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.
Does anyone actually miss the Old Kanye? The whole thing is a hopeful meme-in-waiting cooked up by the PR department of his Meet Dave brain trust. The Benz and a backpack concept was cool in theory, but it also meant he was palling around making terrible music with Talib Kweli and Mos Def. That turned into making terrible music with John Mayer and Daft Punk, which turned into terrible music with Hudson Mohawke and the Travis Scott replicant, so basically there's been a linear progression from Old to New. It's the least compelling rap dichotomy since T.I. vs. T.I.P. When you look back on the way he dressed, you realize he was just a fedora away from hanging out in the manga aisle showing off his rare Magic The Gathering cards. And yoooo, did the Old Kanye even exist??? Or was it just a wishful figment of our 'maginations? Ima wait for you to pick ya jaw up off the floor.
He can keep his leather pants and kilts. The only blip on the Kanye kontinuum I miss is the one where a Trick Daddy collaboration wasn't an insane proposition. It sounds exactly like the cut-and-paste job it is, but if you put it close to your ear like a seashell, you can hear it for what it was...a golden era! I'll take Trick's "Can't Say No" over Ian Connor's any day.
They say Bill Cosby rapin' people / Not the Jell-O man! - Boosie Badazz
In spite of the premise that rap forgets its history, the genre increasingly shows reverence for its past in the form of Cash Money (and No Limit) homages. The shortlist: Bankroll Fresh's "Hot Boy," Nef The Pharoah's "Big Tymin," Jacquees's "Like Baby,""Get It How U Live" by Zoe Realla & Baton Rouge's freshmen class*, and 23.7% of Lil B's catalog. Future retooled "Ha" on Beast Mode. Kodak Black owes outstanding debt to the estates of Juvenile and Soulja Slim. This month Boosie threw his rag in the ring with "BG Shit," while Shady Nate and Lil Blood flip "400 Degreez" on the Bitches On Dope collaboration. Both are somewhat easier to explain than some of the trend's more mystical entrants. Bitches on Dope is a collection of new takes on old standards, and BG is Boosie's peer, roughly—a real person, not a play-actor in a multimedia Southern rap ideal. Trickles in a groundswell, maybe, but what does it all mean?
A pinkied-up treatise on nostalgia is not hip-hop, so we ain't about to prance down that lane. Suffice it to say that while nostalgia is a trap, it's a shot of Botox that not every moment in time enjoys. It might devour songs good and bad, but it doesn't happen without reason and cause. The Cash Money homages wouldn't exist if they didn't satisfy a common demand. Kanye West, a man obsessed with his own place in history, borrows the ándale and E.I. from Nelly's 2000 hit on "30 Hours"—a campy tip o' the hat in a song engaging directly with the past. It's a blatant act of Millenial pandering from the guy who invented Millenials, and one not likely to take root as anything more than another ironic swatch in the great Post Malone patchwork. In 2016, Cash Money is cool and Nelly is not, except maybe in some inverted way. Yet Nelly was more popular than any Cash Money artist, and the "E.I." and "Hot In Herre" callbacks will inspire winces of recognition from everyone who had them play soundtrack to the erectile mishaps of 7th grade slow dances. Which begs the question: is nostalgia more about self-love or self-loathing, or does it operate on a sliding scale?
All these Cash Money homages, and Meek Mill still won't release the unabridged "Ha." Ya boy still tryna process The Life Of Pablo over the din of a thousand white bloggers typing with reckless fury. For a son of College Dropout, there's no exercise in nostalgia like wallowing in an album where levels of Old and New Kanye fluctuate like the balance of urine and water in a kiddie-pool. Sustained by the search for truth and a big box of porn, this is RAP MUSIC HYSTERIA! signing off from the darkest corner of your public library.
A man of wisdom once said, "There's only two things certain in this trife life: death and Spanish guitars." When civilization finally annihilates itself, bet there's gonna be some cockroaches carrying on the legacy, one in a sombrero wit his legs splayed out and an acoustic guitar restin on his groinals, the other on the M-I-C talkinbout, "Cockroaches is the hardest species outchea, survivin 'n' thrivin while all these soft-serve mammals got punked by the ultimate wedgie puller."
MAX B - 50'S OF SOUR
This ain't Biggavel's only foray into the exotic delights of sultry strums. There were Max B's before Max B, bawdy Orphic bards spittin da raw and real. Some mistook it for transcendence, but it was actually a finer state of mind known as waviness. Charly Wingate was just the ultimate expression, the final evolution in a process that began with the inception of language. Now Buddens free!
FREEWAY - RING THE ALARM (FT. PEEDI CRAKK & OMILLIO SPARKS)
Finally it ain't a gringo blessin las guitarras. Here's Peedi & co. flippin da Tenor Saw classic boricua style. Maybe da rap bloggers of cockroach Earth will finally give Peedi his due when they typin on they lil cockroach computers wit headphones on the antennae. Big up to Freeway for being an early adapter on that hipster crossover money dat Big Boi now chasing on that album I ain't able to manage caring about.
