Some Relatively New Boom-Bappy Realness That Doesn't Suck (As Improbable As That Might Seem)

It's hard to believe that The Ownerz, Gang Starr's sixth and final album, came out the same year as Get Rich or Die Tryin, so far removed the former seems from the latter. In fact, the Gang Starr album is the younger of the two by four months. At the time, it was sharply criticized by some for making commercial concessions (Snoop on a Gang Starr album? Really?) and more importantly, for just being plain stale. When you start sampling DMX for your obligatory scratched hooks, as Premo did on Zonin, it's fair to wonder whether your formula's been used up. Looking back, though, the album looks like the last great gasp of the boom bap tradition. The Ownerz begins on a rather pessimistic note, as Guru and his weedcarriers cryptically complain that "niggas are wandering in darkness...you've got mass confusion, motherfuckers like rats in a maze and shit." The rest of the album can be read as Guru's attempt to dispel this darkness. Each song contains a lesson. Put Up Or Shut Up teaches rappers to quit fronting. Deadly Habits teaches listeners to (a) pay Guru their debts, (b) not get dangerously wasted, and (c) not to shoot up clubs. There's even a little message about American foreign policy. Sabotage, of course, teaches you not to betray your friends. Nice Girl, Wrong Place teaches nice girls to stay out of the wrong places. And so on. If it sounds a little didactic, it is, but there's a lot more to be said for this sort of thing than the vague political gesturings of the so-called conscious rappers (Common and Untitled Nas, I see you), and inasmuch as The Ownerz is another salvo in the "real hip-hop" wars (most explicitly expressed when Premo grabs the mic on 'Peace of Mine' to rant "what the FUCK is this shit that y'all are listenin to nowadays on the radio man? You call that shit hip-hop? THAT'S SOME FAGGOT BITCH SHIT Y'ALL ARE LISTENIN TO!", but implicit in every line of the album), the argument for the continued relevance of boom bap is a lot more convincing when it's yoked to some sort of politics or ethic than when it's simply put forth as an aesthetic preference for scratched hooks over what Guru calls "Tinkerbell beats."*

Unfortunately, Guru's case for his brand of hip-hop - that, through its emphasis on workmanlike storytelling over showy punchlines, scratched hooks over danceable synthetic pizazz, boom bap was of moral use to a troubled community - didn't really get picked up on, as your average backpacker's argument against what gets play nowadays often doesn't boil down to much more than Premo's "'THAT'S SOME FAGGOT BITCH SHIT YALL ARE LISTENIN TO." Too often backpackers sound like my sister did on a family trip to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, noting that she could've easily painted everything post-1950 in the whole museum. ("An all white canvas? You call that art?" = "You mean you don't spend days writing your lyrics before you get in the studio? You make your beats in fruity loops in ten minutes?** You call that hip-hop?") Or like me when I was 8, bragging on my mental math skills. Or like people in the mid-90s, fretting that "hypertext" would profoundly alter for the worse the way everybody thought. (Sven Birkerts in 1994: "Words read from a screen or written onto a screen–words which appear and disappear, even if they can be retrieved and fixed into place with a keystroke–have a different status and affect us differently from words held immobile on the accessible space of a page....I stare at the textual field on my friend's screen and I am unpersuaded. Indeed, this glimpse of the future has me clinging all the more tightly to my books, the very idea of them." DJ Premier: "Most of today’s producers do not sample and that’s okay, but if they are gonna play instruments to make Hip Hop tracks, make ‘em fonky, you see how I spelled it? That’s the way it’s supposed to sound. Hip Hop is a sound, and if you can’t create it to sound like the culture, don’t call it Hip Hop just because someone is rapping on it. All you’re doing is confusing people." DocZeus: "I know this firmly entrenches me as an insufferable, Mos Def hugging, Illmatic loving elitist but a mixtape by its very nature is a completely different artistic medium than an album." True, but so what?) So it's no wonder that Guru's brand of rap has died out, when the only argument its proponents seem willing to make for it is that (a) it takes more work to make than that fake shit, (b) it's the way it was always done (always meaning a decade or so), and (c) the other guys are dumb, or worse yet, minstrels.

