DOO DOO BROWN: THA MIAMI AND BALTIMORE CONNEC

We all about equilibrium of Feng Shui and other Oriental shit over here, namean?  I'm very enlightened and multicultural.  Ya boy got seven Oriental symbols tattooed on his calf muscle, and I own thirteen Muslim swords that I show to all the high-class professors and whatnot that be comin to my dinner parties to talk about Republicans and paintings.

After yesterday's Meaning Post, I knew I had to keep things in cosmic balance wit some levity and whatnot.  Chuckles and chortles does the heart good, ya feel?  As it always does, my mind immediately went from matters of the toilet to a certain excretion and its juvenile diminutives: poo poo and doo doo.  The latter made me think of "Doo Doo Brown," and I was like, "Yo, this muzt be what Tha Godz call Serindipity!  Miami and Baltimore at the same damn time!"  2 Hyped Brothers & A Dog consisted of legendary Baltimore DJ Frank Ski - Harlem-born, Miami-raised, now apparently some kind of straight-world radio personality in Atlanta - another guy whose name I don't know, and a mysterious and charismatic dog who was sorta like their Maharishi (RIP, Sparkles).

Now the cross-pollination of Baltimore club music and Miami Bass is material for a dry, academic book that would sell 9 copies, so we ain't finna try n cover that shit today (callin dibs right now tho).  Suffice it to say that Luke recorded his own take on "Doo Doo Brown" with the legendary "I Wanna Rock."   I'm the Rap Internet's biggest Miami stan on account of growin up here (my Dad's job was to glue all the rhinestones onto Blowfly's costume) and still livin that shit to my core like white suits and deviated septums, but for a long time I preferred the OG version to Luke's.  It was an embarrassingly long time before I realized  Doo Doo Brown's fecal connotation, and I thought it was kind of biterish that Luke ripped off such a badass '70s pimp name.  Now I'm not sure.  Luke's version is a sureshot party-starter, but Frank Ski rocks that hip-house shit to the fullest extent.  Why we always gotta have a winner?  They both classics!  Turn ya headphones up, close ya door, and do some air D-throwin' and P-poppin' before Mabel from Accounting comes knockin' at your door talkinbout, "Yo we gettin bread bowls from Panera Bread, you down?"

I'LL WRITE ABOUT K. CAMP'S DEEP CUTS NEXT WEEK: RAP IS STILL THE ONLY MUSIC THAT MATTERS

Though the artist may leave politics alone, thinking they are no real concern of his, politics may not leave the artist alone...
- Henry Moore, 1938

30 years ago, there were no black cops!
-KRS-ONE, 1993

Although he did it to himself, it's a great tragedy that KRS-ONE's contemporary image is a caricature: hectoring pedant, crackpot doomsday preacher.  While his blowhard routine deserves all the derision it gets, I keep thinking back to one of his songs every time a black man is killed by police.   With respect to the overseer/officer alt-etymology, "Sound Of Da Police" is more agitprop than nuanced critique.  "Black Cop" might be myopic in its focus, but it addresses issues of representation, enfranchisement, and power structures better than any of the more cathartic "fuck cops" raps we rally behind.  Stroll around Brooklyn and it's hard not to see the parallels between Operation Impact and military occupation, an issue writ larger in areas that are gentrifying in the most lopsided socioeconomic terms.  Who exactly is being protected?  Is everybody in the community being served?  Answer: it took a demographic shift before Fort Greene even got decent garbage pick-up.

Cam fucked up when he went on O'Reilly.  "Stop Snitchin'" could have been a great opportunity for dialogue if anyone had bothered to explore the underlying grievances behind the attitude.   Instead, he took an opportunity to give mainstream America a credible definition and made a publicity stunt out of a cheap soundbite.  He let the media run with sensationalism at the expense of real injustice.  Like its spiritual predecessor Warna Brotha, it was irony as defense mechanism, a way of laughing so you don't cry for lives lost to heavy gavels.  Ultimately, "stop snitchin" wasn't some comic-book gangster code of ethics or a petulant justification of criminal activity.  It's a reaction to a history of brutality and corruption, excessively punitive sentencing and tactics that prioritize surveillance and containment over protection and real change.  In a perfect world, "We Don't Talk To Police" would have got the same attention as Cam, but that shit ain't meme-able.

