SOULJA BOY MACHT FREI

I realized a little while ago when Discipline leaked that I had never sat down with an entire Janet Jackson record, so I went to iTunes to do the normal 30sec-per-song browsing to figure out what her best records were and copped them.

Listening to Control and Rhythm Nation 1812 halfway through a bus trip to West Bumfuck, Pennsylvania, a couple of things occurred to me. One, how much Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis sounded really fucking odd and overdone and all over the place, and how much like industrialized Minneapolis funk it reminded me of (not surprising since it turned out they were fired from The Time in the mid-80's for being late all the time). Also, how cheesy and underwhelming Janet's singing and performance pre-janet. was. There's a lot of unintentionally funny moments on those records.

But of late, I noticed some whole other shit that blew my mind. And that is with all of the cool, hyper-intricate and experimental programming and production Jam and Lewis did, their successor may be Soulja Boy.







"Get Silly" is my shit.

Those FL Studio hits aren't as cheap sounding and ridiculous in light of this. Give the kid 10 years and he'll be putting out classics. Like thriller caliber, deadass.

"I Don't Want Any Gays Near Me While I'm Killin' Kids"

That timely Bill Hicks quote is inspired by the continued fuckery from the throngs of useless assholes who bring you this:



See, I got awoken out of my formerly jobless (Shout out to the MET) blog slumber yesterday after the corpse formerly known as Bol posted some Japcity videos, which had their share of funny parts, but what stuck to me was the second video he posted, where this bummy wagonrider felt the need to, like every person more concerned on what other people do than taking care of their own shit, define for himself the ideas of what is and isn't hip-hop and what is and isn't manhood. Add that to a few items in the Village Voice piece about Thug Slaughter Force and, voila, I'm resurrected from my moping in my sweaty boxers to shit on people and continue to encourage passive eugenics.

First of all, its clear these dudes are just trying to get on. Which isn't fine. Ordinarily people will just shrug and encourage people to "get money", but we've reached this ridiculous 1980's-esque orgy of blind materialism and untalented starfucking careerists, so I've long ago abandoned the idea of humoring people to just "keep grindin'" and "make that money". Fuck that. Fuck you and fuck your open breezy-assed submission to free market capitalism and all the distraction and illusion of choice that comes with it. Even in a recession, things aren't nearly as bad as they have been in the past, so continued efforts to peddle yourself and suck industrial Satan's throbbing dickclit for some Black Rob shine (i.e., like 5 minutes). So the constant excuse that "I'm just starting a movement and making money" doesn't mean shit. That line of thought makes all those involved cheap mindless whores, not businessmen and artists. The revulsion from this only comes from the huge mass of people trying to get on in some way. Competitive world aside, not everyone needs to be shopping beats and trying to model. Some people are just untalented and the sooner someone crushes their aspirations and returns them to the dredges of the night shift at the Flatbush Popeye's Chicken, the better for society, the entertainment industry, and by extension, Palestine and fat mother Gaia.

Eschewing trying to formulate any defense of supposed gay looking/dressing/acting behavior within hip-hop and the black community, the simple question to pose to Japcity and Thug Slaughter Force (fuck is this, the A-Team?) is: "Why the fuck do you care about what somebody else does?"

Its a basic question that none of these people can really ask right. To prescribe one mode of behavior, one idea of masculinity, one idea of dress and speech for all black men is to be behaving like a dictator and appointing yourself to apparently know what's best for everyone. Which, from the cliched '04 Lil'Jon beat and lack of rhyming skill, these dudes are the last people who should tell anyone what's proper.

They deny this has anything to do with homophobia, and that's true. This is pretty much heterosexism, and the lamest form since its not even perceived homsexuality people are railing against, its retro clothing. People are getting hissy fits over clothing. Clothing that is mostly copied from the 80's anyway, so to declare "tight" (really just form-fitting) clothes and wearing colors instead of looking like a bum "not hip-hop" means you never really understood the concept of hip-hop in the first place.

The "No Tight Clothes" campaign is their latest idea in a decade of trying to make it in the rap game.

Why is it that the motherfuckers bitching about what is and isn't hip-hop are usually untalented? I know that, for the most part, this decade you could throw a bottle of Alize at the McDonald's dollar menu and hit 50 cats who claim to be "old school 50 crossed with Lupe Fiasco and 2Pac", but its fatiguing to see that the attitude doesn't seem to be getting any better.

There's a part of Black on Both Sides where Mos paraphrases a quote and says something to the effect that "However hip-hop is doing is how we as a people are doing". By the looks of it, despite the weirdness and degrees of freedom that have come from hipster revivals and Afro-Punk and etc the last couple of years, you still have the mangy failures of the black community talking sideways as if they had any idea what real manhood was. Worst of all, they're proliferating the weird transgressive conservatism that seems to be pervasive in mainstream black America.

"Where'd you get that shirt from?" yells Elijah Bilal, sitting outside Lalove Uniform on Fulton Street. "Bring me one!" the 40-year-old adds, and then offers a reporter his own observation about the direction of hip-hop attire: "The tight clothes—what, the boys is gay now? Boys walking around thinking they girls, girls walking around thinking they boys . . . No wonder all the girls are dating girls—because the boys are gay!"

And Bilal isn't alone in his analysis. "I like that shirt," says a 28-year-old NYPD officer on foot who didn't want to be named. "This movement of everyone wearing tight-fitting clothes—it's not nice."

...Blanco, for his part, insists that "it's not a gay-bashing movement." On the other hand, he added, "if you are homosexual, you are not gangsta. There's nothing gangster about being homosexual."

