BUCKWILD IN THA SKREETZ

Buckwild is the dark horse of the '90s super-producers. Maybe it's his name, so generic it could be a self-referential parody of the East Coast ruffneck style, but he's the kind of paradox who's so consistent and omnipresent that he can fade into the background, until one day you pull out an old chessnut, peep the credits, and bug out: "Oh shit, he did that?"

I didn't know, for example, that he produced the best song on The B. Coming. A couple years later he was working with Playaz Circle. If you heard anything from those sessions it was probably "U Can Believe It" off Supply & Demand (co-produced with JR Rotem, a riddle who deserves his own debunking). You'd be forgiven for not knowing "You Ain't Got Enough," which appeared on a DTP comp fated to rot in dusty corners of FYEs across the nation, absorbing the exhaust of the Cinnabon and Wetzel's Pretzels stalls as Fast & Furious movies came and went. Lines like "My ring look like I peed on my pinkie" are why I consider the erstwhile Tity Boi to be the greatest bad rapper of his generation.

Looking back, although it already seemed like New York had been dead forever, the mid-'00s were more textured than that - a strange transitional time when Primo hit the pop charts, Buckwild worked with 2 Chainz, and Ego Trip had a show on VH1, before the formalists closed the borders and became a micro-concern unto themselves.

LIFE STORY IS A CLASSIC, BUT ARE CLASSICS EVEN A THING ANYMORE?

As far as I'm concerned, there's two kinds of classics: those minted by the mainstream press (Illmatic, The Blueprint, Good Kid M.a.a.d. City, Hell Hath No Fury) and the sleeper classics that earn their status over time (Uptown Saturday Night, 400 Degreez, Thug Motivation 101, Trap Muzik).  Call 'em the people's classics.

The latter are usually more interesting cause it's more about the strength of the music than fitting into a critical rubric, kinda like how Escape From New York kicks the shit out of Hiroshima mon amour.  Look at Ma$e.  He was a popstar on Harlem World, but never a critical darling.  Double Up flopped and he became a creepy preacher, then a nostalgia act on Welcome Back.  Now people are coming around and acknowledging Harlem World as the imperfect classic it is.

The evolution of an organic classic usually goes like this.  When the album drops, critics and old heads write it off; worse yet, they damn it with tepid praise.  Eventually the kids who actually bought and bumped the album grow up and realize, "Yo, they were wrong.  This my shit."  It's a funny formulation, as much about the quality of the music as the attachment developed from growing up with someone's raps.  It's also about slaying your elders and goin, "You clowned on me when I rocked the shiny suit, but your fossilized ass dropped the ball on this one.  Put on your Karl Kani onesie and go to bed."

It's been 15 years since Life Story dropped.  It's now as old as Radio and King Of Rock were in the year 2000, which blows this young seed's mind.  Notwithstanding its warts, Life Story is a classic, and probably the swan song of New York's cultural dominance.  D-Dot is the backbone of the record: there's a Madd Rapper skit, an excellent Primo knockoff with Charlemagne, and a triumphant post-defection appearance from The Lox.  Even an ill-advised crossover attempt like "Spanish Fly" is vindicated as an encapsulation of the period: those naive days when A&R knobs were still fumbling in their attempts to cash in on the Latino market, and Pitbull was still floating in amniotic fluid in a Little Havana laboratory. 

I got absolutely no objectivity when it comes to Black Rob, but it's all good cause we anti-objective round these parts.  When I first heard "Whoa" I was a snotnose listening to Hot 97 on my transistor like, "Fuck a worksheet, I gotta hear Flex drop bombs."  Before that, the edited version of the "Money, Cash, Hoes" on the "Hard Knock Life" cassingle was probably the hardest shit I ever heard (in my defense, this was the version featuring Beanie Sigel and one of the only hot Bleek verses).  "Whoa" (and its ancestor "Ha") challenged my understanding of what rap was allowed to be.  It was the same effect I got from Ghost's "Cherchez" video: totally over my head, but that's what made it so captivating.

