2014: THE YEAR FUCKBOY BROKE

It only makes sense my Alice Waters ass is bloggin about 2014 a month and some change after Ryan Seacrest necromanced Dick Clark's spirit in a truly magickal New Years Rockin' Eve, but I adhere to an older process - call it artisanal blogging.  There is but one handmaiden for this sudden outburst of productivity: lovely, nourishing Contempt, whose bitter milk has sustained me for so long.

Fuckboy:  I used to love the word, but now I wince every time I encounter it.  IDK about the exact etymology of the word and ID-really-GAF, but in my recollection it became popular as an inclusive alternative to the irremediable taboo of "fuck nigga."  For understandable reasons, it became a popular term amongst rap fans.  It was fun, succinct, and it packed a punch.

What is a fuckboy?  Essentially, a pussy and a poseur.  Where did it all go wrong?  When the fuckboys started using it.  When did they start using it?  Hard to say, but it reached a breaking point around the time the fuckboys started jizzing all over the decent but highly overrated RUN THE JEWELS album of last year.

NOISEY INTERNS: I just heard the dopest post-chlorophyll ficuscore with my patna dem in a Bushwick loft.  Très on fleek!  Wait till the fuckboys at STEREOGUM choke on this exclusive!

The oversensitive harpies of the Internet cry racist like it's nothing, but that shit is irritating and irresponsible.  But because we talkin' bout rap slang here, the old knock against white ppl appropriating shit has to get some shine. See me after class if you wanna chop it up about the aesthetic merits of appropriation, but the criticism is not wholly out of line in a media age where white ppl are increasingly appropriating a form of subversion once relegated to whispers from the back of the room: talking shit on white people.  Ayo, manifest destiny!  Guess the sky was the limit after Lance and the boys took FUBU.  I feel like a bully in Mask who wanna bust on Eric Stoltz, but he already snappin on himself like a motherfucker and you're just like, "Shit, his Vulcan material is too fresh.  Not even worth it anymore."

Why are white ppl having pissing contests to show how much they hate whitey?  It's like The Exceptional Negro, Part Two: Electric Boogaloo: Whitey's Revenge.  Whatever happened to good old-fashioned white pri--nah, scratch that one.  But like hipster, yuppie, and gentrifier, fuckboy gets thrown around with an alarming lack of irony by the very people it describes.  It's a smug, self-exculpating, pussy-ass way of passing the buck: "I'm not a fuckboy.  They're the fuckboys!"  Embrace your inner fuckboy, you hipster-ass, kale-smoothie-slurpin', crossword-puzzlin' yuppie scumbag fuckboys.

I am a fuckboy, as is anyone who's ever written about rap on the Internet.  I also like kale.  If we rely on an aggregate value system of Fuckboy Rap, we're left with a Gordon Gekko of the streets.  Makes for fun raps, but it's not something your New Favorite Rapper KILLER MIKE would cosign.

Let's put this one to rest, fellow fuckboys.  Let's make 2015 the year fuckboy dies.  Y'all can decide what to do with "on fleek," cause I already washed my hands of that shit.

LIVE REVIEW: PRODIGY CAN TELL YOU WHAT THE '90s WAS LIKE, JOEY BADASS NOT SO MUCH

Miami, LMNT, 2/7/15

When the bell rang out I was the last man standing.  Summoning my inner Vanessa del Rio, I vanquished the competition in an epic Rocky Mountain oyster eating contest.  The next day I was on a plane to Miami bedecked in the finest floral print ensembles, bankrolled with the lavish lucre of my champion testicle-chomping abilities.

Second day there I copped some OG oysters off a one-armed fishman posted up on Flagler, splendid with gold tooths and blurry tats, a silky doo-rag rippling playfully behind him in the east-blowing wind.  I was slurpin hard on the oysters til them shits made me sick, G.  I was makin it rain all over the toilet water, though I must admit his mignonette sauce was on point.

I caught his skeezy ass out on the same corner and we squashed the beef for an industrial-size tub of mignonette sauce and a ticket to that night's Dilla Fest festivities.  By the time I got there, I'd already missed CAMP LO and M1 cause I was at the Versace store buyin out the adult diaper section, fucked outta my skull on Immodium.

MOBB DEEP was supposed to play, but it was just PRODIGY cause HAVOC was sick or some shit.  Guess he ate some of them oysters.  I can't hate on the set tho, cause the li'l old man got some impressive lung stamina.  I seen NAS a couple times and he fuckin collapsed on the ground like the meaningfulness of the songs was just too much to bear, but I knew he was just milkin it for a breather.  That bein said, what do you do at a MOBB DEEP show?  You can't dance to gothic street raps and mean muggin and nodding your head is the exact opposite of having a good time.  The crowd, who looked a streetwear sweatshop exploded, awkwardly put their hands in the air when instructed, but it was half-assed and embarrassing to everyone involved.  You know you're at a rap show when forced hand motions are involved!

