DEEPER THAN RAP: READING THE BAWSE!!

Rick Ross is the Eagles of rap.  They are not so much artists as blunt-force arrangers of genre signifiers, assembly-line producers who distill the form to its biggest and dumbest cliches.   They are maligned, justifiably, as commercialized outgrowths of their original genres; and yet there will always be apologists like myself, those of us who can accept the criticism and still appreciate the schlock and excess in the same way one appreciates Imitation Of Life.

That Ross was born in Mississippi matters only in the sense that his music is different from anything else that came out of Miami.  Perhaps this explains why he is less than interested in faithful representation.  Ross's Miami is pieced together from old episodes of Miami Vice, that streamlined fantasy of dangerous living in the subtropics that came to be the lens through which we see ourselves.

As the Eagles simulated an idealized California in a studio, so does Rick Ross with his Michael Bay blockbuster of Miami.  No one has to like them.  In all honesty, no one should like them.  But we should at least be aware of what they are doing.

LOL, WE BACK ALREADY? RICK ROSS ON THAT "BOUND 2" FREESTYLE

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.

2013 WAS A GAS: THE YEAR IN REVIEW!

Wussup to all my peepers, midnight creepers, and all my degenerates who masturbate into sneakers!  It's time for RPA MSUIC HISTERIA to wrap up the year once again.  Now I know my updates is sporadic and all, but I prefer to think of them as spo-radical!  Namean?  Like this post if u agree.

All in all, 2013 was a wack year for rap music.  But I am nothing if not an eternal optimist, and so I look to the raps that tickled my fantasy, the ones that made me laugh and cry, rather than dwelling on the raps that diminished my already threadbare hopes for the human race.  Shall we proceed?  I do say we shall!

MIGOS

Group of the year!  This is the shit the streetz was bumpin in 2013 (J-Hole, stand up!).  Bonus points for bein the whipping boy for every rap purist decrying the state of rappity rappin.  In short, their cadences were the illest; we will one day speak of them in the same reverential, slightly embarrassed tones with which we invoke the name of DAS EFX. 

RUN THE JEWELS

 

Mane.  Would you look at EL-P?  That off-kilter red skully, the black t-shirt terminating in white person tattoos, the Napoleon dynamite glasses frames - affectations that make him look identical to the articles of human filth who make their daily exodus at the Lorimer St. L stop.  For much of my youth I nursed an analogous distrust of the man, much of which was informed by SCOTT SEWARD's tone-deaf, yet devastating, review of FANTASTIC DAMAGE.  Like, that review was wack and all, but kinda cut to the marrow of what made EL-P irritating.  "Step Father Factory?"  That was some emo crybaby shit.

Then one day I realized: my distaste for EL-P was rooted in my own self-hatred!  Word!  EL-P was actually fairly dope if you could excuse all the pretension and self-indulgence.  And you know what he did this year?  He cut down all that artsy fartsy shit by doing an album with a REAL RAPPER (C) instead of one of those compulsive masturbator DEF JUX fags.

RUN THE JEWELS probably used the word "fuckboy" more than any other rappers this year; and for that alone, they make this prestigious list!

LIL SNUPE DIED :(



I ain't hear LIL SNUPE till I checked one of those wack HIP HOP TXL compilations that's always gettin mad downloads on Datpiff.  At first I was like, "Fo rill - his name is LIL SNUPE?  Why don't he just call himself LIL NOTJORIOUS B.I.G. or LIL LL KOOL JAY?"  I heard him again on the DJ MUSTARD Ketchup tape that came out this summer.  At this point I still wasn't sold, but I'd begun to accept that he was someone I'd be hearing from for a while.

Then he got shot over video games or some dumb shit.  SMH.  Anyway, like the death groupie I is, I revisited some of his old freestyles on the YouTubes and was pleased with what I heard.  In a lot of clips you can see MEEK MILL encouraging him to spit some real shit - dat roaches, rats, and poverty flow - and the dude came through with the squalidest imagery.  His freestyle prowess was a welcome atavism in these readin off yo Blackberry ass times.  Before he got capped over Super Smash Brothers, SNUPE was starting to remind me of another Louisiana spitter who never reached his prime.

EARL SWEATSHIRT

"Had a spark when thou started /  But nowest thou ist just garbage" - Jayson-Z, "Ye Olde Takeover"

ODD FUTURE was a breath of fresh air when they came out, but look at em now!  TYLER THE CREATOR is as used-up as a 30 year-old running back.  Dude has been wack and irritating since he got out of the Tumblr ghetto.  Fuck you, TYLER THE CREATOR.  I will fight you.

HODGY BEATS and all them other cats were always just some banal dickriders, so where does that leave us?  EARL SWEATSHIRT, kid!  The main event.  His Doris LP surpassed expectations to the same extent that TYLER's post-Bastard output has sucked balls.  Man, them bars is mad dense.  We need to exercise our close reading tools on some of them verses!

And da best part?  The album is short as fuck, totes catering to my generation's Internet-addled attention spans.  EARL is a true poet, the Tennyson of our times, a prophet of peace, and a beacon of

FUTURE & RICK ROSS

"Bugatti" and "U.O.E.N.O." was the songs of the year, and you know this wasn't 'cause of ROCKO or ACE HOOD.  Whether you like it or not, ROZAY's rape-y ass lyrics was definitely da bars of the year.  And as much as young men aspire to be fat, disgusting frauds like RICK ROSS, I don't think his lyrics had any appreciable effect on sex crimes this year.