The Black Rob Report was solid, despite an opener that had Rob talking about cleaning his colon.   But the world had moved on by then, Bad Boy's marketing department included.  BR has since taken a post at the conservative think-tank known as Duck Down.  Rap has always been about the Next Shit, but the Innanet makes that attention span even smaller.  Word...Life and To Whom It May Concern were once solidly Rap Canon, but IDK if the janitors still dust off their plaques.  And that's cool.  We ain't gotta read what the nerds say and stew in our voicelessness.  If a borderline psychotic wants to call Life Story a classic, he can just get dial up his 56k and yell it to the world.  That's a beautiful thing.

But maybe the whole concept of a classic is outdated now that the album isn't a meaningful standard.  Was the concept of a classic just a marketing gimmick of the bygone magazine era?  "Top 5 Dead or Alive" is a quaint joke, cause there's always something new on the horizon tomorrow.  Most artists got the message and adopted a release model that flaunts its disposability.  Gucci Mane doesn't have a traditional classic under his belt, but the whole corpus of his work trumps anything Kendrick Lamar has ever done. 

BONUS JOINT:  Did u know a young Black Rob collaborated with Dan the Automator?  This is what it's like when worlds collide!

LOOKIN BACK ON STATE PROP, BIG UPS TO PEEDI

Philadelphia: brotherly love, grit, gun violence, and anger.  Few rappers embody their city like BEANIE SIGEL and the boys of SP.  I been goin through hard times lately, and The B. Coming been my grim companion.  BEANS got on for his realness, and though it's a cliche by now, Chappelle was right bout how that shit can go wrong.  Let's hope for a speedy return to health.

STATE PROPERTY was one of the most exciting things percolatin in the streets a decade and some change ago, but they didn't have much to show for it when the Roc-A-Fella gravy train stopped.  BEANS and FREEWAY had gold records, but outside of  YOUNG GUNZ's "Can't Stop Won't Stop," they never really made a crossover push.  Come to think of it, it makes more sense that they didn't blow up than labels thinkin they were gonna sell em as the next WU-TANG or whatever.

It didn't help that the industry was in a transitional state, sluggishly preparing its ass cavity for the long dick of filesharing and diminishing record sales.  Soon they'd be pushin a different product from a different region and resigning 'emselves to the fact that they couldn't sue every granny who downloaded an ENYA B-side.  SP came on at the end of that window, before a new model came in place.  So now when MEEK MILL's album flops he keeps his buzz going through free mixtapes and palling around with certified hitmakers.  Can't hate on that - he found a lane, cause DRAKE needs help appealing to the testicled population.

Label hell put the brakes on PEEDI CRAKK, who was so nice and ready to pop he dropped the surname and and named himself twice.  One of the more marketable cats in SP, he was a whimsical rake in the mold of SLICK RICK, welcome relief to the world-weary piousness of BEANS and FREEWAY.  Then nothing really happened.  He dropped a bizarre dis against a certain camel-faced Brooklynite, crooning hurt feelings like a brokenhearted drunk at karaoke night's last call, and continued to drop uneven mixtapes with flashes of brilliance. As it stands, he will be remembered as one of most talented rappin-ass rappers of his generation to never blow up or really even get the respect he's due.  He still kicks those spastic, protean brangdangdang verses like a Puerto Rican KOOL KEITH, but I can't help but wonder what could have been.  CF 5 saw him awkwardly tryin to jock the South, but he's a dude who sounds better goin over that ol boom-bap without comin off like a Madame Tussauds piece.  "Born in the wrong era" like the kids of Tumblr say.

What kind of world is this where MEMPHIS BLEEK gets four proper releases while PEEDI sits in limbo?  Them discs is fillin up half of Staten Island by now.  You might be driving around with a copy of M.A.D.E. melted into your dashboard.  Maybe PEEDI can rehabilitate his career with a DAN DEACON collab.  Hope he isn't goin out like that, but he's already clockin time at the Harry Fraud Old Folks Home with LIL CEASE and BLACK ROB.