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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
I consider hip-hop to be the most egalitarian genre of popular music. Pretty much anyone with a mouth that can open stands a slim chance of ending up on MTV - while being in a punk band is a good way to get laid in high school, in the end, nobody's really paying attention. The ugliest truth of the rap world is that talent is an entirely secondary factor in a successful career.
Take Young Jeezy. He's famous because he sounds like he gargles with Drano, he wears leather and his production is colossal. But he raps like Shawty Lo if the hemispheres of Shawty Lo's brain were connected. And it doesn't matter.
When the stars are aligned, a rap video will improve exponentially as you throw money at it. Where a rock band would spend all their funds hiring cartoonists to draw girls with stupid haircuts riding magic reindeer who fart raindrops, a rapper will concentrate on what's important: looking cool. This is the central purpose of all music videos, and rap is the only genre that really fulfills it.
This isn't to say that less-groomed rappers are irrelevant, just that they're disadvantaged. And when you see them scaling the side of the YouTube mountain, it's exciting.
See, you don't have to have half a million dollars to make a compelling video. If you have a good concept and you don't spend half the song glancing nervously at the camera while trying to look hardcore in your back yard, it's almost better than the Jerry Bruckheimer shit. Almost. Watching these videos is like getting to see just a little bit more cleavage than you should. Maybe the boobs will look like crosseyed yams when they're seen in full light, but maybe you just danced with Scarlett Johansson before The Island haunted the daydreams of every teenage guy in the country.
Then, sometimes, your grandpa left you $99999999 and your manager is your high school choir teacher.
The producer put a microphone up to the speakers on his Casio Keyjamstation1000, hit the "Hip-Hop 3" button and called it a day. And Birdman's verse, which is half shout-outs, actually weakens the song. You rap like you're mouthing last words to your grandchildren.
SOULJABOY, YOU ARE BEING UPSTAGED BY A TEN-YEAR-OLD IN AN IRONMAN SHIRT.
Pretty soon, when he gets a pube, he's going to realize that he is 1,000,000,000 more likable than you and you will be CRUSHED. I HOPE YOU ARE READY TO REAP THE SCOOTER SMIFF WHIRLWIND.
Ignore the annoying-ass organ sample. Ignore the fact that anything post-Fear-and-Loathing that's Vegas themed is automatically for dads. Ignore Nelly. In fact, ignore everything except the first minute of this video. Look at that little guy! Look at his bow tie and his glasses and his baldness! If you went on a cruise and met the girl of your dreams but she was with her shitheel boyfriend, he'd be the bartender who'd mix you some amazing secret drink, be all like, "Do you have any idea how much pussy I get? You know why? Because I don't give a fuck," then teach you to tap dance, just because. You wouldn't even have to worry about the girl anymore, because you just met the coolest friend you've ever had.
Finally, the Michael Jordan of Rapping sits down for a serious conversation with the Michael Jordan of Wearing Stupid Hats and the Michael Jordan of Being a Third Wheel and Laughing Obnoxiously. If you ever use the term "awesmazing," angels will sear it into your backflesh before casting you into the abyss to suffer forever.
I've been subjecting you to a nonstop assault of embarrassment and pain. Considering that I should probably be tried by a UN tribunal just for showing you the last video, and also considering that I won't be able to go to sleep for another two hours while rage fights shame for control of my face, I did overtime research to find you something nourishing. This came out in 2008, but was accidentally posted in the "new videos" section of one of my source sites. We're all feeling very lost and confused so, in the name of public health, I'll make an exception to my usual exclusion of old releases.
Do you see what happens when serious rappers co-opt elements of rock into their music? This video is so well conceived it makes me want to cry even more than I already do.
I think it's a great thing that hip hop rules the Earth now. Every fourteen-year-old in every country whose media has advanced past the "remaindered Michael Jackson tape" stage (and whose governments won't cut their heads off for looking at black people) lives their life to a soundtrack of American rap.