The youths went crazy for JOEY BADASS tho, understandable since most of em was fetuses when The Infamous dropped.  I'm not the biggest fan of Mr. BADASS's doctrinaire preservationist antics, and nothing short of a whole album in autotune will change my opinion.  So take it with a grain of salt when I say his performance was like watching someone's little brother bouncing around his bedroom to a BUSTA RHYMES record.

What does it mean when your favorite part of the show was when STATIK SELEKTAH played a snippet of "Let's Ride?"  If Mr. BADASS was doing anything beyond pandering to old heads, it might mean I need to stick to my MIC GERONIMO bootlegs and focus on my 401k.  That's the weird thing about my indifference to Mr. BADASS - I'm too old to think he's doing something new, but not old or cynical enough to be suckered by nostalgia.  In one of his last songs, Mr. BADASS tried to start a moshpit but called all the girls to the front for reasons of safety.  Yo, this dude is jockin the '90s hard - he even tryin to bring riot grrrl back.

KEVIN GATES WROTE THE AURAL EQUIVALENT OF A 15 YEAR-OLD GIRL'S TUMBLR

The booty eating was a non-issue trumped up by VladTV and the distinguished analphobe LORD JAMAR.  I can even get past the cousin fucking, although I pray the young lady is on some form(s) of birth control.

But KEVIN GATES has pushed me too far on this "Perfect Imperfection" schlock.  It's the kinda corny sentimental dreck hormonal Tumblr users quote in handwriting font over "evocative" images of moody nature scenes and young people having fun.   Yo, this shit belongs on a needlepoint throw pillow in an apartment full of IKEA furniture and some fuckin vases and mahogany bureaus from Pottery Barn.  They're the kind of lyrics someone with a heavy arsenal of bath bombs would have in a frame surrounded by scented candles.

Guess we know what the teardrop tats mean: homie is mad emo.  And I don't mind emo, but this is just bad art.  Z-RO went full emo on "Happy Feelingz," but he restrained himself from the kind of maudlin self-pity in which GATES indulges.  Both rappers get lachrymose, but where Z-RO approaches it with a degree of perspective ("Yeah I'm a grown man, but I still cry sometimes") and unaffected confessionalism ("Cause I'm a sponge soaking up pain, trying to come out the rain"), GATES blubbers some of the most laughably histrionic lyrics ever penned by a postpubescent ("Is it okay to cry when you're dying inside?").  When did I walk into a LINKIN PARK song?

I'm a perfect imperfection and I don't find interest in the radio

Is that really true?  Seems like he'd fuck with some NATASHA BEDINGFIELD or SAM SMITH.

Emotionally I'm a introvert, but it comes off as aggression
No one understand me and everybody can't be slow
It's refreshing to find someone who thinks like me so I can't be wrong

No one wants to read your journal, my dude.  Art is a kind of alchemy: you gotta transform the content with some detachment and artifice, otherwise it's just some whiny dude embarrassing everyone with his emotional outpourings.

If I wanted some I'm OK, You're OK bullshit I'd hang out in the self-help section at Barnes & Noble.  I don't wanna say there's no crying in rap music, but KEVIN GATES really comes close to ruining it for everyone.  You can thank him, sensitive rappers of the future.

BREAK OUT THE UFO PANTS: YO GOTTI AND LIL BIBBY WILL NEVER CHANGE!

Best joint on Concealed is "Never Changed" with LIL BIBBY, a beautiful ode to developmental stagnation.  Whenever my moms on my case about slangin french fries for the past five years, I crank this song to let her know what's up.  Old sow can pry the fryer basket from my cold dead hands.

Giving some credit to the "Internet collapsin genre barriers" narrative that was so popular a decade ago, the beat is one of those elfin-soul EDM joints you hear in youth-oriented Samsung ads, or when you in a dormroom tryin to fuck a liberal arts girl geekin on molly (so I've heard).   Take the raps away and add some half-naked queens voguing their asses off, and boom: Limelight, 1991.

My man BIBBY stays killin it with a tight writerly verse, but I'll leave the accolades to Datpiff commenter Dee: "Baby face ass lightskin wit the voice of a 6'4 darkskin murderer."  Pure poetry to these ears.  Personally I think he sounds like a constipated 40-a-day Newport smoker exerting himself on the porcelain throne, but sometimes there's more than one right answer.

FLIPPIN GRAMS ON MY FLIPAGRAM

Back when piracy was starting to become the norm, every writer with a pair of glasses and a studio apartment in Williamsburg was speculatin on how the Internet was gonna change music, with dreams of being the next Walter Benjamin or some shit.  They read too much postmodern bullshit in college and was all, "Golly, this influx of information! Young Greil Marcus up in this bitch finna predict the future."

By now most of that wankery has stopped, and the answer has so far revealed itself to be satisfyingly underwhelming: there's been a little bit of change, but not as much as everyone predicted.  Regional styles persist alongside hybridized pastiche.  KANYE did that wack song where he samples CAN, but even the crit-types it was baiting knew it was terrible and swept it under the rug.  Besides, that's called sampling and it's been happening forever.  On a smaller level, rap music functioned like the Internet when nerds were sharing ASCII dick-pics on Usenet, but y'all could make that argument for almost anything.

