In 2021 it's vaguely possible some young upstart will appear in an issue of Cahiers du Cinéma with the hypothesis that Paul W.S. Anderson & Milla Jovovich's Resident Evil franchise was the noughties equivalent of Jerry Lewis' fifties oeuvre which CdC championed back in the sixties, (though, from here on in the series should be referred to as a trilogy since Resident Evil : Apocalypse is just so awful that the only sensible option is to just pretend it doesn't exist.)
But why wait another decade to kickstart your admiration at the behest of a Frenchman when you can cosy up to the franchise which gave us Milla moving with the grace of Ginger Rogers as she kicks zombie ass yet still exhibiting a brooding existential presence similar to Alain Delon in Le Samourai, and the unforgettable sight of Ashanti getting pecked to death by mutant crows who'd been gauging themselves on infected flesh inside a bus right here, right now? It was that noted cinematic expert Chino XL who first brought the narrative arc of black ppl in horror movies to our attention back in 1996, but the grissly death woven around Ashanti's Nurse Betty character in Resident Evil 3 : Extinction was the sort of career move nobody foresaw when she was breaking records in 2002 & 2003 as the first artist since The Beatles to have three songs in the Billboard Hot 100 in the same week with her throwback Uptown-era Mary J. r&b jams, and movies should always be about surprises, right?
Our fictitious Cahiers du Cinéma scribe of the future might point out that this set-piece was such a blatantly obvious homage to The Birds that you'd think it was directed by Hitchcock's most famous imitator Brian De Palma rather than Milla J's husband and Highlander 2 : The Quickening's director - and we use that term loosely here given that it's still one of the most incoherent movies we've ever seen - Russell Mulcahy, but it's a jawdroppingly brilliant mise-en-scène that's executed to perfection. Still, since this is a blog which is primarily concerned with rap related minutiae the question that's begging an answer is this : Where the hell were Cadillac Tah and Black Child when Ashanti really needed them?
BONUS BEATS :
Ashanti ft. Ghostface - Rain On Me remix (2003)
If one of rap's purposes is to make you feel like you're standing under a waterfall in a linen suit getting blown by a mermaid (and even it's rowdiest practitioners like Mystikal and M.O.P have joints which serve this purpose), then the modus operandi of rap & bullshit jams like the Rain On Me remix with Ghostface is to convince the listener that they're standing under that very same waterfall but wearing a pair of XXXL dungarees with one strap hanging off screaming "ALL WE NEED IS A STAGE, GOD!!!" up at the Heavens. This was far preferable to that official remix with Charli Baltimore, Ja and him from The Outlawz with the missing teeth.
This was gonna be another one of those posts about some AZ songs which've never quite been embraced by the internet's bosom beyond hardcore S.O.S.A fans, but after writing about how he's not really allowed to get tetchy when Azie accuses him of swagger-jacking when his Gangsta Shit joint on Doo Wop's The State Vs. Doo Wop album is the namesake of MobStyle's most anthemic choon, and how it'd be unfair to chop Papoose out of Knowledge Is Freedom from the N4L mixtape when it's necessary to the equilibrium of New York rap that both rappers appear on a song together where AZ doesn't hilariously pilfer Cam's Confessions Of Fire-era flow like he did on Thug Connection (plus *whisper it* I actually quite like Papoose's verse on there) I decided to scrap the idea and threw together a compilation of lesser-spotted AZ cuts instead, including those two joints, a few songs I've posted before and a bunch of other stuff; all of which should fit on a blank CD-R.