Which finally brings us to the relatively new boom-bappy realness that doesn't suck I promised in the title. Relatively new meaning a year old. It comes by way of Big Shug. Big Shug isn't even the most diehard Premo fan's idea of a good rapper. He's a little like a backpacker's Mike Jones, if Mike Jones didn't have an underrated flow and didn't have a southern accent and didn't do funny things like repeating his telephone number and had a way deeper voice and stumbled over big words. Some might say that's a little unfair, but this is a guy who's rapped:

You want the raw, it's pure and unCUT
Me and my cats, we're pure and unCUT

and when he said raw, he wasn't even talking drugs, just the pure and uncut-ness of his raps. Anyway, Big Shug, a longtime member of the Gang Starr Foundation (Premo's charitable foundation for dudes who can't rap but always dreamt as children of getting namedropped by Tim Westwood), put out an album last year, and of course it wasn't anything special. But the single, "Play It," was genius. Over an absolutely gorgeous Premo-produced bed of strings and chimes and something that sounds like it could be (gasp!)*** a synth, Shug does something very novel. He doesn't rap about how real his raps are, or how not real other rappers' raps are, or pretend to rap about politics - he raps about begging DJ's to play his records. And it's the most poignant and honest rap record you'll ever hear, because in 2007, DJ's just aren't playing a Big Shug's records, Premo cosign or not. Shug doesn't bitch and say the DJ's are wrong to play the more poppy stuff and ignore his superior work (okay, he does send a little shot at "coward cats who hide behind they raps and flashy Cadillacs," but the notion of wack rappers hiding in their flashy Cadillacs is so old-school that it only adds to the charms of the song), he simply asks the DJ's to "play all of the music," just to keep some "balance in the game." Shug isn't saying that the DJ's are missing out on something particularly good or worthwhile; at most, he thinks they're missing out on some musical diversity, that boom-bap still deserves a seat at the table just for inclusion's sake. "Give the fans a chance to hear the fly shit I say," he pleads, and though he eventually gets to threatening violence against DJ's who don't play his music, the overall tone is plaintive and a little elegaic, as if deep down he knows that his brand of rap is finished. Ironically, it's only in the act of begging DJ's to play his records that he makes something worth playing. Just as the only line from Godfather III (a work of an exhausted art form if there ever was one) that anyone remembers is the one that expressed its creator's true feelings about the project - "just when I thought I was out [of making more Godfather movies], they [Paramount] pull me back in," the only song in Big Shug's body of work that really rings true is the one that gives away what a dead end that body of work is.

Big Shug - Play It.



* Clearly Guru was hinting at the Neptunes there.
** This is okay, of course, if you're 9th Wonder. Though some heads feel 9th Wonder could be even more hip-hop if he spent some time crate-digging for some better drums.
*** Just kidding, even I know that Premo was sampling synth records back in '91.

Episodes In The History of Personality Cults

It's been a long time - I don't regret leaving you. Anyway, today I thought I would share a fun ye-ye song with you. Ye-ye, apparently, is an upbeat sort of 60s bubblegum French pop music. This particular song comes from Jean Luc-Godard's pretty fucking brilliant film, La Chinoise. It's about a bunch of rich kids who decide to start a Maoist terrorist cell in their apartment. They spend most of the movie arguing over arcane distinctions between various theories of Marxism, stacking their Little Red Books (the Chinese youth, at the time, all carried around a little red book of Mao's sayings), and dressing up as Vietnamese peasants running from toy airplanes. But then they decide to kill some Russian cultural minister (he's one of the "fake," or to use the correct terminology, "revisionist" communists), and things get interesting. Anyway, Godard specially commissioned this bizarrely catchy bubblegum pastiche of Mao's sayings, Mao Mao, from hippie ye-ye singer Claude Channes, as a sort of parody of adolescent Maoist enthusiasm. (Or at least that's how I take it; it's hard to say for sure, given that Godard became a Maoist himself a year after he made this movie.) In this moment of Obama frenzy, the youth vote actually mattering for once, and aestheticized politics, I thought it was just a little a propos. Not that I think Obama's a socialist or anything; I am a Republican but I'm not retarded. The song's in French, so we've got a translation, a video from the film, and a zshare. I would have posted the video on youtube with subtitles, but it's the trailer so it isn't quite the same thing as seeing how the song's used in the film. If you like, though, you can watch that instead. Enjoy.