The bad thing is that contemporary rock music, having confronted the empirical and undeniable superiority of rap, is attempting to dip its nail-polished fingers in the pie. First Lil' Wayne decided to announce the end of his career with a cacophony of screeching Avril Lavigne guitars, then this:
Luckily, the Criss Angel VH1 emocore cokefiend eagle-tattoo-on-chest guyliner invertebrates have only succeeded in capturing E-40, a fourth-tier artist who hasn't gotten a record on the radio since back when people thought taking ecstasy and jumping out of moving cars was cool. But HOLY SHIT. What is your deal? You know who listens to you? Guys who watch TV shows where every time anyone walks anywhere (usually to go into a store that sells internet browsers for motorcycle dashboards) it's in fast motion.
"Oh baby girl I see your photos on myspace You look so beautiful So what I gotta do to take you to my place So you can be my booty girl."
Asher Roth, I'm sorry I called you a date rapist. Not because you aren't, but just because I had forgotten that there are bigger enemies at work in the world. You know what I think about when I imagine girls I have crushes on being hit on by guys who aren't me? These people. It's like whatever soulless label executive cooked up this band magically recorded my nightmares and set them to "music."
BrokeNCYDE, you are not date rapists. You are rapists. Old fashioned. I think I caught syphilis just from watching that, you fucking mongoloids.
Product placement doesn't bother me in rap music. But blatant plagiarism does. Especially when you're ripping off one of the dumbest beats in history.
There are great rappers starving right now just because we only seem to have enough attention for five or six legitimate talents at a time. Not only did you get record deals, Big Hoodboss and Tum Tum (who the fuck?), when you rap like a kid with gelled hair in a middle school bathroom during passing period, your My First Production Crew couldn't even rip off a respectable sample. No, you went with Lil' Jon. You went with Lil' Jon's WORST SONG.
The whole point of this video is that you get to see him laugh all the way to the bank after spending as much time on songcraft as you might spend drawing a sharpie dick above a urinal. This whole thing - song, video, everything - probably took no more than four hours to make. This is what you choose as the starting point of your career, and you only change one note in the hook? You might as well call yourselves "Shmiddle Sean and the Beastside Boys." Even Vanilla Ice picked Queen's best song to steal.
I want Rick Ross to be a good rapper, mostly because he's so ubiquitous now but also because I think he could have a real presence if he managed to issue a decent response to the Officer Ricky scandal and to polish his verbal skills, no small feats either.
If you can get past the bad production values and the extreme close-ups of Ross' googley eyes peering at you through the dark, you can begin to recognize this potential. The beat is spooky, his delivery is almost acceptable and he seems into it. Even if he's being fed prewritten lines (they need to hire a better ghost writer, maybe someone who graduated fourth grade), he seems almost sincere. Plus, the niche of "big fat scary dude" isn't really being filled satisfactorily by Fat Joe in the absence of Big Pun and Biggie.
It has always bothered me when people harp on rappers "selling out" because they did a commercial or co-starred with Jennifer Lopez. Especially rappers whose explicit life campaign is "getting money." Nobody except moms (rappers' only natural predator) bats an eyelash when Biggie talks about shooting women in the head and taking their purses but the whole world goes up in flames when he drinks a Pepsi.
There is only one rapper who has ever really sold out. Do I even need to say his name?
Anyway, ad whoring is pretty much the common denominator in hip-hop. It bridges all gaps. Why not? If you're going to be subjected to asinine TV commercials, you might as well take some comfort in the fact that there's someone who does something cool benefiting from it. Plus, does it really undermine your credibility that much? If you were Dr. Dre, sitting on your throne made of blowjobs and diamonds, and some studio head offered you 9999 billion dollars to walk through a party and scowl at a DJ, would you bust out your back issues of Adbusters and lecture him about integrity? No, you'd spend two hours in front of a camera, take the profits, and go eat an endangered specie.
This has been going on pretty much since forever. Check out the saga of mid-90's St. Ides ads.