Sending this one out to all y'all still unconverted and casual AZs listeners to familiarize you with some of his more slept-on moments, so we have original versions, remixes, songs from the independent S.O.S.A EP, mixtape joints, songs from DJ compilations, songs from his own Anthology compilations, cuts from officially unreleased albums, cameo appearances, songs from mixtapes & street-albums, and acapella viral video commercials ripped straight off the 'tube. Basically songs from everywhere but his official canonical albums, which are the ones he shot videos for if I use the same criteria he applied in some WSHH interview where he was quizzed about the difference between the Doe Or Die 15th Anniversary album and his glut of dodgy indie releases throughout 2008 and 2009. Sex, cars, clothes, money and murder, soldiers - this is for your server :
1. AZ - Your World Don't Stop original version (1995)
2. AZ ft. Raekwon - Doe Or Die RZA remix (1995)
3. The Firm - La Familia original version w/ Cormega (1996)
4. The Firm ft. Half-A-Mill - Firm Biz remix (1997)
5. AZ - Sunshine (1998)
6. AZ - Platinum Bars (2000)
7. Doo Wop ft. AZ - Gangsta Shit (2003)
8. AZ ft. Ma$e - We Gon' Make It Right (2004)
9. AZ - I am AZ (2004)
10. AZ - Omega (2004)
11. AZ ft. Nas - Serious (2004)
12. Begetz ft. Half-A-Mill & AZ - Cold Outside (2005)
13. Styles P ft. AZ - The Hardest Part 1 (2006)
14. Statik Selektah ft. AZ & Cormega - No Holding Back (2007)
15. AZ - Doin' That Memphis Sessions remix (2007)
16. Foxy Brown ft. AZ - Too Real (2008)
17. AZ - Burglar Rap Intro (2008)
18. AZ ft. Papoose - Knowledge Is Freedom (2008)
19. AZ - Live Your Life (2009)
20. AZ - Hustle In My Blood (2009)
21. DJ Kay Slay ft. Ghostface, AZ & Raekwon - See The Light (2010)
22. AZ - Doe Or Die 15th Anniversary Commercial (2010)
Ayo, you might see us in designer underwear, bloggin' in a recliner leather chair with minders everywhere, and when we postin' shit up the minors stop and stare, but we just spotted this Canadian TV performance of Horse & Carriage in the Youtube Suggestions bar of the Ma$e live medley on Teen Summit video that's currently everywhere :
Oh, jou don' know that Fat Cam and Jimmy doing some synchronized pattycaking is a matter for much discussion, but here at The Martorialist offices the most pertinent talking point has been Jim's 3/4+½ nu-metal cuffed jean shorts which can finally set the scene for an epic Martorial Elegance showdown at noon we've been waiting to take place for over 5 years now; Michael Buffer's currently recovering from throat cancer and swimming in the $400 million he's made from licencing, so we had to rope in Mystikal for this one instead. Our shorts tinted out, yours see-through - we see you :
Mystikal - Ready To Rumble (2000)
In the left corner we have Capo representing Harlem in the Fieldy from KoRN cuffed jhorts that are bigger than a Sumo; in the right corner we have V.I.Prodigy from the Outta Control remix video representing th-th-th-the 'Bridge in some eastern European builder during the summer months cuffed jhorts which won't let ya mouth getcha in shit ya legs can't run from :
Well, no, because Beelow's from Baton Rogue even though the song features Juvenile, but this gloriously cheap 'n' nasty posse cut is like what would emerge from Wyatt in Weird Science's en-suite bathroom if he and Gary had fed their magical computer a bunch of NOLA related data including crucial joints by Lil' Slim, the Hot Boy$, the Miller Brothers and Mystikal on another stormy night :
Beelow ft. Lil' Soulja, Juvenile & Thugg Addict - Big Body remix (From Ballaholic; 2000)
How do metal dudes even have the sheer barefaced cojones to brag about their favourite genre being the most hardbody music in America today when Dimebag Darrell died after taking three shots to the dome yet rappers like Beelow, Azie from MobStyle and 50 have all been shot in the head multiple times and lived? Fuck outta here, heshers.
Still waiting for an MP3 of my Boy Looka Here of 2010 nine months after it popped up online because this version is clean and everytime I try to snag the audio from Youtube it won't rip the entire song for some reason. Factor in that I haven't really liked any other Zed Zilla songs I've heard and that there's some other rapper called Zilla whose songs/mixtapes regularly apperar in my DirtyGloveBastard feed and it feels like I'm being taunted for enjoying a joint by Yo Gotti's weed carrier so much.
