Great Atlanta rap songs of the modern era which sound like they were designed to soundtrack shanty town shootouts in the mythical blaxploitation spaghetti westerns that exist only in my head: Future's Sh!t, Migos' Hannah Montana, Ralo's Calm Down Ralo.
"If he come around with them chains on
I bet he gonna leave with them chains gone"
Ralo - Calm Down Ralo
(From Famerican Gangster II mixtape; 2017)
The ultimate Movies4Men & Chill anthem, plus the missing link between Tragedy Khadafi and Gary, Barry & Terry. A fistful of late passes for ya host because this shit is undeniable and I feel silly for fronting on it until now. As the title of the 2nd best Django movie very nearly said, Ralo kilt... if it jams, post!
If Johnny Cinco's They Gave The Wrong Young N*gga Money is the reckless Blaxploitation Spaghetti Western of cash-themed 2013 Rap songs then Money Whipped by Savage AKA Sav Sinatra AKA Savage On Tha Track (an underrated Baton Rogue producer for Trill ENT/occasional rapping weed-carrier for Young Ready) must be the sombre Paul Schrader-penned late 70s American arthouse movie in Tinsel Town clothing?
If that all sounds a bit too poncey for datazz then here's a more straightforward pitch: dreamy Rap songs with money-as-a-girl similes are way better than corny Rap songs with Hip-Hop-kulcha-as-a-girl similes.
"N*ggas rob for ya, they work for ya, they hustle for ya, they scam
They prey for ya, they wish for ya, sell dope and pro'lly get jammed"
All jokes aside, I'm dead serious about They Gave The Wrong Young N*gga Money being one of the key songs in a new sub-genre of 2013 ATL Rap I'm naming ‘Buck Rogers Years Spaghetti-Western jams’. Also see: Sh!t by Future, Pablo by Gucci Mane & E-40, Hannah Montana by Migos, and Jose Got Dem Tacos remix by Kap-G & Young Jeezy.
Johnny Cinco's manager really shouldn't bother shooting an official video for his client's song that's already surpassed Wayne & 2 Chainz's Rich As Fuck at its own concept at a fraction of the cost and is now beginning to usurp My N*ggas from its spot as 2013's best jam that whte ppl can't ever sing along to in public; why eat into your own profit margin with an expensive official promo for They Gave The Wrong N*gga Money when the lyrics/montage clip your team uploaded to YouTube in august has already captured the song's essence in a way that a generic Rap video with Johnny faux-flossin' in rented cars and hired models never could?
"Yeah, I can pull up in that Phantom, might turn your hoe to a chauffeur
They gave the wrong young n*gga money, spend 60 thou' on my sofa"
Song sounds like what Future might've come up with had he been asked to contribute a song to the Djanjo Unchained soundtrack which has got me thinking : you know how Cam'Ron was talking about his movie deal with Netflix on The Breakfast Club last week? He should direct a Spaghetti Western called They Gave The Wrong Young N*gga Money with Johnny Cinco's song as its main theme. The plot would involve Cam accidentally driving his Lamborghini into a time wormhole on the Jersey turnpike which ends up in a dusty wild west town full of pilgrims being besieged by Mexican bandits in 1780. Cam could ride around on a horse wearing a True Religion Canadaian tuxedo making it rain on the town's folk, would fend off the bandits by doing drive-bys at noon on them with his Lambo, and the movie would combine elements of Killa Season, the original Django, Back To The Future, Boss N*gger and The Gods Must Be Crazy.
Sound good? Hold your horses because it gets even better : Hell Rell could come out of thespian retirement to play the Doc Emmett Brown nutty professor character who eventually finds a loophole in the 4th dimension to bring Cam back home to 2013. Greenlight this shit now plz!
"You see, in this world there's two kinds of people, my friend : those who thought Egyptian Lover's Livin' On The Nile was perfectly adequate as a 1 minute interlude on the One Track Mind LP, and those who couldn't rest easy until it'd been expanded to nearly 10 minutes in length on the remix from the Freak-A-Holic 12". Which are you, Tuco?"
