Put Your Bitch-Ass In The Ground; A Nostalgic Youtube Post ('Fired Up')

Back in the days when I failed out of Duke and went from decorated National Merit Scholar who only went to Duke because he never did any work from 6th grade on to vest-wearing seller of 'As Seen On TV' products (I don't care what you think, that's a pretty steep fall), I knew a devastatingly cute blond girl who worked at the FYE a floor above me. This girl was sweet, funny, and had shockingly good taste in rap. Keep in mind that this was a shit mall on the rural frontier of the Philly suburbs, right around the point where it becomes okay for School Board members to make flamingly bigoted remarks about Jews and blacks and still hold onto their office (North Penn School District, Linda I Forget Her Last Name, for any of you from the area). (The funny thing about where I'm from is that it is this incredibly affluent and expansive place with all sorts of little subtle gradations of class, but if you go the right direction you really only need to drive 30 minutes (fast) from the city before your only dining options are bad diners that offer little handouts about Jesus at the door.) Anyway, this girl was just a gem. I remember when I bought Thugged Da Fuck Out, C-N-N's two-disc greatest hits compilation, and she goes, "I love them! 'Invincible' is my favorite song!" Huh? For the vast majority of white girls back in 2004, the only Noreaga point of reference was 'Nothin.' Particularly that oh-so-funny Smash Mouth line. I was shocked. I was even more shocked when for the first time in my music-buying career, I dipped a toe into Soufern rap and purchased Lyricist Lounge Presents The Dirty States Of America on the basis of an electifying B.G./Fiend/Soulja Slim collabo that I'd happen to run across on the Internets somehow or another. I'm pretty sure that the only people who own this record are myself and 8 Willie D completists. Nevertheless, when I went to the register, the girl says (I'm paraphrasing here, whatever she really said was vastly more charming), "that's the album with 'Fired Up'! What a song!" Indeed, what a song. I'd put it on a top twenty of the decade, easy. Soulja Slim was a monster. Anyway, I was too depressed at the time to even walk around the mall without taking back alleyways so as to avoid eye contact with the public, so naturally I didn't get her number. She went back to college, and here I am 5 years later in Lexington, Virginia, going out on dates with second-years I'm massively brighter than and seriously considering fucking the town's one cute waitress. Of course, uncannily good taste in music doesn't a fantastic relationship make but I do wonder sometimes.

'Now Or Never' x 'Give In To Me'

Can I just say on a random note that as the weather cools, my heart yearns for yesteryears of Big Mike mixtapes? Oh, back in the days of '40 Bars of Terror'... yeah yeah, this nostalgia shit is ridiculous. I have a funny habit, don't know how common this is, of randomly replaying songs I haven't heard in years in my mind. Surprised I remembered all the words ("now what the fuck do y'all think I make music for?"). Great freestyle. As the soggy pentultimate track of Ice Cream Man goes, things ain't what they used to be.

Anyway, 'Now Or Never.' 'Now Or Never' is Elvis at his least Elvis. It was also his biggest hit ever, which tells you something about how conservative the music-buying public still was in 1961. Here's the song:



'Now Or Never' is this pathetic (but successful) attempt to connect with a bigger audience, an audience of Dean Martin and Mario Lanza fans. On it he successfully manages to sound like a vaguely European opera-singing bitch; with all the vibrato it's very easy to not recognize it's him. Substantively though, it's also quite a departure, because instead of the straight-shooting sexual (and let's say it, pretty sexy) advances for which we was known, we get this grossly manipulative creep who croons in his basso profundo that

Tomorrowwwww, will beeeeeeee too laaaaate
It's now or nevvvvvvvver
My loooooooooove won't wait

His 'love,' you see, can't wait. Unfortunately, it gets much worse; at one point he actually says that "just like a willow, we would cry an o-o-o-ocean/without true love, and sweet devo-o-otion." Yeah, or you would cry an ocean if you couldn't get your rocks off. The picture you get in your mind is of this skeevy European playboy on a 50s cruise reciting cheesy pickup lines that just may have worked back then. The interesting thing here is that, in retreating into this family-friendly, sexually conservative mask, he's actually getting more sexist and sexually crass; the song's a disingenuous solicitation of a pump-and-dump ridiculously disguised in terms of almost courtly love. And all this, incredibly, while he's recording some of his best and sexually frankest stuff ever for the real fans, on a horribly under-regarded album (Elvis Is Back) that would sell less than the abysmal soundtracks for Blue Hawaii and G.I. Blues. So to get really schematic, Elvis briefly retreats from his more subversive, sexually honest, and at times downright feminist work (note how convincingly he sings about female sexual desire on 'Fever' and 'Girl Next Door Went A'Walking,' where he manages to make "settl[ing] down for life" sound incredibly dirty) to put out this international chart-topping single that, on its face, avoids flouting traditional mores while completely embracing very 50s sexist notions of gender roles.

