Last year we brought you the gospel according to Jim Jones on the vagaries of fashion, this year we're closing '09 with Jim's pearls of wisdom on the compulsiveness of knowing when to hold 'em and knowing when to fold 'em :
"A man got to make at least one bet a day or he could walk around lucky all day and not even know it"
Bonus Dipset beats :
This really should've been on Diplomatic Immunity volume 1 instead of one of the cringeworthy skits where they let the excitable Freaky Zeeky lose in front of a microphone :
Jim Jones - Questions
Which reminds me, that recent Hell Rell Live From Hell album thingy has some jams on it. Most notably this :
Hell Rell - Motion Pictures
The Blaxploitation horns and staccato drums prevelent on pretty much every Dipset affiliated song from 2004 - 2005 are a-okay in my book, the rehashed Jada punchline about using albums by his enemies as ashtrays in 2009, on the other hand, gets the facepalm. Still, he just about makes up for it with the line where he goes "Rosa Parks sat on the back of the bus, just so I could sit in the front of this drop". Fight the power, doggy.
A couple of months back when winter was first beginning to take its strangehold on us, I was pondering dressing gowns. On paper, there's a certain suave comfortability in coming home on a harsh winter evening and slipping in a nice dressing gown after a hot bath, but the reality isn't quite so straightfoward if my previous two dalliances with dressing gowns are anything to go by.
That swanky silk dressing gown I copped was just too thin and I ended up ripping it after catching the pocket on a door handle rushing to answer the phone, and the thick cotton effort I replaced it with was too heavy and felt a little too....how best to describe it? A little too Karen Mathews.
I'd consigned the dressing gown to the Nice In Theory, But... section of my brain until a recent hook up of the episode of WCW : Nitro where Curt "Mr Perfect" Hennig came out to join the n.W.o resplendent in Ric Flair's Nature Boy robe in Flair's hometown of Charlotte, North Carolina after turning heel on Flair and The Four Horsemen the previous evening at Fall Brawl by slamming the door of the steel cage on his noggin' inspired an eBay assisted epiphany which led me to this :
Not too thin, not too heavy and that awful feeling of being a male Karen Matthews should be nullified by the flamboyance of being a rootin' tootin' Nature Boy every time you slip it on - perfect. I 'unno, though. Maybe I'm just being a stingy cynical twat but for $299 and $20 p+p i expect something with a little more swag. Something like this :
Or this :
Or this :
You smell me, mayn? Something that makes you feel like the ultimate space mountain dwelling, limousine ridin', jet flyin', kiss stealin', wheelin' dealin' son of a gun.
There are innumerable rap rumours which amuse me, particularly the one about Freddie Foxxx threatening to bumrape various Landspeed Records staff with a baseball bat for non-payment of royalties and the recent salacious one about Cage's latest confused emo-mess of an album possibly bankrupting Def Jux to the tune of 200 grand, but my personal favourite rap rumour ever has to be the one about Kool Keith coming out on stage in a silver mullet wig, a Nature Boy robe and a fake nose on Ultramagnetic's tour of The Four Horsemen LP. Whether it's true or not doesn't really matter, as it's all about the mental images it conjures up.
Thanks to Discogs.com for alerting me to Little Bruce's XXXtra Mannish album a while back when searching for tunes that Mike Mosley had produced and/or pre-1995 releases on E-40's Sick Wid' It Records imprint, and thanks to my pal for procuring me a copy of Bruce's Mobbin' In My Old School 12" for Xmas, 'cause this is a much better present than that PS2 add-on thingymebob you bought me for Xmas in 2004 that I never used because I only bought a PS2 to play GTA : San Andreas.
Little Bruce - Mobbin' In My Old School
You can never have too many uses of Funky Worm, can you? Especially if it's used alongside Joe Tex and Isaac Hayes samples first used by NWA and Compton's Most Wanted.
Anyway, from 6 In The Mornin' by Ice-T, Boyz In The Hood by Eazy E, and Act A Fool by King Tee in the late 80s, to Steady Mobbin by Ice Cube, Let Me Ride by Dre and Gin And Juice by Snoop in the early 90s, many of the best west coast gang$ta-rap singles have been day-in-the-life narratives which seemed to be conceived primarily for video treatment, and this tradition was continued with the likes of California Livin' remix by Mac Dre & Coolio (a different Coolio, but let's play a game of taking sides : achieving legend status after getting shot dead in Kansas Vs. sharing a house with washed up UK celebs where you get to grope Ulrika Johnson and her with the funny name who used to be in the Sugababes), 4 Deep by C-Bo, Hot Sunny Day by Celly Cel and Bruce's Mobbin' In My Old School from '93 - '95. If you live in a drab sexless country like the UK where mediocrity is celebrated, and where the long winters are colder than Horace Pinker's soul and the summers are usually a couple of days of sunshine sporadically placed inbetween weeks of drizzle then seeing videos of cadillac driving 18 year olds frollicing with scantily clad honeys in the pools of their backgardens seemed exotic, and if the glamourous future predicted in the ABC, Duran Duran and Prince videos of the 80s weren't going to arrive just yet, these seemed like a pretty good stop-gap.
