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Slap-Boxing With Jesus

Anatomy Of A Classic

During the neophyte days of the blogging section on this site, one of the originals (where the hell is SY anyways?), perhaps motivated by the lists of a variety of bloggers across the Internets, created his own catalog of albums he felt were instant vintage. While I had my own thoughts on his list, I chose not to comment on it (nor will I ever provide my own list) because I realize that everybody’s beliefs are different.

From what I understand though, it was the general consensus that any album – whether it’s The Joshua Tree or The Low End Theory – is considered a classic because not only are they the preeminent standard-setters of music, but they subsequently shaped the soundscape of music as a whole, not to mention stood the test of time. In that sense, I think we can all agree that certain albums can be considered timeless, since their influence is still somewhat heavy to this day.

In my ever-so-humble opinion, classics are birthed when they can distinctly describe vivid street tales, powerful uplifting anthems, intelligent yet cautious stories and old-fashioned “feel good” music, usually backed by an array of lush, emotion-invoking beats that heightens the overall message of the song itself. Essentially, a classic doesn’t necessarily have to make a particular audience relate to its subjects (I sure as shit don’t have any form of personal connection with, say, “Incarcerated Scarfaces”), yet I feel it does have to change the way an entire genre formats its music [1].

What never made sense to me – and tends to agitate me to an extent – is when the word “classic” is thrown around by a shitload of humps, as if they just learned the damn thing from their “special needs” teacher, not unlike the words “swagger” and “hater.” As I mentioned before, the insanely ass-backward reasoning behind that is that people are considered “haters” (or worse, depending on the hump who says it) if their opinions doesn’t match a certain population of blockheads. But if we all agreed that some random-ass mixtape like Eat With Me Or Eat A Box Of Bullets [2] is going to change the way we think about music, what kind of weight could any of us possibly hold in any musical arena?

Besides, being the stubborn asshole I am, it’s going pretty hard to convince me that some bullshit like “Make It Rain” is destined to change the way I think about music other than the fact that it’s probably caused a lot of strippers to get the flames smacked out of their asses, Pacman Jones-style. At the same time, I really wouldn’t think the so-called “voices of hip-hop” would disagree with me either, lest they’d lose any and every form of credibility they have, not to mention catching a mean one from me (pause, no Johnny B. Badd).

But perhaps I could be wrong. With so many of us (me included) holding a dimly-lit torch for hip-hop’s past, most of us have the tendency jump on and attack the latest ear violation that pops up, as if it never happened during the days of Only Built For Cuban Linx... Sure, they may have been more enjoyable then (“Hay” and “Pumps And A Bump” still causes me to act out of pocket every once in a while), but they were still shitty nonetheless. And in that sense, maybe these current shit sammiches are classics to this current generation. I could go on and correlate that theory to the fact that most of today’s audiences are smart-dumb jackasses who wouldn’t know good music if it bent them over and porked them from behind, but I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t need to.

[1] And fuck no, Lil Wayne and T.I. have not injected any form of change in hip-hop, save for some wild jibba jabba about feeling like Plasticman and pushing more keys than Sohmer & Co. And for the record, Positive K had the multiple personality shtick down pat on “I Got A Man,” which is way more than I can say about Cliffy.

[2] Reason number 626 why New York stays losing: craptastically hilarious album titles.

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