Speaking of being mocked for digging songs which only currently exist on Youtube, my bi-monthly check of teh Amazon MP3 store as part of my odyssey to see if Young Bleed's Put Ya Stamp On It has turned up as a good quality MP3 yet yielded an "OH SHIT!!!" moment this week involving another song featuring Bleed from 2006 which could only be found in low bit rate quality on Youtube that I've posted about before when Down Home by Big Mike & Six-2 featuring Young Bleed appeared on a compilation called Lethal Ent. Greatest Hits Volume 1. I paid my money only for it to turn out to be a godamn clean version - this can't be life. The song obviously exists as a dirty version because the video isn't edited so is it really too complicated a task to put that version on your fucking compilation, Lethal Entertainment?
If this weren't shiesty enough, the compilation is also billed as featuring Another 2006 Youtube exclusive in I'z A Playa by Nephew & Pimp C, but Pimp's verse has been completely severed from the song. Big Mike should really firebomb the Lethal Entertainment office like he did to one of J. Prince's houses when he was beefing with Rap-A-Lot back in 2000.
I'm still dilly-dallying and deliberating on whether to check out that AG Everything's Berri album from last year which some of my favourite rap bloggaz have been enthusing about due to briefly hearing a song from it where AG had a banausic Ced Gee on The 4 Horsemen/MF Grimm since 2004 type of flow going on over some bogstandard production which made his outing with Brit' trip-hop dullard Aim sound as grandiose as Spit, but I'm hoping that song can be written off as a minor blip and there'll be at least 6 joints as good as Live Hard from that last Show & AG EP which they released under the ludicrous moniker of The Show & A Experience back in 2007 on there whenever I do get around to investigating it.
Show & AG - Live Hard (2007)
Highlight : Andre the Giant's professedly effortless flow. Low point : Rodney "Showbiz" Lemay's ad-libbing; You're no Kid Capri, Pete Rock or Puffy, bruv.
In the meantime I've been reacquainting myself with Showbiz's totally forgotten Street Talk producer-album he dropped in 2005. This was released when Show was trying to diversify the Diggin' In The Crates brand with his ill-fated Wild Life Entertainment label who included perennial D.I.T.C weed carriers The Ghetto Dwellas and Bronx young bucks like Milano and A. Bless as its roster, so Street Talk is a 50/50 ratio of them and your veteran D.I.T.C stalwarts like AG, Fat Joe and O.C, the reused Big L and Big Pun verses you'd come to expect and a remix of an M.O.P 12" which wasn't even as good as the merely decent original. Here's my 5 choice cuts from the album :
A. Bless - That's Bless (2001)
Highlight : "I need a mami for the don with no kids/and I love 'em in white thongs with no skids!" Low point : The song was 4 years old and had already appeared on the D.I.T.C Presents.. Wild Life EP from 2001.
Fat Joe & Party Arty - On My Way (2004)
Highlight : Show's take on the then de rigueur chipmunked up soul-sample joint template turns out as a standard hard-nosed D.I.T.C banger where Party Arty namechecks Parker Lewis Can't Lose. Low point : Would've personally preferred D. Flow was on this instead of Fat Joe because I could've done with some more Ghetto Dwellas joints like Make It Official or Who's The Dirtiest?
Party Arty - Show & Prove (2005)
Highlight : Arty suddenly breaking into an interpolation of the Fiesta remix hook towards the end of the song. Low point : There weren't enough instances of Arty rapping solo over good production so this should've been longer than 02:59.
Fat Joe & Party Arty - My Bad (2005)
Highlight : Fat Joe kinda rips this, so tally it up with On My Way, AG's Underground Life, Who Got Gunz, the original Ahmed produced version of Best Behavior, Lean Back and Ja's New York as the only noughties tracks he should've been allowed to rap on. Low point : Weirdly, the album version of this is edited for cursing when there was a perfectly fine dirty version on the 12", albeit with a moderately different beat.
