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The Undisputed Truth

Viewing Posts Tagged "Lil Wayne" View All

The Game Needs a Rappendectomy

February 05, 2008 | Tags: Underground, Lil Wayne, mainstream

Perhaps this is just a case of me having very picky personal taste when it comes to music, but I feel like rap as a musical genre is seriously ill these days. Other genres have their issues too, don’t get me wrong, but this is a hip hop site, so let’s just focus on the rap aspect of things.

"OK, start with straight shots, and then pop bottles,
Pour it on the models, shut up bitch swallow,
If you can't swallow, shut up bitch gargle,
Straight up out the water with my Marc Jacobs goggles,
I'm fresher than a muhfucka, yeah I'm a muhfucka,
No I wouldn't take your girl, but I should take her tongue from her*,
Can't you tell I'm in love woman, like no other woman,
I'm sorry sweetheart, I thought you were my other woman."
-Fuck it, all y’all know who the quote is from. No need to mention his name.

This is what’s hot right now? For real? This is what 14-year-old middle school aged girls are listening to these days? And then professing their love for Mr. F. Baby? I don’t know how much more of this I can take. If I possessed the talent to be able to rap, I’d be flooding the market right now with way better shit than this. Unfortunately I can’t rap though. But I can write, so write I will.

First of all, how unnecessarily disrespectful is that verse for no reason at all? Anybody that knows me personally will tell you that I’m not all about that feminist shit, and I’m not about to get on some “hip hop is evil because it disrespects women” tip because I just don’t feel that way. Plus, that topic as a whole is just so broad that it has to be given its own post or two to properly cover it. And one day it’ll get that, don’t worry. But this verse even touches a nerve with me, and that’s saying a lot. I mean really, how many people have you ever heard claim to be a “motherfucker”? OK, sure, he said “muhfucka” but it’s the same damn thing. If that is actually what he said…

Weezy – whatever it is you got in your mouth when you record your tracks, can you remove it please? It makes it hard for me to analyze how irritating you are. Thank you.

Continuing on…I’ve come across some damn wild people in my life, but yet none of them have ever bragged about fucking mothers. Because real talk, in the context he used it in, what else could the word mean? Now I’m sure one of the stanboys out there is going to claim that this motherfuckery makes our boy Weezy “the most gangsta ass rapper alive” or whatever it is that his cult following is choosing to refer to him as these days.

Forget about that verse though. I’ve given it enough attention for the day. My point is that bullshit like this is somewhat like a disease to rap music. No, I’m not about to get on that whole “Nas said hip hop was dead, but I think it’s just a little bit sick right now” kind of steez. It’s bad enough that as of late people seem to forget** how to put together a properly structured sentence free of factual error (and even worse, nobody seems to care). Apparently now the words you put together in a verse don’t even have to mean much of anything for it to sell records. I mean don’t get me wrong – I know there’s a market for this kind of stuff. It’s just a little unsettling how large that market is in comparison to the one that music with a message falls into.

But then take a second and think about the people behind the senseless shit. No, not the lyricist. No, not even the ghostwriters. The people they have to answer to. The CEO’s of the large record labels, which many of you may know more familiarly by the loving term “TI”. These people are not hip hop. They are capitalists. Exploiting people, art, and culture for the love of money***. I’m sure many of you have come across somebody in your lifetime that claims that HIV/AIDS is a manmade virus that was purposely planted into the human race, or some close variation of that tale. Compare that to the mainstream music industry, and it’s like the people running the record labels are the ones who made the disease and are pushing it throughout the streets.

And just like AIDS, this musical disease…this dumping of crap onto the rap economy, if you want it in other terms, seems to have no cure. Maybe with time the market will change its tastes and desires. Maybe with time sound systems will continue to improve to the point that I can just turn the bass up so loud that I don’t have to bother myself with lyrics anymore, without even having to worry about collapsing a lung or sonically shitting my pants****.

