juvenile shit ever, fully aware that it makes them look stupider than it does the intended target and not give a shit at all. The entire career of Dipset has been about actually not giving a fuck. Just start with their clothing, their complete embrace of fur and pink and purple is an affront, a challenge to laugh at them. I’d also argue that for fans like me, it’s almost a challenge to take them seriously. I really have to work hard to find what I consider some really interesting realities that they address. Although I love their over-the-top production, many have a problem with it and I can’t really argue. Those nutso strings and cackling sped-up little kid voices on ‘S.A.N.T.A.N.A’ entertain me but I can see why a lot of people have trouble taking the Dips seriously. This bombastic production, coupled with their apparent ability to rap on anything from super-obvious samples (‘Push It’, ‘Roxanne’, Zapp, Cindy Lauper, ‘Between the Sheets’) to television themes (‘Monday Night Football’, ‘Magnum P.I’, ‘Hillstreet Blues’) to fucking Rick Wakeman samples makes them bona fide weirdos. Even their actual threats are filtered through some weird, genius form of Dipset comedy wherein they are the butt of their own jokes, as when Jim Jones threatens some guy with a wedgie. And yeah, I really mean genius here, these guys are funny in this weird subtle comedy way that’s only seen on like, early Albert Brooks films or ‘The Larry Sanders Show’. Those “Mizzle” skits on Cam’ron’s ‘Purple Haze’ are legitimately clever: “Get some weight on you like that fat bitch Della Reese-Yo, I still don’t know what that means.” A pitch-perfect parody of a Woon, the hanger-on, repeating what his favorite rappers say, without any understanding. Or the genius of ‘Chicken Head’:

Chicken Head: I’m a chicken, so I’m a act like a chicken, quack quack!
Cam: That’s a DUCK.

The extra-weird thing about that skit is by the end of it, Cam has clearly lost the argument. As much as the Dips are about pumping themselves up, they spend a lot of time making themselves look like jerkoffs. The much-hated ‘Killa Season’ is the best movie that came out last year. No joke. It is Cassavetes-like in its improvisatory style and what people used-to Hollywood movies call “the worst acting ever” is actually so realistic that it makes you uncomfortable, so you call it “bad”. I have a feeling that when people actually freak-out because their niece has been shot they look a little embarrassing too. A musician hasn’t made a vanity project that makes them look this real since ‘Gimme Shelter’.

Now that Dipset are huge because of ‘We Fly High’, one might think they’d tone it down, but as this hacking escapade proves they couldn’t care less. When ‘We Fly High’ was first released it seemed like typical Dipset hilarity: Jim Jones doing push-ups with a video chick on his back, that hilariously bad on-purpose bluescreen effect with Jones, Cam, and Juelz doing choreographed dancing. Then, Ballin!-mania hit and the inevitable remix was released and the video is even goofier. Jones ups the retardation level by now, bench-pressing a video chick. The video really is a parody of the baller-ific Puffy era. The video takes place on white floors, in front of white walls, leaving the only thing to focus upon to be the rappers, girls, and cars. Rap video cliches are reduced even further. Money is handled in a way that suggests contempt, they objectify woman and money; Diddy poorly juggling wads of $1 bills, Jones drops-back like a QB and throws a wad of bills like a football, Juelz wears the bills in his bandana like an Indian feather, and Birdman angrily punts a stack of cash. When Juelz brags “money ain’t a thing” I sort of believe him. And, let’s not forget the part where the to-be-bench-pressed video girl climbs out of the hood of one of the cars, exposing the car as, literally, a prop…and Juelz has some weird little piece of shit dog on his lap. Is that cool by anyone’s standards?