AG, Ruck & Ghetto Dwellas - You Ain't A Killer (2005)
Highlight : Arty insinuating that he's had carnal knowledge of celebrity females as varied as Tia & Tamera and Christina Aguilera. Low point : Unfortunately not that Ruck.
Someone ID me the artiste and the title of this absurdly erotic song, puhleez. I'm assuming it's not actually called Use Me John, it's just that the Moxie Disco Edits label who put out the EP with this on a few years back in 2008 would generally issue the songs on their releases under pseudonyms because they were a bunch of bootlegging Borks from the Netherlands, as witnessed by the re-edit of Curtis Mayfield's What Is My Woman For? as Yes You May on the A side of the same 12" :
Unknown Artist - Use Me John (197?)
I can't quite parse whether this is song about Cunnilingus or the simple joys of losing one's body to the rhythm under the disco lights with a partner, but it doesn't really matter either way because I envision it as the de facto 70s porno soundtrack to an opening tracking shot of Vanessa Del Rio's arse in a pair of skin-tight Daisy Dukes walking down 42nd Street into a porno theater in where Ron Jeremy is sitting with a box of popcorn in his lap with a hole cut into it and his...
You get the picture. Use Me John's monolithic groove would sound pretty damn sweet with Camp Lo rapping about pearl necklaces over it, but, ultimately, I think its ideal home should have been as an interlude on a 90s Beatnuts album with snippets of XXXplicit Vanessa Del Rio dialogue carefully grated on top. Here's Vanessa looking sultry, vampish and ridiculously doable sometime in the early 80s before she went ham with cosmetic surgery. Shout outs to the woman who'd Lick dudes places other porn stars wouldn't dare put they faces :
Khayree ft. Mac Dre - Back 2 My Mission
(From The Blackalation; 1997)
We begin today by hopping in the DeLorean to zip back to the more innocent era of 1997 when wholeheartedly heterosexual west coast and southern gangsta-rappers could use the word cock as a euphemism for vagina without having to postfix it with a NO HOMO! ad lib. Scarface and Pimp C both ruled this roost in terms of sheer volume of AYO!-worthy quotables, but my personal favourite cock-er was Mac Dre, not least because he inspired message board threads like this, but also because his opening salvo of "woke up one morning about 6 o'clock/dick still smelling of spit and cock" from this cut from Khayree's The Blackalation (The World Is Yours) compilation inspires a dichotomy of impulses deep within my loins. Day-in-the-life-of Mac Dre narratives in the company of Khayree production is always a winning combination, especially when it's embellished with such piercing guitar, so just forget Hendrix, Clapton and whatshisface from Led Zeppelin because I want a west coast gangsta-rap guitar duel to the death between Khayree, Quik's string-plucker Robert Bacon and the James Jones fella that Mike Mosley & Sam Bostic used on the C-Bo and B-Legit joints they producer under the umbrella of Mobboss Productions.
Young Bleed - A Fool
(From Concentration Camp; 1997)
I mean, I like Young Bleed's one legitimate hit How Ya Do Dat with Master P and C-Loc, but I genuinely L-O-V-E the song that beget it, which is this solo Bleed cut from C-Loc's first Concentration Camp compilation that the grand imperial Percy Miller was so enamoured with he immediately signed Bleed to No Limit Records and had him rerecord it as a spruced-up posse track. Here on the less polished original version Bleed's hazy drawl is allowed to ramble freely for near-on 5 minutes without interuption and therein lay the problem with the No Limit roster featuring joints on My Balls And My Word like Bring The Noise : Bleed might have benefitted from rhyming over a beat which Craig B, KLC, Mo B. Dick and even Pimp C all had a hand in (it's hardly Stravinsky's Rite Of Spring in terms of composition so why it required 4 producers remains a mystery) but his voice just wasn't compatible with P's constipated URRGGHHHHH-ing and Mystikal's drill Sergeant barking. It ain't that easy to remain a No Limit soldier if you can't spazz out on a track with a voice which causes the listener to pull inadvertent vinegar-stroke expressions, as Bleed's spiritual heir Curren$y would also later find out.
