THE MARTORIALIST: Turn da korner

Tuesday, 15 June 2010

Turn da korner

Pill - On Da Korner

As well as popularizing an excellent piece of rap slanguage, Pill's Trap Goin' Ham might also go down as an important ATLanta single of 2009 since it's a pretty great song, and I relatively fond of his freestyle over I Got 5 On It (though, as Puffy proved, literally anyone can rhyme over I Got 5 On It and make it sound as majestic as Once Upon A Time In The Projects or Sideways) but he's really exhausted this whole "yo, check out at these forlorn looking black ppl inside/outside of dirty houses" video trick of his with this latest viral single On Da Korner, huh? I have gross, bedsit dwelling scumbag friends-of-friends who use their kitchen sinks as toilets and their toilets as ashtrays, and you're tryna show me how ghetto you are in your 5-room bungalow because your stove has a few gravy stains on it?

I find his rhyming about trappin' ad nausuem terribly irksome too, because even The Clipse can't get away with that anymore when they're far more talented and charismatic than Pill could ever hope to be, and I type this as someone who's never been able to work out which one is Malice and which one is Pusha-T. So many new coke-rappers fail to realise that selling crack is only a minor tenet in the blueprint of Gang$ta-Rap behind rhyming about power, guns, money, women, their mothers/grandmothers, cars, clothes, and food, combined with regional idioms, tasteless humour, and a little redemptive soul-searching if they can pull it off without coming off like too Ned Flanders at the annual family campfire sing-a-long. Shouldn't real Gangsta-Rappers be rhyming about selling Crystal Meth and bent prescriptions for Oxycontin or Xanax in 2010 anyway?

And then there's matter of the likes of Pill and the usually dependable All $tar suddenly rapping over samples first used on old Q.B shit by Kool G. Rap, Cormega, and, in this instance, Tragedy Khadafi; I know Robbie over at Unkut has been incolsolable since Killa Sha went bye-bye last year, but I can't imagine he's gonna start featuring southern rappers just because there's currently a void in the market for generic, retro Q.B beats rap. At least not while Meyhem Lauren is alive, anyway.

When we discuss Boosie we must now talk about him in the past tense as he's never getting out of prison since the po-leese have started building a solid case that he was behind Nu$$ie's murder, but there was a southern rapper who knew how to make Gangsta-Rap which faithfully honoured all of its traditions as he offered us countless entertaining viral 'hood videos with gimmicks like funerals, Adidas sweatsuits, canary-yellow cars, riding in the front-basket of a bike like Snoop in the Who Am I (What's My Name) clip, genuinely attractive hoodrats in hotpants who you might possibly chug one out to, and his own undercurrent of looking like a nasty little hobgoblin to starve off the ennui of jaded Rap-nerds who've spent far too much time on Youtube and WorldStarHipHop watching cheaply made rap videos the past few years :

Lil' Boosie ft. Lil' Trill - Back In The Day