French Dude: Vietnam burns and me I spurn Mao Mao
Johnson giggles and me I wiggle Mao Mao
Napalm runs and me I gun Mao Mao
Cities die and me I cry Mao Mao
Whores cry and me I sigh Mao Mao
The rice is mad and me a cad
Woman: It's the Little Red Book
That makes it all move
French Dude: Imperialism lays down the law
Revolution is not a party
The A-bomb is a paper tiger
The masses are the real heroes
The Yanks kill and me I read Mao Mao
The jester is king and me I sing Mao Mao
The bombs go off and me I scoff Mao Mao
Girls run and me I follow Mao Mao
The Russians eat and me I dance Mao Mao
I denounce and I renounce Mao Mao
Woman: It's the Little Red Book
That makes it all move
French Dude: The soldiers are the foundation of the army
Real power grows out of the barrel of a gun
The monsters will be defeated
The enemy doesn't fall of his own accord
Mao Mao, Mao Mao
Mao Mao, Mao Mao


Claude Channes - Mao Mao.

Link Of The Century

The Official George W. Bush Store.

"As licensee for the last eight years to the George W. Bush Presidential Campaigns, and as the creator of the George W. Bush Store, Spalding Group has been fortunate to experience the tremendous popularity and respect that President Bush has attained. As President Bush enters his last year in office, we are receiving countless requests for new items that allow supporters to demonstrate their appreciation and admiration for our President."

Check out the t-shirts. I'm killing myself over their not selling smalls. This brings ironic fashion to a whole new level.

Videos Of The Day

Soulja Boy dares friend to drink bottle of Patron for $5000. This is how people die.




Biden going nuts (and getting his campaign's policy wrong):

Thursday Throwback - TRU's "I Always Feel Like (Somebody's Watching Me)"

The Miller brothers liked to dress up as jack-o-lanterns on Halloween.

Today's throwback is a paranoid laughfest off the Miller boys' so-bad-it's-a-classic double album, Tru 2 Da Game. Seriously, this album's been egregiously slept on in "what's the best rap double album" debates. I promise you, if you take the time to buy this record, you'll find there's nothing as wack on here as 'Black Shampoo.' Anyway, this song is like a good version of 'Nightmares,' the horrendous "My Mind's Playing Tricks On Me" homage on The Clipse's overrated sophomore effort. Instead of Bilal, hook singer for the conscious rap stars, you get Mo B. Dick (No Limit's in-house answer to Nate Dogg/TJ Swan), instead of Pharrell's limp beat you get some classic ersatz G-Funk and cheap sound effects, and instead of the Thornton twins you get... Percy and Vyshonn Miller. What, you say that's not a good trade? Read on. The whole fun of the paranoid thug subgenre, of course, has always been laughing at how hilariously unconvincing the rappers' claims of paranoia are, and this song is no exception. Percy kicks things off. Never one to elegantly express himself, he flatly states, in his best angsty voice,

I'm paranoid I can't sleep I'm in this dope game
I think these hoes and these niggas out to get me man

You see, P's just stolen a key, and, well, growing up in the ghetto didn't quite prepare him emotionally to know how to deal with holding such valuable property:

I ain't never had nothing in my whole life
I'm from the ghetto grew up on eggs and rice

Poor guy! So, paranoid thug that he is, he starts spraying his A-K at policemen (lots of gunshot sound effects at this point), gets chased by some dogs (bark bark bark), hijacks some white neighbors' Cadillac, gets taken to see his project bitch, "gets some pussy" (very strange sound effect at this juncture that sounds nothing like any sex I've ever had), and heads off to California. Then Silkk does a verse, which we'll get back to in a second, and then Mia X finishes things up. Having made a career off of recording the same braggadocious verse over and over, she's not about to change things up now, so she actually finds a way to brag about how paranoid she is ("I beez more paranoid than a fugitive!"). It's kind of a first in the paranoid thug genre.