Camp Lo - Material
(From Black Hollywood; 2007)
Wouldn't exactly say I'm a hollow shell of a human being too easily susceptible to the influence of rap music, but less than 24 hours after copping We Can't Be Stopped by the Geto Boys in 1991 I'd already re-christened our road the 5th Ward, dyed every denim item in my wardrobe purple, and had my nextdoor neighbour Julie shoot me in the eye with a catapult. Thankfully the influence of Camp Lo proved to be far less dangerous, even if I did waste away evenings looking up words which rhyme with Martini and spunk my student loan on leather bellbottoms and fake fur coats. As "women are shallow jezebels and evil sappers of your bank balance!!!" rap songs go this isn't as relatable as either Gold Digger by EPMD or KanYe, but who listens to Camp Lo for relatability anyway, especially when this might just be the only rap song ever with a replay of a sample that's actually better than the sample itself? I feel like I could take a bubble bath in this song and that's the desired effect of pretty much every great Camp Lo jam.
Yelawolf - Ride Down The Highway
(From Creek Water; 2005)
No jokes about why Yelawolf's cartoonist apparently thought he resembled Skinnyman with Bells Palsy back in 2005, plz. Right now in 2011 I'd describe Ride Down The Highway as the highlight of Yelawolf's answer to Eminem's Infinite due to those little details in the lyrics and that almost Flamenco guitar which worms its way into your brain, but by 2013 all blog reviews of rap songs will consist of screenshots of the best Youtube comment section blurb about said song. So, let's hop back in the DeLorean and set the controls for may 13th 2013 to see what the definitive take on the song will be then :
Can you believe that motherfucking Black Star are actually headlining over them, though? Even regardless of historical importance and quality of music, Rakim and De La have albums which did Thriller numbers whilst Black Star barely scraped to 2300 Jackson Street status.
Thankfully, a team equipped with stinkbombs and ripened fruit has been assembled to pelt messrs Def & Kweli as soon as they hit the stage and as I type this very sentence I'm in the process of fitting us out with disguises in the form of cut-out Eric B masks taken from the Don't Sweat The Technique video :
I ate Asparagus for lunch so the bottle of piss I'm currently in the process of filling up to throw at Kweli should reek to high heaven :
You don't have to speak just seek....and peep the technique
Straight out the fuckin' dungeons of the HHC vaults, courtesy of the Fat Lace crew circa april 1999. Click to resize, obv' :
BONUS RELATED BEATS :
"You know how it go Beatnuts representin' the funk since eighty-fo' Inhale, I smoke roaches with basketball coaches and stick my dillz in the cho chas
The Beatnuts - Sandwiches Part 2 (1994)
Officially unreleased treasure recorded between Intoxicated Demons and Street Level from the same EP that the classic 40 OZ with the same sample as Tribe's Steve Biko which briefly caused a little bad blood between the two groups came from.
Webbie ft. Lil' Phat & Birdman - Do It Bigger (From All Or Nothing; 2010)
This really should've featured some sort of Boosie vocals from the vaults, but Webbie pulling the same talking-to-someone-on-the-phone-rapping trick that Biggie used on Warning, my current favourite weedcarrier Lil' Phat continuing to sweep through Trill Entertainment posse cuts as the key supporting performer like he's some sort of John Cazale of Louisiana rap, and the surprise inclusion of Baby will suffice quite nicely instead. If Trill's owners Turk and Mell should happen to stumble upon this post then I'd just like to point out that I'm posting this to promote your shit, so plz don't have me shot in the head like you did to Beelow when you caught him bootlegging Boosie's albums after his rap career had withered.