One of the most disingenuous moves on 'Now or Never' is when Elvis says that "I've spent a lifetime/waiting for the right time." See, he needs to do you now, tonight, because he's been waiting his whole life! For you! How romantic! Don't contribute any further to this man's sexual deprivation! Er, I mean, his deprivation from your sweet devotion, which, like a willow, he would cry over if he couldn't have. Well, I was listening to Dangerous a couple weeks ago, and I happened on this line:

I've spent a lifetime waiting for someone
Don't try to understand me,
Simply do the things I say

Coincidence? No, not at all. What Michael has done here, in his attempt to broaden his marketability (by displaying what a straight guy he is), is reinterpret 'Now Or Never' as an exercise in brutal honesty. Where Elvis is forced to erect, no pun intended, this subterfuge of utter nonsense, Michael can just say - in fact, the climate encourages him to do so in 1991, to prove his heteronormativity - exactly what he means and wants. (Namely, Michael's spent a lifetime without sex; now is your time to do your duty, save this desperate soul and go fuck Michael.) Which does two things - it turns 'Now Or Never' into something a whole lot less manipulative and dishonest, but it also makes it infinitely more chilling. Because what Michael plainly wants is for some stranger to come follow instructions and service his anorexic pasty ass. (Go on girl! Quench that desire!) Whereas Elvis, besides not being half as candid about it, clearly believes, in part, his own bullshit. Even when trying to be some suave opera-crooning schmuck, he still has a heart. Michael... well, Michael is suffering from such a severe case of deferred sexual discovery that he doesn't have much of a heart left:

You always knew just how to make me cry
And never did I ask you questions why
It seems you get your kicks from hurting me
Dont try to understand me
Because your words just aren't enough

That frigid whore! Getting her kicks from hurting Michael by... not fucking him. No, words will not be enough tonight. Or as Michael asks on 'In The Closet,' "if you want it, then why don't you taste it?" The world is so unfair to Michael on Dangerous. People tripping on him when they should be worrying about world hunger, and teachers who can't teach, and drug addiction. (Oh wait.) Girlfriends who go cheat on him with his brothers. His brothers sleeping with his girlfriends. That neighbor who he asked for a favor and told him later on 'Jam.' Women who pray to Buddha and then sing Talmud songs. Confusing! Contradictory! Worst of all, girls who say they want it but won't suck his dick. What has come of all the people? Have we lost love? Of what it's about?

What's telling is that, as Michael is being pushed out of his choirboy comfort zone by the demands of the "do we really want to give our cash to a gay pop star who's turning funny colors" market, he's still Michael at his most Michael. 'Give In To Me' isn't some forced bullshit like 'Now Or Never'; it sounds like something he's wanted to sing all his life. You often hear Michael and Prince linked in this good guy/bad guy dichotomy; I find that very odd. To me the dichotomy is Elvis and Michael, with Michael as the bad or incredibly fucked-up guy. For, when Michael interprets Elvis, borrows from Elvis, what does he take? Elvis the creeper. Elvis the sell-out Mario Lanza imitator who isn't really Elvis. (Of course, Michael also did a 'Heartbreak Hotel,' and on that, instead of the hotel being a place for brokenhearted lovers and victims of breakups to go, it's where "every girl that I knew" is, where the "wicked women" sleep. Elvis spends a career fearing, often quite morbidly, loss of attachment; Michael spends a career running from attachment.) Of course, this is not an argument against Michael, though it may be one for you if you like your pop life-affirming and uplifting; it's actually an argument in favor of him on the grounds that no other singer so brilliantly sang about man's misanthropic, misogynistic, and violent impulses. Elvis is pop's great lover and Michael pop's great loner.

Don't Fuck With Cokeheads

On a humorous note...

Cokehead (21:53:36): do u drink or smoke or nething else?

Tray (21:53:40): drink

Cokehead (21:53:51): tried nehting else?

Tray (21:53:55): oh no

Tray (21:54:06): should I?