In the middle, though, you get Silkk's verse. Silkk, of course, was always a pretty pathetic make-believe thug; his flow and voice were way too goofy to take anything he said seriously. (Unlike C-Murder, whose whole presence on the roster was justified by the fact that, when he was put in jail for murder, no one was surprised.) But, for the same reasons that Silkk made such an abominable studio thug, he made a really great paranoiac. The guy just sounds unstable. The whole verse is a masterpiece, but it really reaches a crescendo of wacko ghetto-limerick paranoia when he goes:

And I be seein shit that ain't there
It ain't there, but I be seein shit
I be in places without bein seen there
But bein seen in places without even bein there!

Except it's all in something between double and quadruple time, so it sounds more like "ibeseeinshitibeinplaceswithoutbeenseentherebutbeinseeninplaceswithoutevenbeinthere." (I had to replay it about twenty times before I understood it.) Moral of the story is, boring rappers like the Clipse are killing hip-hop. And bring back the old Silkk.

Download "I Always Feel Like (Somebody's Watching Me)" here.

Random Brilliant Idea

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Pop Genius.

Young Jeezy's The Recession, Reviewed

So I finally got around to listening to The Recession and to my surprise, it sucks. As a huge fan of his first two records, I struggle a little to explain why, since he hasn't deviated too far from his usual formula. However, the line between classic material and weedplate status can be awfully thin, and I think there are four major factors leading to the crossing of said line on this album:

1) worse beats
2) dumb hooks
3) obnoxious flows and deliveries
4) no more fun trademark adlibs

That said, let's get into this song by song. If I don't mention the beat, it's probably because it's too mediocre to talk about.

THE RECESSION (INTRO)

I liked this much better when it was 'Girls, Cash, Cars.' Sample was flipped way better. If you were going to make a song about everybody being broke, would you use this beat? The rapping on here's really slurred and lazy. Sample lyric:

God bless America, never been to Colombia
So I'm gon' need one of you to get the work to Colombia
But if need be I'll get the work to Columbia
That's South Carolina, just pay my driver

That just sucks.

WELCOME BACK

Wherein Jeezy (or someone who sounds a lot like him) welcomes himself back, a weedcarrier not having been available to do the honors that day. The first four lines of the song end with place/face/face/face. If this is how you're going to come back, you're so not welcome.

BY THE WAY

For a second I thought he was going to make the classic overindulgent-rapper-on-his-third-album mistake of bringing in a kids' choir. But then they're abruptly dropped for something worse - a really long, boring hook where every line ends with 'by the way,' rendering the song borderline unlistenable. Appropriately, the beat's like a boring remake of 'Standing Ovation.'

CRAZY WORLD

This starts like a great Jeezy song - apocalyptic Thug Motivation 101-esque beat, urgently delivered first few bars, promises of 'dumb shit, where you from shit, ride around your hood all day with your gun shit' - but then Jeezy fails to deliver. Instead his flow falls into this really annoying pattern where he stresses the third-to-last syllable of each line, like so:

All I got to my name is two bricks and one felony
Your going back to jail that's what my conscious keep on telling me
I really ain't buying all this bullshit they selling me
When the government throwing more curves than the letter C
I said the letter C I guess that's for correctional
They try to box me in, sit me still like a vegetable

Can't quite explain why that's so annoying, but it is. As for content, Jeezy doesn't really have much to say - merely that the world is crazy and Bush is somehow at fault. Tonally, I don't think Jeezy's cut out for political protest. He doesn't seem to know how to sound angry - just celebratory or braggadocious. Even here, he sounds like he's bragging, or at best slightly bemused.