How did I previously miss this? The best song I've heard all week (though I've yet to listen to $tarlito's new @ War With Myself mixtape which dropped last night and features a song called Lil' Boosie Out on it) and it's great to hear some fresh Bad Azz, but this video is also pretty fascinating since it includes 2 key players in Boosie's murder trial in Michael "Marlo Mike" Louding, the kid alleged to have killed the rapper Nu$$ie for Boosie who then implicated him in that murder and the murder of some dude called Terry Boyd after getting bagged for another 4 murders, and Darryl “Bleek” Milton (mostly known for being the guy riding the bike with Boosie in the basket from the Top To The Bottom video), Boosie's cousin and best friend who the Marlo Mike kid also murdered because, well, if you read into it a little deeper, this whole sordid affair is way more entangled and complicated than the standard headline of Boosie merely putting a hit out on Nu$$ie because Nu$$ie was rumoured to have killed the Ivy "Lil' Ivy" Smith rapper Boosie always mentions in his rhymes (and then using a sample of him on his album intro) before adopting the name Nu$$ie Bad Azz and talking sideways about Boosie in videos like this.
I mean, sure, Heavy metal might have had Vince Neil from Motley Crue killing that dude from from Hanoi Rocks when he was driving drunk in the 80s and Scandinavian black metallers slaughtering each other in the 90s, but since Wes Borland from Limp Bizkit ain't never catch no bodies the genre really needs to step its game up nowadays if it wants to be considered as dangerous a career option as rap again. Anyway, this video may possibly end up inadvertently pwning Boosie in his trial because the D.A of Louisiana are already using the Marlo Mike kid's appearances in other Boosie videos and the "Marlo Mike in the backstreet begging for a body" line from Lime Life as evidence in their case against him. Let's hope Beanie Sigel or Billy Danze never go on trial for murder or the D.A will have an absolute field day with their respective lyrics.
This time, issue # 2. The Beastie Boys haven't prospered this long without knowing exactly who their audience consists of, and so every issue of Grand Royal was filled accordingly with adverts for skate brands such as Vans, Droors and Supreme, punk-related labels like Dischord, Touch & Go, Revelation and Sub Pop, and your token middlebrow rap releases by The Pharcyde and pretty much everyone who ever put an album out via Mo' Wax.
But amongst them all there was this "WTF is some rap for actual black ppl doing in here?" moment with a full page advert for releases on Khayree's Young Black Brotha Records imprint by Ray Luv and Young Lay :
And this brings us to a question that's been troubling me for donkey's years now : What was best item of outerwear in a Young Black Brotha Records video? Here at The Martorialist we're torn between Ray Luv's sheepskin coat in the All About My Fetti promo and Ant Dog's tan duffle coat in the Definition Of A Hustla clip because, well, who the hell expects to see mid-nineties Bay Area gangsta-rappers looking like John Motson and Paddington Bear :
BONUS BEATS :
Mac Dre - I'm N Motion (1993)
That Grand Royal advert actually wasn't the first time that seemingly disparate worlds of Khayree and the Beastie Boys had collided because a couple of years earlier Khayree sampled Slow And Low on this, the greatest rap song recorded over the phone from prison (well, from Fresno County Jail) ever. Having said that, I wish Dre & Khayree had re-recorded this when he got released in 1997 because he rips it for nearly 6 minutes straight but most rap fans won't listen to it because they're pseudo-audiophiles who want proper vocals recorded through microphones in, like, real studios. This ain't Tubular Bells by Mike Oldfield or Emerson, Lake & Palmer spending months multitracking kazoo solos through the Alpha 60 computer from Alphaville, cuzz.
Here's 5 songs that every self-respecting rap fan should have in their arsenal of musik.
G-Unit - True Loyalty (2003)
Thug lovin' indeed. Essentially, a 2pac-inspired homoerotic bromance between 50 & Banks in the vein of Jay & Bleek on Coming Of Age or AZ & Nas on The Essence which gives way to one of the main reasons why some of us have been cheerleading for T.O.N.Y ever since the Best Of Tony Yayo mixtape was released during his incarceration that I'm posting because the internet is now finally starting to become stricken with Yayo fever. I still occassionally wake up in a cold sweat cursing myself that I didn't get a picture of the fat white-trash dude I saw with a full Get Rich Or Die Trying back-tattoo a couple of summers back for a Martorial Elegance post.
