Enthusiasms

This is my impression of me trying to go to bed:

"I'm so sleepy better go to beRICKROOOOOOSSSSSSSS!!!!"



Who the FUCK starts their rap video with a Ken Burns montage? Also, Rick Ross must sleep in a bed made of Yes Men, because his self-hype has reached a level where it's hard not to believe that he actually thinks he's a criminal mastermind. Who's going to believe you, Rick Ross, when you compare yourself to the greatest supervillains in American history and nobody in your production team can even spell the word "informant?" (0:55)

We are also subjected to the displeasure of seeing Ross try to feel human feelings - when you weigh 400 pounds and 300 of those pounds are tattoo ink, any attempt at impish roughhousing with a girl comes off as much more a spooky, rapey pursuit.

And just when you thought he couldn't get any more conceited, he namedrops Biggie and Tupac.

Biggie: heaviest, most fluid, most impressive delivery in the history of rap music.

Tupac: terrified the nation for half a decade by openly endorsing anti-police violence, still considered the most sophisticated lyricist in hip-hop.

Rick Ross: most notable achievements are being exposed as a corrections officer, getting into a slap fight with 50 Cent and being friends with T-Pain.

The greatest offense does not come until the end, when, after an inscrutable monologue, he beats someone to death with a baseball bat. This guy could afford to rent a mansion on the beach and a HELICOPTER to film it from above, but the best FX people he could find were his 8th grade nephews. Gently lowering your bat off-camera while someone squirts a bottle of ketchup at you is NOT COCAINE-WARLORD-QUALITY-WORK.

When you're being out-rapped by Birdman, it is time to fucking retire.

Who is Curren$y?

My favorite videos are the mundane ones, where a rapper is so competent that he can just sit around rhyming in his underwear while your mom gets slowly pregnant. If you don't like the last thirty seconds of this song, you don't like rap.

The Agony and the Ecstasy

First Lil' Wayne decides to become a thirteen-year-old girl who listens to screamo as LOUD AS SHE WANTS AND OH MY GOD YOUR DRESS IS SO EMBARRASSING MOM. Then E-40 awakens from his eldritch slumber to help Brokencyde rub their herpes dicks on our ears. Now this. Tiesto.

I hate Tiesto in the same way I hate having my Lucky Charms spiked with Ketamine. Trance is supposed to be safely quarantined in Europe, but some Typhoid Mary motherfucker in a $300 t-shirt wiggled his shiny ass through customs and now we're staring down the barrel of a pandemic. I recently met a girl who tends bar at a venue where Tiesto played and she said she was still haunted by the vacant, passionless frenzy of the crowd. She was being serious.

You can have Flo Rida and Sean Kingston, Tiesto, BUT YOU WILL NOT TAKE THREE-SIX MAFIA AWAY FROM US. I choose to believe that they did not participate in this Ed Hardy clusterfuck of their own freewill. The only answer I can come up with is that Tiesto got his hands (during the thirty seconds of his life they weren't raised in the air) on one of those eel things from Wrath of Khan. The one that crawls into your ear and uses magic/gross to let someone control your mind.

How else could he make DJ Paul look like a pussy? HOW? Scientists have been working on that technology since before DJ Paul was born. Hundreds have died just thinking about it - the closest anyone came until now was sprinting ten feet towards him with a poster of John Mayer before exploding into a thousand apologetic bits of jello.

Send 3-6 some good energy. They are in my prayers.

Slim Pickings

Finally, Slim Thug has done something cool post-"Still Tippin." "I Run" was about as compelling as watching Harold Bloom quietly read King Lear in his living room.

There is absolutely something to be said for being a big dumb guy too big and dumb to not kick ass despite total lack of talent/charisma. Especially if you get into fights with eight year olds.

Beaches Ain't Shit

0:15 Cars, motorcycles with sidecars, babes, hula hoops, a guy pumping everyone up with a megaphone. Holy crap, Mack 10 and his posse are about to declare the beach the sovereign nation of Fuckingcoolistan.

0:16 Oh my god, look at him! He's like some genie guy who floats through your bedroom window at night when your parents are fighting and plays Risk with you until sunrise, when he disappears with a poof and an echoing giggle. I want to push him off a bridge just to prove he can fly.