Now would be the time to reminisce on the many occasions I woke up in new Bugattis this year, but I am legally required to remain silent on this subject (I may or may not have left some hot DNA on the seatz).

CHANCE THE RAPPER

White America's new favorite negro performer!

SUMMARY
2013 was highly, highly wack.  I could sift through some of the chaff - the also-rans and kind-of-were's - but I'm tired and quite obviously lazy.  See you in 2014, bitches!

RICK ROSS IS NOT A RAPIST OR A RACIST OR RACIST RAPIST (BUT HE DOES THINK YOU ARE CUTE)

Does this look like a rapist to you?  Hell naw, he wearin a suit and we all know rapists don't wear suits.  Well they do I guess, but they usually polyester leisure suits and that's a whole 'nother animal.

Anyway, my mans RICK ROSS a/k/a ROZAY a/k/a OFFICER RICKY a/k/a WILLIAM ROBERTS, JR. been catchin mad static over his line in da otherwise CHUUUCH-tastic "U.O.E.N.O," a barnburner featuring the likes of ROCKO and Tigerbeat pin-up FUTURE.  I guess RICKY felt the heat thru the slabs of blubber padding his skeleton and empty soul and decided to respond.  He explained, "there was a misunderstanding with the lyric, a misinterpretation," citing as evidence that the word "rape" was never used in the song.

So fall the fuck back, feminazis.  Even doe he rap about droppin a molly in a bitch's champagne without her knowledge, taking her home, fucking her and enjoying it ("and she ain't even know"), he never sez da word "rape," so obviously it ain't rape!

Maybe some of you dumb feminists and/or victims of sexual violence should've paid more attention to your critical theory when u was at ur liberal arts school, understood that the author is dead, content is secondary to form, and art need not be moral.  So when RICK ROSS drugs you and rapes has sex with you, you can have an aesthetic appreciation of da act and be like, "Yo, I ain't really feelin dis content, but the form is sublime."  Then you can be on par with us phallocentric male rap bloggers and understand rap on a deeper aesthetic level, i.e., a social vacuum of detached sophistication.

Peace fuckboys!

GUEST POST: NEW YEAR'S RAP MUSINGS FROM A PROFESSIONAL GLASS POLISHER!

As many of y'all know, I run shit in Jax Hole.  From da ski slopes to da flourishing drug trade, I'm well-known like the number man.  I used to slang herb to this herb named Fezziwig.  He wore a fedora and had a large collection of Japanese swords.  All he did was smoke weed by himself and play World of Warcraft.  I ran into him at the Million Dollar Cowboy Bar the other day and he bugged me about writing for my extremely successful rap website until I said, "Aight."  Here we go!

The clock passed midnight, a grinning crowd of rubes watched the ball drop in Times Square, and 2012 floundered into the annals of history.  It was New Year's Eve and I was polishing $4 glassware for less than minimum wage.

I regarded the customers with scorn.  Drunk idiots with too much expendable income blowing noisemakers like idiot children.  "BMF" by Rick Ross floated from out of the kitchen.  We shucked and jived to the anthemic throb, trying to forget that we were actually making money at the rate of a slow trickle.

"Bands A Maker Her Dance" came next.  I wondered what a stripper feels on New Years.  Maybe it's better to start the year in a G-string than polishing water spots off a water glass.  Rick Ross bellowed, "Deez niggas won't hold me back!," and I increased my polishing speed.  But deez niggas were holding us back: busted economy, the development of an American oligarchy, all the lies, the goddamn lies!  Where is our recession rapper, one who would rap about being broke and working a job beneath your dignity?  Of realizing exactly how little your college degree is worth in today's economy?  All we have is a cartoonish, nearly self-parodic celebration of capitalism.  We love rap music as an opiate that helps us believe in a failed system.

I decided it was time to take action.  I would no longer debase myself by listening to escapist drivel.  No more rap music for me!  But then I remembered my duty as a busboy and how bad I would feel if someone died from a water spot I'd failed to remove, so I polished bravely into the future as the old world, foaming at the mouth, clipped rabidly at my heels.

RICK ROSS IS THE EPHEMERAL MOMENT

"I like listening to RICK ROSS on the way to my minimum wage job.  It provides me with the motivation necessary to chase that paper; to swallow my pride for another day and suffer the thinly veiled condescension of the leisure class sucklin pon da fat o' the land."

That's what some phag said to me the other day.  I nodded my head in assent, but really I was thinkin, "Dawg, you take shit way too seriously!"  I be listening to RICK ROSS in the same way I like watching a fucking STEVEN SEGAL movie or some shit.  It's the  kind of overwrought fantasy that momentarily allows us to escape the hideous boredom of the quotidian grind.  And fo sho we laughin at ROZAY just as much as we clownin on SEGAL fo his bufoonery!

But yo, errytime a new RICKY album comes out I be thinkin, "Damn he done come out with another classic!  ROSS got that MICHAEL BAY swag!  Lush cinematics!  Rap game SIDNEY LUMET!"  But the euphoria of a new installment in neon candy-dipped ROZAY land - a land of opulent freeway overpasses, strip clubs sticky with spilled champagne, and many many XXXL Hanes white tees - is as temporary and fleeting as the high from ROZAY'S favorite subject matter (cocaine [btw]).  Hits hard and quick.  And is there anything wrong with that?  I dunno.  I be snorting mad lines of yayo, so I says yes.