STREET LORD'Z PLATINUM - COME ROLL WITH A NI--A (1999)
Not trying to be a rap republican, but this is the best rap song I've heard since the last time I've blogged. Your boy is sinking deeper into the delirium of old age and he likes it. Some honorable tracks have come across the dash, but do any of them confirm the longstanding connection between Bay (proto-)hyphiness and Detroit grit? They do not.
I am too young to figure out how to embed a video on Blogspot, too old to do anything else, so I will spend the remainder of this post trying to jerry-rig some primitive HTML. As I used to say in more carefree days: "CHUUUUUUUCH."
SMITTY FT. KANYE WEST, SCARFACE, AND JOHN LEGEND - GHETTO (2005)
It's sick, in every sense of the word, to think that I'm still moving through culture. I've lost a step. My hair is turning white, the kids laugh at the Pyrex Vision logo plastered across my ass, but I don't know what else to do with myself, and so I move onward.
The reappearance of the '03 XXL Freshmen list got me reminiscing on the raps of my youth that fell through the cracks. Little Haiti's Smitty earned local airplay and a Hype Williams video with "Diamonds on My Neck," an underrated slab of Swizzy 2.0, before his debut album was shelved and he was banished back to his old ghostwriter haunts. According to a Wikipeia citation terminating in a 404 error, Smitty is currently signed to Blackground/Interscope and will be releasing an album "in the near future." Time is relative. We may very well be banging new Smitty on our Nanos before this blog is updated again.
"Ghetto" is about as mid-00s as you could ask for: Kanye soul sample, John Legend providing the melodic counterpoint to Ye's talk-hook, a Scarface verse for some reason. I'm not complaining. Everything is so self-contained that Smitty ends up being an also-ran on his own track. Was Twista busy that day? Did someone owe Smitty a favor? His presence makes no sense, as if an armchair rapper deepfaked himself into the object of his fantasies.