At the same time, Cam drops a shaky video of him riding mountain bikes with his friends through Harlem. I think there’s some truth in all of their actions. The fun and even stupidity of Dipset is there to be entertaining but it’s also there for us to cut-through to get to the substance. They couch their big ideas and their emotions in jokes. They, like the best artists of any medium, in any era, have a compulsive need to tell the truth. Take a song like ‘Harlem Streets’ from ‘Purple Haze’, a very affecting song, that contains the line “I told my mother I hustle and she said ‘Be Careful” which pretty much defines, in the sparest of words, a mother’s unconditional love for her son. Of course, ‘Harlem Streets’ is backed by a TV theme sample which arguably, downplays the song’s seriousness, as does a line like “…climb behind vagina/then I hymen grind her”. This precarious balance of emotional lyrics, goofy production, and rampant misogyny, contains itself because all of it sort-of fits together in a real-world-is-contradictory way. Jim Jones’ ‘Summer Wit’ Miami’ (wasn’t this the real beginning of the beef with Jay? Everyone seems to have forgotten this…) does not contain a single quality line but the overall feeling of the song is a lot like what it feels like to reflect back on summer. If you actually listen to it, it’s hardly a party song, more of a morning-after-the-party song. Those ‘Purple Haze’ skits are funny but they are also incredibly well-done and realistic. They didn’t have to be recorded so shittily, as to reflect a bad phone-line, the Jamaican on ‘Rude Boy’ could have a slightly less impenetrable accent, and as I said, Cam doesn’t have to get totally schooled in his argument with his girlfriend. The world of Dipset is incredibly well-observed and well-wrought, but there’s also room for wedgie jokes and bad CGI.

Written by Brandon

May 7th, 2007 at 4:31 am

Posted in Cam'ron, Dipset

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Why I Love Dipset.

So, Dipset are at it again. If you haven’t read, according to Nah Right, someone Dipset-ized Tru Life’s Myspace. Among the changes, the main image is (was) a reversal of that lame Tru Life mixtape cover and the top four friends are (were) listed as Jim Jones, Juelz Santana, J.R Writer, and Duke Da God. The most hilarious change is Tru Life’s ‘About Me’ section. I copied the text from the screenshots on Nahright, so all weird grammar, spelling, punctuation etc. is kept intact.

“I want to apologize for disrespecting The Whole Dipset especially Jim “capo” Jones. I’m just a tad upset with my situation at rocafella, Jay Z spends all his money on beyonce, and doesn’t leave much for any of his broke Rocafella artist Like me Young Gunners, Memphis Bleek and Peedi Crakk; especially for his dust smoking habits.. I’m driving around the lower eastside in my 96 Windstar Caravan with my broke friends not really doing much. I don’t know when my album gonna drop, I’m still living off Jewelry I stole from Mobb deep and I’m down to my last dollars. I really want to say thank you to Geno, end of the day I know he is my muscle, and the only reason niggas aint swerve on me yet”

96 Windstar Caravan? Spends all his money on Beyonce? This is why I love these guys! This whole hacking thing is presumably a response to the Tru Life mixtape that shows Jones’ head photo-shopped onto Borat-in-a-wrestling-singlet and Cam’ron photo-shopped onto a woman’s body. While we’re at it, the woman’s body with Cam’ron’s head looks disturbingly close to Jamie Foxx’s Wanda character from ‘In Living Color’…anyways, this whole Dipset/Jay-Z beef was absurd from the beginning and as many others have said, it’s only become more ridiculous because Jay-Z has given it the time of day and worse, seems to be taking it seriously.

What makes Dipset so great is how they will do the most juvenile shit ever, fully aware that it makes them look stupider than it does the intended target and not give a shit at all. The entire career of Dipset has been about actually not giving a fuck. Just start with their clothing, their complete embrace of fur and pink and purple is an affront, a challenge to laugh at them. I’d also argue that for fans like me, it’s almost a challenge to take them seriously. I really have to work hard to find what I consider some really interesting realities that they address. Although I love their over-the-top production, many have a problem with it and I can’t really argue. Those nutso strings and cackling sped-up little kid voices on ‘S.A.N.T.A.N.A’ entertain me but I can see why a lot of people have trouble taking the Dips seriously. This bombastic production, coupled with their apparent ability to rap on anything from super-obvious samples (‘Push It’, ‘Roxanne’, Zapp, Cindy Lauper, ‘Between the Sheets’) to television themes (‘Monday Night Football’, ‘Magnum P.I’, ‘Hillstreet Blues’) to fucking Rick Wakeman samples makes them bona fide weirdos. Even their actual threats are filtered through some weird, genius form of Dipset comedy wherein they are the butt of their own jokes, as when Jim Jones threatens some guy with a wedgie. And yeah, I really mean genius here, these guys are funny in this weird subtle comedy way that’s only seen on like, early Albert Brooks films or ‘The Larry Sanders Show’. Those “Mizzle” skits on Cam’ron’s ‘Purple Haze’ are legitimately clever: “Get some weight on you like that fat bitch Della Reese-Yo, I still don’t know what that means.” A pitch-perfect parody of a Woon, the hanger-on, repeating what his favorite rappers say, without any understanding. Or the genius of ‘Chicken Head’:

Chicken Head: I’m a chicken, so I’m a act like a chicken, quack quack!
Cam: That’s a DUCK.