-Quoted for maximum failure.

There's two things wrong with the last quote from Blanco, besides being cliches constantly regurgitated whenever anyone is called on this shit. One is that being gay isn't gangsta. Well, one, who still cares about what is construed as being gangsta? Besides being a nebulous concept that was never defined and since when does being what your average hoodrat or GED/Jobcore case considers "gangsta" matter outside of the projects or hood or prescribe some concept of achievement?

Also, there's the whole "being gay isn't gangsta" thing. Well, seeing as the definition of gangsta involves cliches like "not giving a fuck" and "not backing down" and occasionally fucking someone up, I'd say your local black drag queen is tougher than your average Red Hook junior high dropout. But they wouldn't know that because that lack of awareness is what being ignorant is all about. Furthermore, the extension always is "gays have no place in hip-hop". Well, I'd say considering prison culture and the prominence of gays in fashion, it has huge influence, not even to address musical contributions of people both closeted (Busta Rhymes) and out (Man Parrish). And whatever happened to being inclusive? Shit is global and multi-ethnic and its hypocritical to claim that someone can't be part of a musical genre considering history. Shit, there's plenty of gay rappers, and in twenty years, they're be a decent one to surely shut up all the naysayers.

"You walk in urban communities [like] Harlem, Brooklyn, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and you see these young people walking around with pants sagging way down below their ass cheeks and underwear showing—what are you selling? That's much more homoerotic than fitted jeans," says Terrance Dean, author of Hiding in Hip Hop: On the Down Low in the Entertainment Industry—from Music to Hollywood, a book that electrified the music industry when it was published last month and hinted at the homosexuality of numerous unnamed music figures.

"It just so happens that heterosexual people are always emulating gay style," Dean says. "Most stylists are gay," and, he points out, those styles then make their way from international runways to inner- city neighborhoods. "I don't think it necessarily correlates with people being gay or feminine," he adds. "I think it's just fashion and hip-hop go hand in hand."

But he doesn't share TSF's fashion sense: "It's about time that people started wearing clothes that fit."

I always find it funny how much black America is associated with Democrats considering how conservative or alternatively materialistic is can be. Here's the thing. Until you start taping Noah's Arc to watch with your boyfriend in a post-gape cuddle session as you plan your next circuit party while quoting Paris Is Burning, you aren't gay. A culture and subculture can adopt aesthetics, mannerisms and etc into it, but that doesn't necessarily change that thing. Society has always been fluid, which is why the whole shitfit about Cam wearing pink and purple (more the latter, since dark purple represent royalty, not Santorum)was pathetic. If we start concretely assigning colors and etc. to gender and sexual orientation, you're limiting the possibilities of what people can do and be and forcing people to accept your definitions rather than their own, which never turns out well.

Is it really bothering dudes that people are walking around looking like Saul Williams or the Cool Kids? Yes, I think man purses are dumb, but that's because I think women's purses are equally as useless. Bad jokes are one thing and aren't really a concern, but to be so virulent and catch feelings over what someone else is wearing is just as fucking retarded as Kia Shine bragging about spending close to two grand on a pair of shoes and one pair of jeans.

Kinfolk_kia_shine-krispy-xvid-2007-dynasty
Uploaded by LIMIT-AR

I'm signing off when someone successfully promotes education as "for faggot ass niggas".

Oh, and "no homo"*.



*"No homo" is easily from 2000/2001 and remember dudes stopped using it in my high school around 11th grade, and then all of a sudden all of America knows about it. Weird.

Favorite Album From Each Year of My Life

Before I get back into my own faggotry, Joey's list convinced me to ride on the Weiss auto-musical phenomenon and notate the albums, per year I was alive, not counting Dec '86 when I was conceived, that make up the internet's number 2 greatest mulatto music blogger.

1987: Boogie Down Productions- Criminal Minded
1988: Pixies- Surfer Rosa
1989: Pixies- Doolittle
1990: Entombed- Left Hand Path
1991: De La Soul- De La Soul Is Dead
1992: The Prodigy- The Experience
1993: Wu-Tang Clan- Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)
1994: Notorious B.I.G.- Ready To Die
1995: Raekwon- Only Built For Cuban Linx
1996: Ghostface Killah- Ironman
1997: Jay-Z - In My Lifetime Vol. 1
1998: Refused- The Shape of Punk to Come
1999: Mos Def- Black on Both Sides
2000: Badly Drawn Boy- The Hour of Bewilderbeast
2001: Converge - Jane Doe
2002: Clinic- Walking With Thee
2003: Three 6 Mafia- Da Unbreakables
2004: Death From Above 1979- You're A Woman, I'm A Machine
2005: Kanye West- Late Registration
2006: Converge- No Heroes
2007: UGK- Underground Kingz
2008: Danity Kane- Welcome To The Dollhouse

A couple of interesting things- 1989, 1991, 1994, 2000-2004, 2006 and 2007 were hard to pick a favorite because there were a bunch of albums that were fucking amazing. Also, 2005 had no great rap album besides Late Registration, which is interesting in retrospect since 2007 and 2006 had a bunch of great ones and the public discussion on the creative death of rap started around 2006. In fact, 2007 and 2002 were probably the hardest years and I had to listen to UGK, Devin, Kanye and Battles all at once to choose my favorite album of last year.

Since the tie-breakers were based on musical preference, doing this was very informative about what kind of sounds and genres I tend to prefer on gut reaction, as opposed to seriously and objectively weighing the albums out. So really, this becomes "the albums that I'd rather listen to at any given time than the other albums that came out that year that were great".