YUKMOUTH - SAD MILLIONAIRE (FT. PHATS BOSSI & BIG LURCH)
If you wanna make your shit paranoid and world weary, holla at a mariachi band to lace your shit with some Spanish guitars. But if you really wanna put some guac on that chip, do like Yuk and tap a cannibal dusthead for tha hook.
HOT BOYS - NEIGHBORHOOD SUPERSTAR
I always thought Spanish guitars was a New York thing on account of the Puerto Rican influence, but it's really the Bay that had this game on lock. Sixth man of the year tho? That's the great Mannie Fresh!
KANYE WEST - ALL FALLS DOWN
Real talk, Kanye couldn't dress for shit when he came out. Ratty-ass baggy blazers, Aeropostale button-ups, Rocawear jeans-as-sweatpants, and some white Reebok Classics? Mu'fucka was about to rock a straw fedora. Crazy how Ye went from tha I'm so normal and middle class! Look at me, I'm rapping about this college girl's problems! dude when Rhymefest was his ghostwriter, to the grrr i'm so weird and i wear leather pants i like triangles and weird symbols shitty art project he became when Travis Scott turned him into the angular haircut of rap.
Round 2 AM the pool was filled with varicolored vomit. Lars had stuck drumsticks in two of his orifices. We was wasted off Miller Lites.
"Told you the VINCE album would grow on you," said Lars, waving a soiled Vic Firth in my direction.
"You was right. I still maintain that YG and Vince are different strains of the same root sensibility. They both the premier gangsta rap revivalists, right? Only difference is YG fully inhabits the character. Vince stands outside of it. Put it this way: YG is makin Westerns, Vince is making revisionist Westerns."
"The way I see it is Vince made the album KENDRICK would have made if he wasn't so worried about bein a sympathetic character. He's the good kid in a mad city. Vince is less concerned with being liked."
"True, true. It's the kinda shit Kendrick could make if he focused on making rap albums rather than 'short films.' He's like KANYE minus the middle-class background, like this is what Ye's last two albums might have been if his celebrity hadn't metastasized to the point that everything is ultimately about Being Kanye. Vince is more elusive. He's quicksilver. It's like if ICE T wrote Invisible Man. There's only one person experiencing the world as Kanye West. There are many experiencing the world in ways similar or identical to the Vince Staples concept."
"It's sort of like our Ride The Lightning."
"I hate you Lars."
Graceland came on and we danced until the early morning, Lars in his sarong and me in my Girbauds.
Lol, but this shit is funny, ain't it? I was just chirpin bout MMG runnin the rap game in the mold of '90s BAD BOY, and ol fat-ass releases a HYPE WILLIAMS directed video. Although it ain't necessarily up to par with classic era HYPE, it still stimulates the viewer in the same way that originally got his videos noticed, posing such brain-breaking questions as, "How can a ferris wheel possibly support the rolling fats of a RICK ROSS?" I think it's either a studio set or some green screen wizardry. I bin on ferris wheels, and them shits is rickety.
Because ROSS' verses ain't disrupting digestive system function or nothin, they are technically forgetable, but after "Devil in a Red Dress" it just sound right for him to rock over a YEEZY beat. All hail the fat one.
Sup to all the punk bitches and da hip sluts out there. Damn, yo. This post was originally gonna be about how gay KANYE WEST'S "Bittersweet Poetry" is; I was gonna find some overly sentimental comment on da YouTubes, something from a teenage girl like, "OMG dis kanye song is deep shit son, chuuuch," but then something even more awful happened. I discovered dis overbearing turd by da name of alwaysright10000.
Dis simp be writing like 8-section, numbered essays where he be droppin all sorts of words he learned in his Kaplan SAT prep course. Calm down, son! I learned dem words too (thanks Xi Li, you saved my ass on da math section especially!). You just arguing with YouTube teenagers, dawg, callin em fags would be much more effective trolling.
But damn yo, as a student of da English language myself (shout outs to Shakespeare, Milton, all dem dudes), I gotta say: dis is some shitty-azz writing! Just full of flab, dawg. You gotta cut that shit, pare yo prose of dem superfluous adverbs and wack-ass adjectives. Like, you wanna sound smart and I can appreciate dat, but really you're just makin yoself look like a try-hard bitch. I believe this is what GHOSTFACE KILLAH meant when he referred to "smart dumb [black persons]" ("Biscuits," The Pretty Toney Album).
Damn, this is some cringe-inducing-ass writing! So overloaded with lard words. And he 33? Bad enough dat he a grown-ass man arguing wit YouTube retards, but even worse dat he suck so much dick at writing. But yo, real talk alwaysright10000, I wanna help you out: cop yoself one of deez books on concise writing and da new 2 CHAINZ album. You'll be pimpin shit like me in no time!