0:55 This video was shot on a magic beach where babes sell ice cream out of cavernous, rap-themed pushcarts for hundreds and hundreds of dollars a bar. Mack 10 is not being a philanthropist; those popsicles imbue their eaters with the power to continue producing records despite career-long irrelevance.

1:42 Guess what would have made Xena: Warrior Princess watchable.

1:44 AH FUCK...Rick Ross, we need to be mentally prepared before we're strafed by your huge, weird face.

3:25 He's got it figured out. He's just famous enough to attract top-flight talent and to be able to throw footballs at tens whenever he wants, but not so famous that the public actually gives enough of a shit to sick the paparazzi attack dogs on him.

3:40 Who IS this guy, and can he be rented for hanging out?

Peanut Gallery

Jr. Writer - "Bird Call"

At the onset of this video, one would expect an appearance by the eponymous Birdman. This is not so. Baby is eclipsed by the overwhelming star power of Jr. Writer.

0:00 We open on a crane shot swooping down from street signs (W 204 St and Nagle Av, infamous for being the very spot where W 204 St meets Nagle Av) to reveal a bland-looking guy wearing all black hanging out on the side of a building. This is Jr. Writer, who, in the next shot, has magically teleported back to the wall he just sauntered away from while groping his nuts.

0:10 We cut to Cam'ron in his natural habitat: a fire escape. He begins a dialogue with Jr. Writer by talking calmly into the camera while Writer fidgets on the sidewalk many blocks away. This is not actually a continuity error - rappers can communicate psychically in times of great urgency, such as when one rapper wants another rapper to start rapping.

"Yo J.R, they been waitin' for you, dog. They been askin'; you ready?" Cam'ron is obviously referring to the tortured chorus of voices that haunt his dreams, rappers and fans alike assailing him with endless questions about whether or not the other rappers on his label are ready. Without hearing Cam, Jr. Writer simply knows to give the rapper's secret signal of confirmation - adjusting the lapels of his sweatshirt.

0:20 The song begins. Jr. is seen in three different ensembles: all black, all red, and all dad. Junior has bankrupted his already tenuous credibility with this hat. If we see you with that thing on your head, you are at the zoo with your kids complaining to your beleaguered wife about the gouge pricing of the corndogs. It doesn't matter if you're doing lines off Pablo Escobar's daughter's ass. Corndogs.

0:25 Juelz Santana's first stack-of-cash showcase. He holds it up, we acknowledge that he has it. End of story, right?

0:44 Juelz flashes the stack again. See? He has a stack. He made that stack by rapping and selling drugs and also running this bomb-ass paper route in the mornings before school. Look at his stack.

0:45 The rapping begins in earnest. We suddenly become aware of how irritating the melody has become, how boring and visually redundant the rest of the video is going to be and how important it is to follow your dreams and work hard at your talents so you can do something special that will make people like you, instead of waiting to luck into a brief and mediocre arc of exposure just because you happened to have been friends with Cam'ron.

Jr. Writer raps by monotonously delivering his lines while hunched at a 30 degree angle, hands lilting in half-committed illustrations of the lyrics. He is underneath an elevated subway track, which is territory strictly reserved by the New York Municipal Zoning Office for hard rappers who are hard.

0:50 What the hell? Everyone in the video is wearing the same t-shirt. You know who wears matching shirts? Youth groups on field trips to AIDS clinics to learn about how dope abstinence is.

0:55 Juelz still has a stack of cash.

0:58 In case you missed it three seconds before, Juelz waves his stack of cash at the camera.

1:08 Hey guys, look at what I got. It's a stack of cash. I dunno what I'm gonna spend it on. My mom, she said that I should put it in the bank but I think Imma buy a big trampoline and jump on it ALL DAY LONG.

1:37 Somebody else has a stack of cash.

1:43 Now J.R. is holding the stack. There is not one shot in which more than one stack is visible. Juelz has been holding a loaner stack the entire time. The money continues to change hands for the rest of the video.

2:00 Lil' Wayne begins to rap and never takes his sunglasses off, looks at the camera, or tries.

2:02 Jr. Writer, in the dad hat, recommences the groping of his balls.

2:18 Juelz, stop. You're going to have to give the money back to the props people at the end of the shoot. Maybe they'll give you a twenty to go buy some Pokémon cards or something. Let it go.

3:04 Cam'ron has also elected to wear a stupid floppy dad hat, though this one is tastefully without chinstrap.