Here's where rap pundits decry the dearth of political rap, which is usually just coded nostalgia for Public Enemy's heyday.  But the beauty of rap is that it encompasses so many things.  It sustains itself on contradiction.  Toni Morrison insists that all good art is political; while I think that's too clever for its own good, I'm inclined to agree.  All good rap is political, but that doesn't mean all political rap is good.  Drill music is some of the most political shit to come out in years, so don't underestimate the subversive.  We don't need more Immortal Techniques in the world.  We could use some more Ices T and Cube, artists who responded to the Reagan-Bush I regime as citizens rather than ideologues. History repeats itself.  Let's hope our generation responds in kind.

PETER GUNZ MEETS ROCKISTS UPTOWN, BABY!

Around 2009 I went through a weird period where the only thing I listened to besides rap was Steely Dan.  Young and confused, still ridden with angst but not as angry as the peachfuzzed manchild of my teen years, I no longer found the sturm und drang of zit-poppers and teenage fascists an effective antidote to this sadistic gauntlet we call life.  Instead, I found it in the limp soft-funk of two hideous paleface nerds crooning about dying behind the wheel and suicidal last-stand faceoffs with cops.  And man, were they smooth!  Not even Michael McDonald could resist their combination of easy-listening plastic jazz and sun-cracked noir yarns.

In this clip Donald Fagen recites the beginning of the Steely-sampling Peter Gunz & Lord Tariq's "Deja Vu (Uptown Baby)," and if they hadn't sued for 100% of publishing rights it might have been a fun lil moment.  But as Peter Gunz notes, these switched-on hepcat freaks got a little too groovy with the litigation, resulting in this bizarre legal outcome: "So Donald Fagen wrote, 'I'm quick to slide off and slide this dick up in ya wife.'  That's who gets credit for writing those types of lines."  Walter Becker is equally insufferable and awkward as he bends over giggling, then quickly goes straight-faced like Fagen's robot lapdog, but he's also a former bandmate of noted asshole Chevy Chase, so maybe it's company culture to be rly "caustic" and "off-putting."  Though I wish they weren't such living embodiments of rockism's worst impulses, it's worth enjoying as a surreal cyclical blip in history where your dad's favorite band raps lines to a B+ '90s rap hit that samples one of their songs.  Anyway, here are some other reluctant contributions Steely Dan made to rap history.

"If You Want It" - The Lox & Ma$e ("Black Cow")
"Gas Drawls" - MF Doom ("Black Cow")
"Sassy Ways" - 213 ("Black Cow")
"Cutting Rhythms" - Tone Loc ("Black Cow")
"Eye Know" - De La Soul ("Peg")
"How It Gotta Be" - The UMC's ("Peg")
"Don't Trust 'Em" - Ice Cube ("Green Earring")
"Walk Into The Sun" - Organized Konfusion ("Green Earring")
"Hard As Hell" - Ant Banks ("Home At Last")
"Stripped And Pistol Whipped" - Big Shug & Guru ("Home At Last")
"Champion" - Kanye West ("Kid Charlemagne")
"Everybody Knows Me" - K-Solo ("The Royal Scam")
"Ride Up" - Ice City w/ Freeway & Joe Budden  ("The Royal Scam")
"Dress Up" - Sleepy Brown ("Midnight Cruiser")
"Cemetery Made" - Mr. Serv-On & C-Murder ("The Fez")
"For Those Who Slept" - Bizzie Boyz ("The Fez")
"Live Or Die" - Naughty By Nature w/ Mystikal, Silkk The Shocker & Phiness ("Third World Man")
"On And On" (Alternate Mix) - Godfather Don & Jazz ("Josie")
"Antemeridian" - Count Bass D ("I.G.Y." - Donald Fagen)
"No Static At All" - 3rd Bass ("FM")
"We On 1" - DJ Rashad ("Aja")

And here's a lil R&B bon bon for all my '90s babies still crushin on Ashley Banks.