*****

We may not be able to permanently do away with the bullshit, and honestly the people who really do appreciate that shit should be able to have access to it, regardless of how I feel about it. But we can make a conscious effort to support high quality independent artists who aren’t answering to the people who are feeding our ears this musical pain. Oh, and you can still find that good ol’ misogyny, profanity, violence, and drug talk that you all fiend for in some underground shit too. Fuck what you heard. But at least I can still understand what they’re saying.

*You have no idea how long I listened to this line alone just to figure out what he was saying. And I’m still not sure that’s what he’s really saying. I checked like 20 different lyrics sites online to find some confirmation, and I found damn near 20 different interpretations of the line. And I live in the South, too! It’s not like the accent is throwing me off. Although it’s not like the statement would have been really profound if I knew what he was saying for sure anyway. Actually, here: peep the YouTube for yourself and tell me just what the hell he’s saying in that line.

**Or maybe I should blame this on the never-improving public school system.

***Since it’s Super Tuesday, I suppose I should be politically correct and state that most seem to take that stance. There’s gotta be a good one out there somewhere. Actually, I’m sure there is. But that is a severe minority. And yes, I realize art is a subset of culture. I just wanted to clarify the specific element of art for a second.

****Man, bass is great?

*****Adding in these little blurbs at the bottom is fun, no? OK, I'm done with this now, for real. It's been a long day. I'm entertaining myself while writing this blog.

The views and opinions expressed in this blog are those of the writer and not necessarily those of HipHopDX.com or Cheri Media Group.

Weezy Can't Leave Rap Alone

January 02, 2008 | Tags: Lil Wayne, longevity

I realized something today that made me cringe. Well, a few things actually. First of all, I am an old fart in a 19-year-old’s body that has the joints of an 80-year-old arthritic woman, and I need gym action, stat. Second, I realized that (brace yourselves) Lil Wayne has been releasing music since like 1995. It is now 2008, and you know what that means? Weezy F. Baby has been at it for thirteen years now. That’s more than a decade. That’s more than half of my lifetime. I really never realized that it had been that long. I hope I’m not the only one.

See, this presents a problem though. I mentioned in an earlier blog that I have to give a lot of credit to artists (and not even just rap artists) that can maintain a musical career for that long and remain relevant and in the radar of the masses – including the younger demographics. And, uh, that means that I need to actually give the rapper (who always talks and raps like he has something in his mouth, but I’m not about to go into what that something may be. Extra drizzling of fruity sauce on that statement, by the way) props, despite the fact that he makes me stare at the stereo in my car with that “what the fuuuuuck was that” sort of look of disbelief and terror a lot of times these days. Remember this day, because you may never see it happening again in this blog. Now excuse me while I go bang my head against a wall a few times to kill the brain cells that actually allowed Weezy to find his way into my longevity hall of fame.

OK, I’m good now. Back to sensible matters of business.

Aside from the fact that it’s obviously better to be a well-established artist rather than a one hit wonder, there’s something about somebody who achieves longevity in the world of rap music that I very much adore. Instead of releasing an album or two within the span of a couple of years, and having a few hit singles on the radio, the artist that lasts in the mainstream for a decade or more is easy to observe while they progress and grow. Just look at how people like Jay-Z have evolved stylistically since they started out. Look at where they’re at now. You don’t get the advantage of watching artists enhance (or in some unfortunate cases, lose) their skills over time if one just makes a track that sparks the newest dance craze and then goes on ghost mode from rap.

The way I see it, the best method to use to measure the state of rap music these days isn’t by the one hit wonders that pop up every now and then and put the notoriously crappy music onto the airwaves. Rather, we should be judging the state of rap these days on how the veterans are sounding as of late. The day when all of the people who have been at this shit on a large scale for 15+ years and are still at it are all putting out shitty music? Then a decline in quality is definitely evident and proven. But come to think of it…I still haven’t seen that day happen. Long live the beautiful sound that is rap music. And long live longevity.