The only rappers who really give a shit about any of this are KRS-One, who's basically your grandpa, maybe Mos Def, who sucks, and a whole spate of squinty dudes with tiny backpacks who rap about Guantanamo in their friends' living rooms. Dre could crush you between his shoulder blades. Just leave him be.
Puff and Roth giggle about slippers. The world lols.
They are the kind of people who lose their shit when football players dress up like cheerleaders. I can't really express my feelings for them without breaching libel.
A lot of moms think all rap music is just dudes in hoodies grimacing on street corners. But when hip-hop started out it was all MC's dressing like they were space wizards from Narnia and rapping about "partyin' in the place to be." Somewhere along the lines everything got all grim, but there remains an undercurrent of campy fabulousness that pops up from time to time.
This video combines two of my favorite elements of rap videos: sci-fi themes and overwhelming gayness.
The only thing gayer than wearing a studded leather vest and a disco visor that shoots light is wearing a studded leather vest and a disco visor that shoots light inside of a mock-up Millenium Falcon that zooms around CGI planetscapes.
I would like to see this visual aesthetic regain a prominent place in rap music. I would consider it a restorative gesture. Take a look at old pictures.
Come on guys. Lighten up and put on some fingerless gloves every once in a while. We accept you for who you are. Unless you're Ne-Yo.
Everybody knows that Souljaboy is trash. Except your little sister. But the amazing thing about him is that he has gotten WORSE since his ubiquitous "Superman" infected the world's radio stations for a whole numbing year.
Last month, he released this video, which I have, until today, regarded as a definitive low by which to judge other bad songs.
How could music be any worse? The badness of Souljaboy can only be compounded by the presence of Gucci Mane and Shawty Lo, whom I consider the worst rappers in the industry. that video alone is enough of a credential to make that claim.
Then I saw this video, which is almost as bad, but represents enough of a fractional improvement to suggest that we might never be subjected to another turgid shitstorm of Gucci Bandana magnitude again.
But how wrong I was. Ever hear about those programs the government's undertaking to develop sonic weaponry? The idea is to be able to incapacitate enemy combatants with superpowered acoustics. I forward them to this song, but must disclaim that I fear the results of its use can only be lethal.
Please, if you are pregnant or suffering from a heart condition, do not click the link below.
50 Cent is almost done. His career is burning in the oven like the weak little cornish game hen that it is. The only thing he has to offer is the megamoney his profile attracts. And he's Dr. Dre's Frankenstein monster, so sometimes we get songs like this:
But the fact is that 50 based his career on feuding with rappers just big enough to make waves in the media but not so big as to pose a threat. See Ja Rule. His newest target, Rick Ross, should have been easy pickings. The guy is basically a circus prize huge teddy bear with expensive sunglasses. But Curtis is getting trounced, and I think it's because of two things: a) he doesn't remember how to have fun anymore. He never had a sense of humor, but at least "In Da Club" was something you could listen to to put yourself in a good mood. Now he's all pathos and teen-locked-in-the-bathroom-level surliness. b) He's lost in his own plot. A career founded upon wedgies is unsustainable, and he appears to have finally encountered a PR team savvier than his own.
Rick Ross is a big stupid idiot. But he's trying. The video for "Magnificent" was fairly good, especially considering he managed to make John Legend seem cool for half a minute.
Compare to the only diss track 50 has released since the beef began, only one of three or four songs period released this year.
Trying to use gameplay footage from his own video game to appear threatening is about as effective as having his mom talk consternatingly to Ross' mom. What are you, twelve? Are you at a sleepover? Are you going to hit him in the head with an XBox controller for beating you at Halo and then threaten never to hang out ever again?
DMX is the only rapper in the world who could hit middle age, grow a belly, take up roller skating and be EVEN SCARIER FOR IT. In the interview he says that since he's been in prison for the past four months (for impersonating an FBI agent at JFK airport and trying to steal a car) he knows nothing about Lil' Wayne's dabbling in rock music. He is also, apparently, in the dark about the advent of the new Screamless Microphones that allow you to talk like a normal person during interviews.
The interviewer is lucky DMX spares his life after calling him "Earl Simmons."
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.