Yelawolf - Beer Buzz (2008)
The whole concept of musical guilty pleasures is pretty silly unless you're a member of the Aryan Brotherhood risking ostracization for having Buck Tha Devil by Da Lench Mob on your iPod, but I should probably feel a few twinges of embarrassment at liking pre-Trunk Muzik Yelawolf in frat-rap mode over All I Wanna Do by Sheryl Crow on his Beer Buzz cut as much as I do. This is, after all, a song I prefer to the quintessential Yelawolf joints from the same period like Boyz In The Woodz and Brown Sugar; a song I always end up listening at least 4 or 5 times in a row; and a song which once caused me to slip down an escalator when I was shimmying to the "we are drinkin' beer at noon on tueday" refrain at the end and misjudged my footing. Upon further reflection, that Sheryl Crow joint is clearly better than the entire career of Bruce Springsteen as far as the blue-collar Americana singer-songwriter shtick goes and Beer Buzz is precisely 87% better than 85% of what will consist of Yelawolf's Interscope debut.
Casual - Classic Material (2003)
Man, I always foolishly ran hand-in-hand with the narrative that after Fear Itself Casual became an artist we could only think about in terms of singles because his He Think He Raw and Truck Driver long players lacked any kind of knock factor other than the cuts taken from his 12"s on Stimulated Records until Boothe pointed out that the former does indeed have a few other joints, particularly Studio D. This then lead to a re-investigation of the latter which revealed that Classic Material is precisely what it says on the tin and almost as good as Turkey And Dressing since Cas' spits that "technique magnifique" of his and, with an arpeggio of sinewy G-Funk synths, a robotic cartoon bassline and all manners of other dramatic electronic stabs, it sounds closer to something you'd have heard on E-40's Breakin' News album than some boring retro noughties record by a past-it Hiero member.
Soulja Boy ft. Gucci Mane & Yo Gotti - Shopping Spree (2008)
This first and - still - best of Soulja Boy's forays into PG13 ATL trap-rap where, unlike his other handful of songs with Gucci Mane and/or Yo Gotti, he's the song's main attraction. Because rap is currently bogged down with rappers who make their success sound like a chore (Eminem, Wayne, KanYe, Drake, B.o.B etc) and the still lingering Jay-Z somehow making bragging about his immense wealth and jet-setting lifestyle sound as mundane and irritating as a co-worker's recount of their weekend's drinking in a provincial pub on a bleary-eyed monday morning, we should be thankful to Soulja for the wide-eyed delight in his voice when he raps about copping Lamborghinis and items of home furnishing which cost over half a million dollars. It's also worth mentioning that the kid is quietly morphing into one of this blog's most beloved rapitalists : he's a ridiculously wealthy self-made entrepreneur with a penchant for grunting, chanted choruses, and blatantly pilfering the nuances of his contemporaries who's now also making in-roads into the realm of movies, so all we need now is the revelation that he he has 2 rapping brothers and his transformation into the new Percy Miller is complete.
M.O.P - What The Fuck? (2004)
The year, 2004 when M.O.P were around 20 months deep into their tenure at Roc-A-Fella; the album, the bonus disc of rare & unreleased odds 'n' sods on the Marxmen Cinema indie album they'd tossed out via Koch as The Marxmen to express their displeasure at not receiving a release date writ large; the mission statement, "let's try and top Code Of The Streets and AZ's I Don't Give A Fuck as far as flagrant pitch-perfect Primo facsimiles go"; the song, a total success because this shit went harder than everything on the first disc including the actual Primo joint and squared up toe-to-toe with such 10/10 Mash Out classics as Downtown Swinga and Half And Half that it found itself amongst on the bonus disc. Anybody fancy helping me sacrifice Termanology and the Nick Javas cracker (Ayo Intuition - dude has totally swagger-jacked your image, son) that Primo did a song for last year to the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl in a trade off for one last M.O.P & Primo banger in the vein of this or Stick To Ya Gunz?