WHAT THEY WANT

This is literally the first song on the album that's good enough to have made the cut on the first two. For once his flow's on point, the beat's serviceable, the conceit of Jeezy-as-teacher-for-a-living is hilarious, and the confused, extended sports metaphors for transporting coke are fun, in large part because the uneducated listener (such as myself) suspects there's this whole world of double-entendred out street slang going over his head in lines like these:

Young'n playing softball
'You playin softball?'
Yeah I'm playin softball
Same color as golf balls

AMAZIN'

The 'look what I'm blazin/eyes so low that I look like an Asian' hook isn't as bad as the sing-songy thing he does at the end of each line. It's like a horrible imitation of Juvenile's "Gone Ride With Me" flow.

HUSTLAZ AMBITION

The worst Ambitions As A Rider remake ever. The little computerized "i-i-i-i won't deny it" things on the hook are particularly pointless.

WHO DAT

I really like Shawty Redd's production (though I don't need him to remind me that it's his track each time the hook comes around), but this beat reminds me of the stuff Mannie Fresh did towards the end of his time with Cash Money (think Checkmate), where he'd obscure his great sound with all kinds of whistle sound effects and digital gunk. Jeezy's a little lost here, but I did enjoy this line:

This ain't a mixtape
But the tape's mixed
Black tape, grey tape,
all around one brick

Kind of like a stinky homeless man's "fuck the state pen, fuck hoes at Penn State."

DON'T YOU KNOW

Wherein Jeezy devolves into babytalk and raps in a really weird voice. The one plus side of this song is that, what with all the haunting backing vocals, when Jeezy said

I don't live there, I just cook there
Aint' nothing in there, but fish and cookware

the image that came to my mind was that of a little creepy house in the woods, full of trout and pots and pans. But I doubt it did that for anyone else.

CIRCULATE

I guess this is good, but considering this is the soul-sampling Cannon-produced sequel to Mr 17.5 and Go Crazy, two fantastic songs, it's kind of a letdown. Some critics are all excited about the "looking at my watch like it's a bad investment" line. Understandably, I guess, but it's not that big a deal.

WORD PLAY

Tell me this isn't an inferior remake of 'What You Talkin Bout.' Jeezy says he's "way too intelligent to play up my intelligence." He wouldn't want the other dealers catching onto his lyrical skills. That might... anyway.

VACATION

Sing-rap's like blues; every melody's been used before. I forget who Jeezy borrowed this one from, but he doesn't interpret it very well. Why didn't Jeezy actually rap about his vacations on this? That could've been fun.

EVERYTHING F. ANTHONY HAMILTON AND LIL BOOSIE

Of course, Boosie practically has the best album of the verse here. (And I don't much like Boosie; Jeezy's just that bad on this album.) I don't know why Anthony Hamilton had to sully his good name getting in on this mess. Talking about how he draws a line around his family and shit.

TAKIN IT THERE f. TREY SONGZ

Basically the worst Southern chick song ever. Why does Jeezy even bother? This shit will never make it to the radio and no one's going to buy the record because he made a song about girls "bustin like a Uzi." (Trey in the background crooning 'uziiiiiiiiiiii' is just really gratuitous.)

DON'T DO IT

Sampled and rapped over far better on Trae's 'Restless' and Freeway's (Scarface-featuring!!) 'Baby Don't Do It.' Jeezy just totally ignores the beauty of the sample and shouts over the beat about his friend in prison. Like a horrible version of the previous album's 'Dreamin.'

PUT ON F. SOME OVERRATED RAPPER

Jeezy's delivery is unusually staccato and uncompelling here. It's like he's so focused on enunciating each syllable that he forgot to convey any charisma or sense of interest in his atypically decent punchlines. Then this overrated rapper comes in and bitches into autotune about how he's gotten so much 'big fame' and money that he's become estranged from his old hoes and feels really lonely. It's really touching stuff.

GET ALLOT

The hook to this song goes, in part:

"Let's talk about hate, cuz I get a lot of that
Let's talk about money, cuz I get a lot of that"

Or, you know, we could not talk about it and say we did. More shitty sing-flow here.

MY PRESIDENT F. NAS CONSCIOUSBAR

The greatest song ever. Starring Jeezy as Barack Obama and Nas as Joe Biden. (Get it? Jeezy's the charismatic young man, Nas is the washed-up, garrulous, not especially bright old one... well anyway.)

Best songs: My President, What They Want, Circulate... and Who Dat.