The extra-weird thing about that skit is by the end of it, Cam has clearly lost the argument. As much as the Dips are about pumping themselves up, they spend a lot of time making themselves look like jerkoffs. The much-hated ‘Killa Season’ is the best movie that came out last year. No joke. It is Cassavetes-like in its improvisatory style and what people used-to Hollywood movies call “the worst acting ever” is actually so realistic that it makes you uncomfortable, so you call it “bad”. I have a feeling that when people actually freak-out because their niece has been shot they look a little embarrassing too. A musician hasn’t made a vanity project that makes them look this real since ‘Gimme Shelter’.

Now that Dipset are huge because of ‘We Fly High’, one might think they’d tone it down, but as this hacking escapade proves they couldn’t care less. When ‘We Fly High’ was first released it seemed like typical Dipset hilarity: Jim Jones doing push-ups with a video chick on his back, that hilariously bad on-purpose bluescreen effect with Jones, Cam, and Juelz doing choreographed dancing. Then, Ballin!-mania hit and the inevitable remix was released and the video is even goofier. Jones ups the retardation level by now, bench-pressing a video chick. The video really is a parody of the baller-ific Puffy era. The video takes place on white floors, in front of white walls, leaving the only thing to focus upon to be the rappers, girls, and cars. Rap video cliches are reduced even further. Money is handled in a way that suggests contempt, they objectify woman and money; Diddy poorly juggling wads of $1 bills, Jones drops-back like a QB and throws a wad of bills like a football, Juelz wears the bills in his bandana like an Indian feather, and Birdman angrily punts a stack of cash. When Juelz brags “money ain’t a thing” I sort of believe him. And, let’s not forget the part where the to-be-bench-pressed video girl climbs out of the hood of one of the cars, exposing the car as, literally, a prop…and Juelz has some weird little piece of shit dog on his lap. Is that cool by anyone’s standards?

At the same time, Cam drops a shaky video of him riding mountain bikes with his friends through Harlem. I think there’s some truth in all of their actions. The fun and even stupidity of Dipset is there to be entertaining but it’s also there for us to cut-through to get to the substance. They couch their big ideas and their emotions in jokes. They, like the best artists of any medium, in any era, have a compulsive need to tell the truth. Take a song like ‘Harlem Streets’ from ‘Purple Haze’, a very affecting song, that contains the line “I told my mother I hustle and she said ‘Be Careful” which pretty much defines, in the sparest of words, a mother’s unconditional love for her son. Of course, ‘Harlem Streets’ is backed by a TV theme sample which arguably, downplays the song’s seriousness, as does a line like “…climb behind vagina/then I hymen grind her”. This precarious balance of emotional lyrics, goofy production, and rampant misogyny, contains itself because all of it sort-of fits together in a real-world-is-contradictory way. Jim Jones’ ‘Summer Wit’ Miami’ (wasn’t this the real beginning of the beef with Jay? Everyone seems to have forgotten this…) does not contain a single quality line but the overall feeling of the song is a lot like what it feels like to reflect back on summer. If you actually listen to it, it’s hardly a party song, more of a morning-after-the-party song. Those ‘Purple Haze’ skits are funny but they are also incredibly well-done and realistic. They didn’t have to be recorded so shittily, as to reflect a bad phone-line, the Jamaican on ‘Rude Boy’ could have a slightly less impenetrable accent, and as I said, Cam doesn’t have to get totally schooled in his argument with his girlfriend. The world of Dipset is incredibly well-observed and well-wrought, but there’s also room for wedgie jokes and bad CGI.

Written by Brandon

January 15th, 2007 at 4:44 am