Egyptian Lover - Livin' On The Nile extended remix
When Egyptian Lover was unfettered by time constraints he used the extra space afforded to him on his 12" singles to really unleash his inner-Prince and show his ass off (pause) with extended versions of his album tracks which explored nooks, crannies, and tangents the originals only hinted at. While his persona and image are what makes Egyptian Lover such a great character, the whole "fat bloke with a perm doing electronic songs about Egypt through a vocoder" schtick also works against him with regards to any sort of reappraisal because you'll seldom see him afforded the same sort of critical acclaim as, say, Juan "Cybotron/Model 500" Atkins even though they both shared a similar aesthetic to electronic composition throughout the early 80s until around 1986. Ah well, at least DJ Quik recognises his genius and wears his Egyptian Lover influence proudly :
DJ Quik & Kurupt - Jupiter's Critic & The Mind Of Mars
2 members of The Martorialst mob happened to visit an Egyptian exhibition dedicated to Tutankhamun's tomb and treasures a couple of weeks ago, and as we stood there gazing deep into the replica of his golden death mask listening to the tour guide recount tales of Tutankhamun's higher echelon flossin', I couldn't help but feel that Soulja Boy is the closest we have to someone who embodies his ostentatious spirit today. Btw, purely speculation on my behalf here, but I truly believe the reason Lil B came up with the cooking dance was to save face after Soulja Boy out-boogied him so spectacularly in the Pretty Boy Swag video :
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 oldDre 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?
Django Kill... If You Live, Shoot! is a movie I've wanted to see for years ever since I read a review of it in Empire and saw Alex Cox enthusing about it in the same reverential tones most moviephiles save for the works of Renoir on his Moviedrome season for BBC2 which featured the original Django, but, for some unfathomable reason, I never quite got around to buying it (why I bought practically every other movie in 4 Front Video's Spaghetti Western collection, including Django and the extrodinarily titled but excrutiatingly pisspoor Ringo And His Golden Pistol but not DJango Kill still stumps me) and managed to miss it when it was on TV in the late 90s as part of BBC2's Forbidden series, so in a fit of HMV browsing t'other day I finally bought myself a copy.
There's a lot right about it : the "motherless Mexican" taunts; Django/The Stranger emerging from the grave hand first; plenty of trademark Spaghetti Western looming close-ups and an experimental editing technique employed in Django's flashback montage scene; some fine scoring by Ivan Vandor which runs from sweeping to almost psychedelic to genuinely creepy; the gold stealing varmints strolling into the dystopian town known only as The Unhappy Place and being greeted by sickly men, children being used as footstools, creaking doors, singing girls with vampire fangs and gimpy hedgehogs crawling over the wooden walkways; a gang of gay cowboys led by a fat ginger landowner called Mr Sorrow and his yabbering parrot; some good shootouts throughout the movie with every character gunned down being completely lacking in morals and, thus, deserving their fate; various residents of said town plunging their hands into the sliced open stomach of the varmint Oaks who Django blasted full of golden bullets; the hot chick with the black hair; the supposedly crazy wife locked in the attic like some sort of Mrs Rochester in Jane Eyre figure; the graphic scalping of the injun which was cut from the movie for many years; Django's Jesus-Christ-Pose when he's locked up in the jailcell and the wide-eyed bats twittering above him; the hot gold melting onto the guy during the house fire turning him into a molten bloke version of whatsherface from Goldfinger; and the two children pulling bits of string across their faces in the cemetary as they debate who's uglier in the final scene as Django surveys the tore-up cemetary before riding off into the hazy sunset.
Which, I realise, make it sound like a deliriously crazed masterpiece, but after all the hyperbole I've read and heard over the years I was expecting something more of a downright fucked-up, rabid bloodbath. I had visions of it being the original Django flick with the hallucinatory qualities of a Buñuel, the depravity of Cannibal Holocaust and the blood soaked style of Suspiria (the vivid crimson blood splatters and floods were probably an influence on Argento) with Django/The Stranger being less the O.G Franco Nero Django and more of a maniacal hellbent-on-revenge hybrid of Walker from Point Blank, Major Charles Rane from Rolling Thunder and Don Lope De Aguirre from Aguirre, Wrath Of God.
Not quite so, but a fine movie which blends Spaghetti Western and Italian Horror that I'm glad I've finally seen, and it was probably for the best I left it so long to see it because the movie which was released on VHS/played on BBC2 was an incomprehensible cut version and the dvd we have of it in the UK now is the full version, albeit with the cut scenes being in Italian from an original print. Damn you all for the slightly misleading, O-T-T hyperbole which pumped my expectations up to unrealistic proportions, and damn me even more for feeling disappointed when watching a great movie which can make a justifiable claim as the most peculiar Spaghetti Western ever. Peep Alex Cox waxing lyrical about it :
