Choppa's definitive moment of the noughties

You may have noticed that I'm obsessed with the sort of rap minutiae nobody perfectly balanced could possibly care about, so the other night I spent a half hour on Youtube fruitlessly investigating all the Choppa and Da Band singles in an attempt to find the moment where Nardwuar alleged that Choppa inadvertently invented the cooking dance, but the exercise wasn't a complete washout because it did remind me that Choppa was once involved in a song which qualifies as a minor-classic, and thus rivals his WSHH dis clip to Ness AKA the Choppa's suit video in terms of historical magnitude. When British boxers try their hand at music, you get Frank Bruno ad libbing on charity single posse-cuts with Samantha Fox, Bruno Brooks, and Liz Kershaw; but when American boxers dip their gloves into the world of music you end up with austere N.O gangsta-rap over ripples of sub-zero temperature synths and guest verses from Baton Rogue's two finest rappers like this joint from the group who consisted of Roy Jones Jr, our hero Choppa, and the other former No Limit rapper Magic :

Body Head Bangerz ft. Young Bleed & Lil' Boosie - I Smoke, I Drank (2004)



Well, sorta. The story goes that I Smoke, I Drank started out initially as a remix to Boosie & Webbie's Do It Big with Young Bleed on local mixtapes/radio around New Orleans before an extended version with Magic appeared. Roy Jones then copped the rights to the song, and used it for the Volume One album by their group Body Head Bangerz. If that wasn't quite convoluted enough, the song was then remixed again with Bleed and Boosie being replaced by Choppa and the YoungBloodZ and that version became a hit in late 2004. I've never been able to find the Do It Big remix online so I'm not sure if Webbie rapped on it or if there were any other discernible differences between it and I Smoke, I Drank, but this incarnation of the song goes hard enough and possibly captures the last time the two Concentration Camp rappers Bleed and Boosie appeared together on the same joint, so it's basically the rap equivalent of Herzog and Kinski's Cobra Verde or the last game Pires played for Arsenal, only without the indignity of being substituted before the twenty minute mark after Lehmann got sent off for barging into Eto'o in the eighteenth minute.

Anyway, I freely admit I've not done enough mouse-work to be familiar with Choppa's full discography because I'm not quite that sad, but as someone who watched every episode of Making Da Band and who's recently downloaded both Choppa's No Limit albums to check out the Curren$y appearances on his sophomore effort Straight From The N.O, I feel I can tell you with a modicum of authority that this song probably remains unsurpassed in Choppa's consequential recording career to this point.