Martin & $hort

Remeber when I proffered Django Kill... If You Live, Shoot! up as an example of a great lost movie I'd wanted to see for years which (initially) left me slightly disappointed due to the mythologizing of it into something else entirely which had gone on in my head beforehand? You probably don't because, other than the hits which came from dudes Googling pix of Ice-T's wifey Coco to fap over, this blog had about 10 regular readers before the Best Singles Of The Noughties, Animal Farm/Bodil Joensen, Frank Vs. Immortal Technique, and The Quest To Find Mello-T posts late last year, but it was the same strand of letdown I'd felt 8 years earlier with those early Too $hort independent tapes I'd read about for years in HHC and The Source after I'd finally downloaded them off Soulseek in 2001 : it's not that they were rubbish, it's just I had my own long-held notions of what early Too $hort would sound like and the reality didn't tally up with that. The problem lay squarely with my own confused expectations and not the music itself because songs like Coke Dealers were great, but $hort must've subconciously felt my distress since his Burn Rubber track a couple of years later in 2003 was my fantasy of a pre-Born To Mack Todd $haw song realised to an absolute tee :

Too $hort - Burn Rubber



You chaps who go ham for the Premier remix of In The Trunk have always baffled me in the same way that people who buy prunes with the stones in leave me all like "these fucken' guys" because $hort-Dog over a Primo beat which was a dry-run for/a throwaway from Daily Operation is a combination that's just all sorts of wrong. Burn Rubber, though, yeah - that's what an east coast friendly Too $hort record which still retains its scent as being from the Bay should ideally sound like, innit? I specifically remember Westwood once playing it before State Property's When You Hear That, but it sounds best alongside them '03 - '06 Bay classics like Hyphy, Feelin' Myself, Super-Hyphie, & Tell Me When To Go, and it's also a song I can comfortably air-scratch to in public without feeling like a peckerwood extra in a Dilated Peoples video. It reads a tad unlikely in text, I know, but it's better to be Danny Bonaduce in them old Dre videos than it is to be A-Ron in Non Phixion's Rock Stars promo.

Please don't think that I'm not all over them old 75 Girls Records And Tapes era $hort releases like Terry Richardson in a room full of naive 18 year old Beckys from Ohio desperate for a break into the modelling industry, though, dawgz. Both Girl (Cocaine) and Players are classic singles which are as important to the evolution of rap in 1985 as La Di Da Di, I Can't Live Without My Radio, or P.S.K were, and $hort pioneered various rote rap paradigms such as equating the 'hood to the wild west and eulogizing big booty bitches in his early independent days. I'm fairly certain this is the first recorded rap song dedicated to the subject of the derriere :

Too $hort - Invasion Of The Flat Booty Bitches



If any Morrissey fans who stumbled onto this blog after the last post are still reading, let me just point out here that Invasion Of The Flat Booty Bitches isn't a new Moz song protesting about the increasing amount of Oriental knocking shops in Manchester, but an early song by Oakland rapper Too $hort about hoes with behinds which are flatter than a Jeff Hardy shoot or any Dr Dre beat from the last 5 years. While Morrissey probably isn't too keen on them fooken' foreign lasses moving to Salford, $hort almost leans into Captain Save-A-Hoe territory here with his lenient attitude to white chicks naturally built like Olive Oil in the posterior department and his far less forgiving stance towards the "black as tar" women of his own race who were born with Paris Hilton pancake buttocks. Kind've a weird position for $hort to adopt there, but it's probably better to find his sympathies resting with Jack Tweed or those Lord Melchett in Blackadder II-ish fawning male fruitfly Captains in that Sady Doyle response to Dom P's IDCIYW, IW post about her than it is to find them being shared by Jim Davidson and Ron Atkinson, eh?