Cokehead (21:54:26): drinking is enough

Cokehead (21:54:49): coke is great but that can be a downhil slope

Tray (21:55:24): mm

Tray (21:55:30): if I did drugs it would be coke

Tray (21:55:55): but I wouldn't risk it

Tray (21:56:25): though girls who do coke must be fun

Tray (21:56:33): I don't know enough of them

Cokehead (21:57:35): i think its mental thing when it comes to controling it

Cokehead (21:57:48): sex is great on coke lol

Tray (21:57:53): but let's say I'm one of the thousand or so smartest people in america

Tray (21:57:56): probably true

Tray (21:58:04): do I want to kill any of my precious brain cells?

Cokehead (21:58:23): for a reaaaaallly amazing sex

Cokehead (21:58:28): might be worth it

Tray (21:58:33): nah I don't know

Cokehead (21:58:59): u can probbly down a few red bulls and have similar effects

Tray (21:59:04): hmm

Cokehead (21:59:36): but i would usually not drink do coke and drink red buls

Tray (22:00:54): oh, so don't do both

Cokehead (22:01:50): neway moving on b4 i start to really sound like a junkie ...

Tray (22:01:58): I actually have work



Sorry I don't have the mp3 on that. You can find it.

Godfather 3 Syndrome

I should really just get a Twitter and make all you follow me because my observations on shit are pretty brief these days, but on the big leaks of the week, let me just say this. I'm not listening to Blueprint 3 because I know I won't like it. I'm eventually listening to OB4CL2 because I'm sure it'll be a decent album, No Said Date with an actually good rapper at the helm, or something like that. But look. Whether you're the type of person who reflexively loves anything a Wu-Tang member puts out (like the people who loved Big Doe Rehab even though it wasn't particularly good), whether you're a Jay stan or Jay apologist or just someone who finds the sound of Sean Carter's voice a soothing balm in the, uh, midst of your harried existence (which is alright), you have to admit this. This being, there's a problem when the event records of the year are sequels of 8-to-14-year-old classics or albums that undeservedly have classic status. That is as sure an indication as there can be of a genre spinning its wheels. Either that or (a) a genre bizarrely obsessed with history or (b) a genre with a lot of savvy operators who understand the marketing upside of trotting out a beloved brand, like 'Blueprint' or 'Cuban Linx.' But even if it's just (a), or (b), I still think you have a problem. Rock stars aren't marketing idiots and I don't recall Bob Dylan putting out Highway 61 Revisited - Again. The fact that there is a market for this shit in rap and not so much elsewhere means something.

To just start a paragraph without any sort of transition, when Nas first did this with Stillmatic, at least he wasn't promising a straight re-run - the idea was some kind of synthesis between the purity and ambition of Illmatic and whoever he had become circa 2001. This ended up not being the most sustainable of artistic directions, but there are few bars recorded this decade that deserve the enconium of classic and canonical more than:

Ayo, the brother is Stillmatic
I crawled up out of that grave, wiping the dirt, cleaning my shirt
They thought I'd make another llmatic
But it's always forward I'm moving
Never backwards stupid here's another classic

So at least that project started out well. Here, there's not that promise of forward movement. What we're seeing here, just in the way these projects have been billed, is more along the lines of 'Do It Again' (here I won't be some allusive schmuck and assume you know what I'm talking about - 'Do It Again,' an "okay, we'll go back to just being surfers" song the Beach Boys recorded in 1968 after their crazy genius leader's experimentation met with poor commercial reception):



So whether you're one of the Armond Whites of the world who think Sofia Coppola was amazing in Godfather III, or whether, unlike Armond, you are sane and realize what a misguided clusterfuck that movie was, you should still acknowledge that the rehashing of old classics is not a great forward direction for a medium to take and that that film's release signaled something about the downward spiral American cinema would take through the 90s and 00s. And that is the real issue here, not whether these albums are really worthy of their expectation-raising titles. Even if they are, we still have a problem.