Someone's gonna read these thinkpieces in the future (prisoners in Gitmo?) and clown on us the way we clown on dudes who thought there would be flying cars by now.  Actually, them dudes was cool.  Keep dreaming, friends.  One day we will bump BOOSIE as we fly the skies together.

But yo, lately Instagram always gets mentioned on my favorite rappers' projects. YO GOTTI and DJ DRAMA mention the 'Gram a couple times on the new Concealed joint, notably on "Ion Feel 'Em" with Kevin Gates (spoiler: not actually about ions), wherein GOTTI ridicules the dissonance between IG/Twitter puffery and reality, thesis fodder for a freshman philosophy major with a torrent of The Matrix and a dimebag of mids.

Oh you a Microsoft plug / You got thrax for sale?

 These bitches ain't really bad like they on IG / In person might think it's a whole 'nother person

It's an evolution of the real vs. fake dichotomy, but where rappers used to question street-cred, they now question the authenticity of social media self-representation.  GOTTI doesn't believe the sepia-toned images of your TECs on the dresser, but he clearly has an account of his own and an unhealthy familiarity with those of his inferiors.

Yeah yeah, Instagram has become a touchstone of online life, but let's not minimize the weirdness of this development.  We have an artist who staked his career on coke-raps talking about picking up chicks, an old and staid trope, except now it's on a social media platform originally designed to make digital images look like they were taken by a vintage LOMO, where pop-feminists lead hashtag campaigns to #freethenipple and you can flame an NYHC luminary into threatening you with bodily harm.  This ain't even a permissible realist prop and status symbol like the pager: it's a free application for sharing photography and connecting with other enthusiasts of the visual form. YO GOTTI breaks character, the coke-rap genre is no longer self-contained, and the world loses meaning.  It's like watching James Bond beat off to PornHub, or living to see Jordan wear distressed jeans big enough to host a family of beavers.

Seeing behind the curtain has its price.  We must honor mystique.

R.I.P. A$AP YAMS

Say what you will about A$AP ROCKY and his fashionable cohort, but that LiveLoveASAP joint changed the game for about three months.  It was like the Doctor Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Sandwich of the Reblog Era.  NYC rappers were still too retrograde, provincial, and stupid to rip off the south; hipster rap was still just a glint in an A&R dweeb's eye.

I guess A$AP YAMS changed all that?  IDK, I only knew him as the dude with the big liver spot on his headpiece until I started getting my necrophiliac death groupie shit on.  But that Jon C NYT profile portrays him as the Malcolm McLaren svengali type behind the A$AP operation, which makes SPACEGHOSTPURRP Glen Matlock (sorry Glen) and Raf Simons Vivienne Westwood.  Dipset are the New York Dolls for obvious reasons.

An' even if u don't fuck heavily with the A$AP schtick, YAMS'S taste was impeccable.  His Complex list is unorthodox and straight from the heart, a map of one man's highly personal hip-hop canon.  No matter what LORD JAMAR tries to tell you (he haunts me Freddy Krueger style in my dreams), the beauty of hip-hop is it ain't a monolithic slab - it's different shit to different peoples from all walks of life.  And yo, the casual enthusiasm behind his choices just shows why so much music writing is wack.  This was a dude just pontificating on his favorite shit, not tryin to write a term paper or parlay his internship at Spin into a position at Pitchfork.  The love is real, even if it was scatterbrained and syrup-addled.  He became a tastemaker cause he had his own taste, and that's hard to come by in this world.

SHY GLIZZY'S PHILOSOPHICAL, BUT EXISTENTIALISM IS FOR THE FUCKBOYS

Yo, ya boy back from the brink and I ain't talkin clink!  Got kidnapped by a jam band while I was skiin da slopes, fell victim to Stockholm syndrome, and swore off all rap music but the cargo short kind.

Anyway, what about this new SHY GLIZZY tape, Law 3?   Best mixtape since IDK, that ASHER ROTH joint I was bangin back in my puka shell days.

But yo, let's get straight to the track "Funeral."  It's a gospel banger courtesy of KE ON THE TRACK, wherin GLIZZY envisions the illustrious mourners and ostentatious hijinks gon bless his funeral.  Spoiler: it sounds a lot like King of Diamonds.  He reflects on the conditions of loved ones, rhapsodizes all DANTE n BEATRICE PORTINARI on his bitch, and articulates his game plan before death's unforeseeable, inevitable scythe cuts him down.

It's an inspired entry in a classic rap theme: joyful celebration of death, mournful acknowledgement of life, the same contradiction that cats like SCARFACE, BIGGIE, and PAC built they reputations upon; it's that very same kinda emotional resonance that makes they listeners more acolytes than fans.

But ain't that what good art is all about?  Fuck life, but middle finger to death too.  Ain't know why we here - can't go on, I'll go on, son!