3:14 Damon Dash shows up. One guy in the audience goes "Oh...huh."

4:20 The video comes to a whimpering, merciful close with the caption, "To be continued..." Somewhere in Nebraska, a twelve-year-old gasps in anticipation.



Samantha Jade - "Step Up"

0:00 The cinematographer offers a tantalizing bit of foreshadowing by showing us the bank of televisions that will play the same clip from "Step Up" for the rest of the song. These asides, showing the protagonist of the movie dancing next to his car, will take up at least half the video. I have never seen "Step Up," (and by merit of Samantha Jade I never will see it) but from these clips I assume the whole movie is about a dude in a wifebeater poppin' and lockin' while the love interest is all, like, "Nuh uh."

0:03 Cut to a bunch of girls in a convertible Mini Cooper. A year ago, they all drove around in Ford Explorers with the windows covered in slogans about their field hockey team. Now they're free, out and about in the world, barfing jello shots all over their boyfriends' dicks like debauched mother penguins. O, youth.

0:12 The girl behind the wheel opens a laptop and everyone goes nuts, pointing exaggeratedly at the screen, which displays the "Step Up" website. Laptop girl has discovered a contest to "Star In Your Own Step Up Music Video." Are we to intuit that we are watching the winning video?

0:20 Samantha Jade beings singing/whining while slinking down the sidewalk. Behind her, her crew of fresh, empowered, carefree backup dancers go CRAZY with the fist pumps and ass shakes. Somebody cracks open a Diet Coke, the guy in the headband starts rollerskating backwards and Steve Jobs showers them with iPods from his passing Segway.

0:30 The procession encounters the bank of televisions, which are now reflecting Jade and friends. They are all so unnerved by the dizzying meta-awareness of watching themselves in a television while being filmed for a music video that their dancing ratchets up to new heights of freshness. The observer will notice a kind of frenzy in their movements, eerily counterposed by the opaque gaze of the linearly/existentially displaced.

0:50 Having entered the electronics shop, two guys from the entourage start tampering with the merchandise. Stripey-shirt douchebag cashier is mesmerized by the tiny, glittering copper flakes glazed to the faces of the three girls distracting him.

1:00 The pranksters record the breakdancing performance outside the store, steal the DVD and everyone prances away breezily, leaving Stripeyshirt reeling in infatuation.

1:56 Some girl receives a text message reading "Samantha Jade to Star in "Step Up" Video." The girl and her friend go apeshit.

2:05 On wait, the girl is Samantha Jade. I thought for a second it was Samantha Jade's friend. Samantha Jade has no friends.

2:15 The quantum flower of self-reference continues to blossom as we see a camera crew filming the Jade people dancing outside of the shop where they were previously filmed recording themselves auditioning to be in the video we are now watching them perform for, which is still one layer removed from the actual video being reviewed. Clearly, Jade is some kind of post-post-modernist performance artist maven and this whole project is a commentary on the ephemeral, mutually-reflexive cycle of media production/consumption.

3:30 Nothing interesting has happened in the entire video.

Woo Ha

There's an adage in the publishing world that books have the shelf life of yogurt. The same could be said of rappers, if yogurt lasted for years at a time. Like chemically stabilized goat yogurt. Rappers have the shelf life of goat yogurt.

A better analogy is that they basically live in dog years. From the moment you get some visibility, you have eight to ten years to remain relevant. After that, you undergo one of nature's most beautiful transformations: from rapper to dad. Pretty much every rapper with a household name does very little, in terms of the content of their music, other than yell at the kids to get off the lawn.

But some older rappers, the chosen few, manage to resist the temptations of crankiness, domesticity and predictability. Dr. Dre. Bun B. DMX. And, maybe most important of all, Busta Rhymes.



He's like that kid in 28 Weeks Later whose body mysteriously resists infection by the Rage virus. There is something in Busta's genes that makes him immune to the slow creep of mediocrity. His delivery is still jaw dropping, his lyrics have always remained sophisticated without lapsing into pedantry and he is still having WAY MORE FUN THAN ANYONE. Maybe that's the secret. He actually loves making music, and pretty clearly isn't just using his talent as leverage on fame. Try to tell me that 50 Cent loves the process of writing and recording songs.

Maybe we should inject some of Busta's marrow into Eminem. It might be our only chance.