Nostalgia For The Days of 'Sunshine'

Somehow Lil Flip's 'Sunshine' wandered its way into my head, though I haven't heard it in 4 years, and I thought I'd write about it. 'Sunshine,' if you'll recall, was one of the most despised songs of the decade (despite, or rather in part because of, its somehow reaching #2 on the charts.*). 'Sunshine' was derided because Flip's rapping was incredibly lazy, it featured a lame r&b hook, it was really soft for a guy then regarded (and not entirely unjustly) as the South's Freestyle King, but most importantly because of that immortal line:

Spaghetti, shrimp, and steak, and I'll adore you
I'll treat you like milk, I'll do nothing but spoil you

An awful line, though maybe a goof like Kanye could pull it off. Anyway, Flip really half-asses it and so it sucks. Nevertheless, as a piece of songwriting and production, the tune is not without a certain candified craft of the sort found in Ja Rule/Ashanti collabos of that period; actually, the whole thing plays out a bit like a really stilted 'Always On Time.' (They both feature a cute little acoustic guitar line, a line, which, on similar songs of the era, will often waver into 'Maria Maria' pastiche.) Which, depending on what you think of 'Always On Time,' isn't the worst thing in the world. I guess what I want to say then is a couple things.

One, though 'Sunshine' isn't a great exemplar of the bubblegum rap aesthetic of its day, it is, for what it's worth, a song that could never have been made this year or the year before. Precisely because that particular aesthetic is so dead. I would admit to liking Ja in his commercial heyday, Kells's 'Snake,' 'Bump Bump Bump,' '03 Bonnie and Clyde,' as well as the great-grand-daddy of many of these tracks, Puff's 'Senorita.' 'Sunshine' a good song, no, that whole sound a fun one, yes, for me anyway.

Second, oh for the days when the worst thing in the world was rappers half-assing shit and making garbage for-da-ladeez tracks promising to treat their significant others like milk! For one thing, a lot of those songs have their stupid charms, particularly when the rapper is in on the joke of how much this sucks. (Think Neef on 'No Better Love.') That's not the case here, but the song's still funny. For another, there are so many worse things in the world than 'Sunshine' and its ilk. For instance, rappers who sing, or, rappers who decide to only sing, or, rappers who decide to only sing and only sing into shitty pitch correcting software. Then you've got rappers hanging on past their prime, which you're just seeing way more of now than 5 years back, when that was only an issue with LL and.... yeah, who else? Master P tried to do a comeback with Lil Jon but that shit was actually hilarious. Mase did a comeback, it yielded a couple of okay songs and hardly poisoned the landscape. Then you've got the inanity and dullness of someone like Drake. Of course, it's become totally okay to rap without actually knowing how, doing songs with Justin Timberlake and other people who really belong nowhere near a rap album's track list is de rigeur, lyrical types go pop with disastrous results (Common), fun ignorant types choose to attempt to please the bloggers who will never buy their albums anyway and work up their flows to the point where they're no fun anymore (Jeezy, Ross) - in short, the multitude of ways in which it's today possible to make a bad 'rap' record has expanded astronomically. Compared to most of them, 'Sunshine' seems positively purist.

* Amazingly, if it weren't for 'Slow Motion, 'Lean Back,' and 'Goodies,' two of which were great singles (and the third of which was utter garbage), 'Sunshine' would've been a #1 song. Speaking of 'Slow Motion,' it's notable that, in spite of Wayne's burgeoning stardom, Cash Money would not chart another #1 again until 'Lollipop.' In fact, unless I'm mistaken, Cash Money's first #1 single ever was 'Slow Motion' - from which it oddly follows that the two songs for which the label's known best weren't produced by Mannie Fresh, and don't even sound much like him, though 'Lollipop' bears a slight resemblance.

Hurray, Crappy Videos For Songs That Are Actually Good

I just looked at onsmash for the first time in months and was strangely glad to see that Jim Jones is still alive. Hard to explain. Anyway, of the tiny number of new rap songs I've heard this year, 'Last 2' with Chris, Freeway and Beans is definitely one of the best. And now it has a video! A cheap crappy one! Isn't it something how these guys' old boss has entered the global celeb stratosphere at the same time that he ceased to be any good at making music, while his old super-talented crew members have become mixtape nobodies? Very odd. Especially since they've actually gotten better (with the exception of Beans, who just stays as great as he ever was) since they got cut. Has there ever been a scenario before where there was a whole label of incredibly gifted rappers that went from stardom to nowheresville for no good reason besides their label head being a dick? I used to get all exercised about the endless push-back of Styles's second album, but this is way worse.



Has the Rae leaked yet? I feel about this Cuban Linx 2 shit the way I feel about most attractive girls I meet down here. There's some small promise but odds are she's taken or her favorite movie ever is American Beauty. If only 'Wu Ohh' or whatever it's called had never happened I'd be expecting another Lex Diamonds dud and have nothing to worry about one way or another. Now there's actually a chance. Realistically I think you're probably seeing something like Masta Killa's first album on steroids. For instance, Meth kinda kills this but otherwise the song's pretty dull. GZA in particular needs to take a long walk.