25 BEST CHARACTERS IN RAP SONGS & SKITS

Rap ain't nann but a game of characters.  Back when Tyler The Creator was rapping about raping ladies, a truly refined rap intellectual could brush off all the unsophisticated blowback with five simple words: "He's playing a character, mooooooommmm!"  For the purposes of this list, however, we are not interested in peelin back the layers of rap personae - just the characters who appear in songs or skits.  Y'all brainiac types can hash out that hair-splitting mise-en-abyme shit on ya own time.  We strictly 'bout the rapps over here.

I consulted some other lists as I wrote my own, and while they was alright, I didn't feel like I was truly represented by staid choices like Shorty Doo-Wop and Bonita Applebum.  So we decentering the canon with this list.  Think of it as an alternative history of great rap characters - a people's history.  Unfortunately, that means we had to cut the likes of Suzy Screw and Brenda so we could include the immortal Mizzle from Purple Haze.  Duty calls.  It was very close, but we always side with truth over politricks.  So if you don't want me speaking for you, write ya own or tell me what I missed.  As Lil' Zinn said on one of his early Gangsta Grillz mixtapes, "It was easy, it was cheap, go and do it!"

1.  Captain Save a Hoe (E-40)
2.  Mr. Hood (KMD)
3.  Pretty Little Sally (Ghostface Killah, "Child's Play")
4.  The Hunted Child (Ice-T)
5.  The Redneck (Devin the Dude, "R&B")
6.  Dany (Mobb Deep, "Drink Away The Pain")
7.  The Baby (UGK, "Pregnant Pussy")
8.  Grandma (Gucci Mane, "Wasted")
9.  Whining Cop (NWA, "Fuck Tha Police")
10.  Poppa Large (Ultramagnetic MCs)
11.  Protagonist (Scarface, "I Seen A Man Die")
12.  Larry, The White Guy (Sir Mix-A-Lot, "Posse On Broadway")
13.  Shannon (Too Short, "Freaky Tales")
14.  Triggerman (Showboys, "Drag Rap")
15.  Hypochondriac Chick (Jay-Z, "Girls, Girls, Girls")
16.  Dead Horse Bride (Ganksta N-I-P, "Horror Movie Rap")
17.  Tina (Brand Nubian, "Feels So Good")
18.  Shopkeeper (Ice Cube, "Black Korea")
19.  Milk Marie (Rich Gang)
20.  Tameka (Slick Rick, "Mistakes Of A Woman In Love With Other Men")
21.  Sally (Diamond D & The Psychotic Neurotics, "Sally Got A One Track Mind")
22.  "Mami" (Kool G Rap, "A Thug's Love Story")
23.  The Neptunes' Cocker Spaniel (N.O.R.E., "Superthug")
24.  The Guy Big Pun Tells To "Go That Way" ("It's So Hard")
25.  Mizzle (Cam'ron, Purple Haze)

Honorable mentions: Ken Kaniff, The Sheriff's Daughter,  "Sleazy E" and Jerry Heller caricatures, Peter The Pimp, Chinese Boy Who Goes "Wy ton thai ton thai thai thai," Jimmy, Jane Doe, Puerto Rican Kid On The Train, Buzzed Bus Driver, "Where Are My Panties?" Girl

Worst character: Roger.  Golf clap for good intentions, but I'm the type of schmuck who roots for Goofus.

13 THOUGHTZ ON THE BARTER 6

(Ed. note: had to censor the nudity for our yunger readers, so I gave him some cool cargos [or bool bargos lol].  I'll let u decide if they're pants or shorts!)

Listicle time, bitch!  These shitz is the waviest, no Dave Mariner!  For those who ain't know, listicles are a way to present ur thoughtz if you don't really feel like ordering ya shit in poisonous paragraphical structures, ya feel?  That shit went outta style when the Innanet sonned ya boy Gutenberg, that simple ass Bible printin herb.  Fuck Johan Gutenberg, we still got beef.  He knows what he did.  Anyway, ya just write shit out like it's a list even tho u ain't ranking anything, it's just a lazy way of imposing some arbitrary order to ya shitz.  Woop woop, hollaback!  Yo fa real, these listiclez is like the hors d'oeuvres of the bloggin game, so sink ya gold-plated ivory toothpicks into my mental goat cheese crostinis and expozitory jalapeno poppers!