More Lexington-Related Ramblings

Yes, that would be the chapel on my campus where Bobby Lee is buried.

One of the reasons that well-intentioned but mildly racist white guys like myself listen to rap is to stress how we're cooler than other white people. Because, you see, while those white people listen to that shamefully white music, we whites are listening to cool black people music. Of course, this presupposes that black people are all cool and all like good music, which is racist, and when, in reality, say, Cam's fanbase outside of Harlem largely consists, or consisted, of clever adolescent/early-20s Jewish folk like myself. While, obviously, there are many black folk who do have good taste in music, otherwise Gucci Mane and Styles P would be shit out of luck, I am always surprised, being a sheltered white guy whose interracial socializing kinda cut out around 2005, by the incredibly bad taste in rap that some blacks have. To wit, I took a drive out to Roanoke with the gorgeous Spelman grad, dude from Houston, and an Indianan who went to school in NOLA, and what did we listen to?

1. 'Death of Autotune,' which Houston dude said he liked in spite of the awful beat because Jay kills it. "Listen to the lyrics!", he said over and over. Yeah, I'm hearing those shits and they aren't too good.
2. Copious amounts of Graduation. Kanye's rapping on that album, apart from the decent stuff he's doing musically, is fairly abysmal.
3. The Common/Pharrell disaster. Gorgeous Spelman grad professed amazement at how I could like Dipset and not care for Universal Mind Control.
4. Plies. Of all the ignant Southern rappers, you go for Plies? (Spelman girl even said that she liked it but would be feeling it even more if she had a few shots of Patron.) I ethered that album last year. Though I will admit that 'Plenty Money' is kind of catchy ("what's in my pocket dog, BIG FACE HUNNIHS, JUST LEFT THE MALL, BOUGHT EVERYFING DAT I WAWWWNNID").
5. Some really generic Houston club shit about dude's swagger.
6. Suck-ass Black Album cuts. Not until the other day did I realize how mediocre the Black Album actually is and how fucking virtuosic the highlights of BP2 are compared. That forced bullshit at the end of 'My 1st Song' where Jay pretends to be a nice guy with friends he didn't screw over and phonily looks back nostalgically on his humble beginnings, ughhh. Even 'PSA' is kind of lame. He starts wheezing on the second verse, and shooting at actors like movie directors isn't that hot a line. That guy who used to write for SLAM and moved on to ESPN once wrote in Scratch that the 'Excuse Me Miss' remix (AKA 'La, La, La') was Jay's last great hurrah, and aside from 'Diamonds' and 'Go Crazy' guest spots I completely buy that. (In fact, the 'Excuse Me Miss' remix is to Jay what 'Glitter' is to Cam, a track that at the time meant little and looking back means everything.)
   
7. On the plus side, we did listen to the new Maxwell, the first few bars of Gucci's verse on 'Obsession,' and Soulja Slim's classic, 'I'll Pay For It.' But I was also subjected to arguments on behalf of Lupe's crap song where he pretends to be a hamburger. ("It's really deep, he's talking about the game through the perspective of a hamburger.") In fact, gorgeous Spelman grad went so far as to say today that "Lupe can get it. He can get ALL of it." To which I averred that he's an ordinary-looking nerd in glasses. To which she countered that it doesn't matter because he be saying deep-ass shit. Not in those words though. Oh, and I also learned from Houston that there were not even 4 songs on Carter III that would hold up a few years from now. That's not true.
   

Of course, the next day I go to a drink-all-day house party with white folk and I listened to Asher Roth (did you know that Beans did a track with Asher Roth? 50 seconds of joy in the midst of all that suckitude), Girl Talk, and lots of post-retirement Jay. Some drip tried to tell me how great he still was, how '99 Problems' is Jay's best song ever, and how Wayne used to be really bad and got really good. It's not so, he's great on the old Hot Boys shits. Oh, and the one very cute black girl at the party loves Game, is from Oakland, and doesn't really care for Too Short. (In other bafflement, she likes Woody Allen but has never seen Annie Hall, while she loves Manhattan Murder Mystery. Nice girl though.) And the decidedly not-cute black girl at the party said that she couldn't talk to me anymore because I like No Limit and 2 or three songs by Soulja Boy. Another Lupe fan. Yeah, people are retarded.