1.  Like Based God's I'm Gay, the Carter 6 title trolling was funny until it went from soundbite to "Oh shit he actually doin this, SMDH."  Retitling it The Barter 6 gets points for stupidity, but not enough to make up for the fact that he titled his album The Barter 6.

2.  If Young Thug sets the standard for an inverse relationship between banality of name and banality of music, Young Dolph is the other extreme  Such a bizarre name, such a boring, boring rapper. 

3.  "Constantly Hating" and "Dream" have the airiness I loved in "Shine," the early noughties Cash Money smash that never was.  Makes me feel like I'm floating on a flyboard in the nude with a fistful of Xanax and a couple sea-nymphs champing at my bits.

4.  Birdman looks and sounds like someone left a loaded Po' Boy in the back of his S-Class, and the oysters just got extra pungent.  Say what you will about the most dubious man in rap, but he's the creepy manager-svengali the game needs.  The star he had tattooed on his head was one of the great Cool Dad midlife crises to play out in the public eye, the Rap Game "getting frosted tips" or "experimenting with bootcut jeans."  From a cell covered in Aaron Carter magazine clippings, Lou Pearlman nods his extraglandular turkey neck in approval.

5.  Some of the beats on Barter and the last Rich Gang tape are so smooth and lush.  I hope London on da Track is ushering in a '70s-style smooooth era of rap.  Think Steely Dan, Frankie Beverley, and the Brothers Doobie and Isley.  This the kinda shit that make you wanna dress in white linens and blow lines on a yacht wit hoes wit da Farrah Fawcett hair.

6.  I fux with albums that are under 14 songs.  Also like that there are no "name" guests besides T.I. and Boosie.

7.  Young Thug could have had a career as a voice actor or whatever it is Michael Winslow does.

8.  It will take a few years longer before Young Thug is widely acknowledged as a great rapper because 64.6% of what he says is indecipherable without conscious effort.  I though this was a stupid criticism until someone whose opinion I respect told me, "I don't like him because I can't understand what he's saying."  A major part of being a Young Thug fan is that his music needs defending.  It's a rough pearl before the dummies who can't hear the brilliance, and within that is an implicit smug superiority.  He is the posterboy of post-lyricism, a school of thought that get off on knowing better than the people who stake their reputation on knowing better.

And that's the rub.   Although the slurred articulation is integral to his delivery and style, I'll bet you there's only a handful of people walkin this planet who can recite a Young Thug song verse for verse.  He increasingly sounds like he just got some heavy oral surgery done.  There's a fine line between acknowledging that lyrics aren't everything and acting like they don't matter at all.   True, Young Thug might be one of the more inventive writers out.  But how much does that matter if most people can't hear it?

9.  1017 Thug is still the best and most varied thing Young Thug has done.  This is p good tho.

10.  Barter 6 is at least as good as To Pimp A Butterfly, if only because there is nothing as bad as "For Free?" or the open-mic-night interview with 2Pac.  "OD" mentions Mike Brown, so Young Thug is officially #conscious, OK?  Rap remains the Buzzfeed of the ghetto!

11.  Someone get this man an echoplex.

12.  My mans makes Migos Flow look like child's play on "Just Might Be."  There's a lot of rappin-ass rappin' on the whole album.

13.  Can Young Thug sustain a career on "weirdness?"  Most talk centers on Young Thug as misunderstood genius or rap Antichrist.  But what happens when his schtick gets stale and familiar, as it inevitably will?   Maybe he'll keep barreling into the unknown.  Maybe he'll stagnate and everyone will move on, as with the Gucci Craze of '09.  The forced zaniness of Wayne ca. 2010 is a chilling potential outcome, altho Thugga hasn't shown a tendency for making egregious aesthetic choices so far.

I ain't said this in a while, so here it goes: CHUUUUUCH!

WHO'S B.O.B. WHEN B.O.B.'S AT HOME?

Like Gucci before the cone tat and Cosby without the Quaaludes, it's hard to go back to a time when B.o.B wasn't synonymous with the crassest kind of pop-rap.  Lest you seedlings get it twisted, there was a time when B.o.B. was gettin hype outside the Meredith Vieira demographic.  Thanks to "Haterz Everywhere" and "Cloud 9," he was even bein painted as a drugonaut for a hot minute.  "Haterz" was "just MADE to be listened to on pills" gushed a pre-Murdoch Vice, and B.o.B. himself supplied the loathsome moniker trance-hop.  Thanks to my peoples in the Thug Mansion up in the sky (a/k/a Heavan) fuh not lettin that shit catch on.  Wide-eyed, the interviewer reports that rappers in Atlanta are starting to take "E" and "Ecstasy."  In these post-Molly dayz it's easy to clown the article's golly, gee! tone, but drug use beyond weed was actually somewhat notable in '07.  After years of coke-rap's straitlaced strictly business ethos, I was ready for the BayTL cross-culture experiment to fly the freak flag.

Instead, B.o.B. went pop in the the most throwback sellout since will.i.am discovered harem pants.  A year or two later Future did the whole zooted sonic voyager thing way better, while B.o.B. drifted further into his role as the kind of stock rapper Target might call if they needed someone to dance around in a socks ad.

Who is the real B.o.B.?  He was initially presented as a genre-hopper, even tho Clef should've made rap weirdoes totin acoustic guitars forever suspect.  It quickly became clear, however, that his eclecticism was of the "I like everything from Coldplay to John Mayer!" variety, his collaborations with Hayley Williams and Bruno Mars less a get-money scheme than a misguided understanding of experimentation.  As a rapper he was never better than good, nowhere more evident than when Boosie merked him on his best song.

Seven or eight years after his first appearance on the market, it seems B.o.B.'s brief period of critical acclaim was less about his music than it was a reflection of the rap audience's own unfulfilled desires.  He was never the artist we thought he was, never the eccentric or eclectic weirdo found later in Young Thug, Lil B, or even Tree.  There was a demand for a certain kind of artist and B.o.B. seemed to fit the bill, so people filled in the blanks until his later choices refuted that characterization empirically by making the worst shit ever.  B.o.B. auditioned for a prestige role he didn't want, then went off and made a boatload doing the musical equivalent of Transformers II.

B.o.B. was never all that interesting until he became a pop-star.  How many artists who hit #1 later recorded a song about an AIDs conspiracy?  If he can keep his most VH1 tendencies to himself, he could rebrand himself as a credible pop-rapper and maybe occasionally indulge in the grating OMG ALIENS! side he refuses to relinquish.  I know I'd rather hear B.o.B. get his Infowars on than any Wale ever.  Whether he cares about anything but mainstream success remains to be seen.  Judging from the way he's kept up with the times, B.o.B. will stay in the picture whether we like it or not.

S.O.S.M.O.P.: PROMOS AIN'T LIKE THEY USED TO BE

Ol' Dirty Bastard cashing his welfare check on MTV was one of the finest publicity stunts of the '90s, and this clip of M.O.P. & Friends strong-arming the bootleggers of Brownsville, from their Straight From The Projects DVD, might have achieved similar status if online piracy hadn't killed the bootleg market.  Shed a tear for the days of Xeroxed cover inserts as Teflon stomps out a bogus copy of Warriorz, reprimanding an African purveyor who probably wouldn't know M.O.P. from A.B.C. and seems primarily interested in finishing his french fries.

Masta Killa assaulted Cheo Coker and stole his tape recorder; The Stranglers allegedly kidnapped journalists and tied them to the Eiffel tower.  In the age of Twitter beef, even angry blog comments are becoming obsolete.  Street level bootlegging might be going the way of the buffalo, but that shouldn't prevent artists from taking it back to the streets.