Such videos were also great sources for sartorial inspiration as early 90s west coast gang$ta-rap was the greatest era of rap fashion, but, eh, Bruce doesn't quite have the physique for a wifebeater, his alternating between having his pants pulled up to Pete Rock on the cover of Mecca And The Soul Brother levels one minute, and then emo-kid hanging below his ass cheeks levels the next isn't really working, his hairdoo is reminiscent of the ghost who lives in the public toilet in series 2 of Round The Twist, and WTF is the tucking of his pants into his socks like some British raver circa 1991/1992 all about?
Still, Bruce makes up for any clothing faux pas in the Mobbin' In My Old School video with his Footlocka Crew track on the XXXtra Mannish album (handily on the B. side of the Mobbin'.. 12"), as it's like Cube's A Gangsta's Fairytale and GZA's Labels gave birth :
Little Bruce - Footlocka Crew
See, I told y'all rappers from the Bay make the best tunes about gear. If only he'd have known that in 2009 Footlocker would be the dumping ground for every generic Air Force or Air Max, and the only place on the planet you can guarantee to hear the entire catalogue of Akon anytime you happen to visit.
Finally, I suppose we should end with the best song on XXXtra Mannish, Fuck Little Bruce, which features fires shots at Mac Dre, and which was the song responsible for starting the whole 90s beef between E-40's neighbourhood and Mac Dre's neighbourhood. Now this is some twitchy, Seinfeld theme bassed, Bay G-Funk shit :
Colour the festive period officially over, as we're declaring the next few days the heads-must-roll season after hearing news that our hombre Sha Deezy had his car broken into the other night, which resulted in his iPod, Xmas groceries and gloves gettin' jacked. Such lovely gloves too.
Harry Brown had its heart in the right place and was worth the price of admission alone to see the acoustic-guitar wielding, ol' Pam Ayres soundin' ass shit UK rapper Plan B gettin' his cap peeled (chalk off another one of our fantasies as being fulfilled), but if you're gonna indulge in a spot of vigilantism then we wanna see you be a little more creative with your blasting of criminals. It's not enough to just smoke 'em, you have to smoke 'em with flair like the god Charlie Mothafuckin' Bronson when he shot Larry Fishburne's Cutter character through his ghetto-blaster during the gunfight with the gang in Death Wish 2.
Anything else just comes off as softbatch in comparison.
Beef is when you get headbutted by an insane Filipino kid in front of your own fans at Fat Beats...
Since the rap singles of the noughties have already been evaluated and chronicled, it's time to document the really juicy shit and pay lip service to the the best rap message board beef between a civilian poster and a notable underground rapper which then spilled over into real life with disasterous consequences.
Right now there's a thought-bubble probably forming above your domepiece like "Oh, this is a post about that King Kube from Parker Lewis Can't Lose lookin' guy breaking the jaw of whatsisface from Cannibal Ox, huh?" Nah, never that - that's far too obvious a choice, and while it was hilarious that Vordul from Cannibal Ox wound up in a hospital bed with a wired jaw and the verbose steroid addict Will High ended up doing a stretch on Rikers Island for assault after El-P grassed him up to the NYPD, it wasn't quite the hilariously grandiose affair that was the Filipino Frank vs. Immortal Technique's beef on UGHH.com; a beef which led to Frank travelling from Florida to New York to confront Technique at a Fat Beats instore signing session in 2004.
Frank
Immortal Technique
Frank was a deeply disturbed kid who'd post graphic in-depth stories about being molested by his babysitter and flood the boards under gimmick accounts with pictures of gay porn; Immortal Technique was a shitty punchline rapper with a cliched political edge who'd greet any sort of non-fawning feedback with threats of violence, racial slurs against caucasians and his habitual "I WAS BORN IN A PERUVIAN HOSPITAL, N*GGA, AND I'LL CRACK YOUR FUCKIN' DOMEPIECE OPEN IF YOU EVER COME TO HARLEM YOU MOTHERFUCKIN' PUSSY" rants; together they made sweet internet love for the doey eyes of rap message boarders.
Our story begins when the tempremental Technique was an underground rapper posting on UGHH.com to promote his releases or performances. It was your usual boring guff which the denizens of UGHH politely pretended to be interested in (at that point rap message boards were in a post-The Blueprint state of flux where former Sage Francis fans often mutated into Juelz Santana lyrics-posting Dipset fans overnight, so Technique was semi-acceptable for either camp) or would casually mock with no malice intended. Frank would troll Technique posts with pictures of the Super-Mario Brothers and taunts that Technique should float back to Cuba on his banana boat. Technique would explode in anger with expletive ridden caps-locks threats which would intimately detail what he'd do to Frank if they were to ever cross paths. This went on for weeks with Frank even registering a fake female AOL screen name to sucker the flirtatious Technique into an IM cyber-sex session before copy and pasting the full conversation to Technique's considerable embarrassment and the board's delight.
Their antics continued another week or so, before Technique announced he had a Fat Beats instore the following monday and that Frank and any other internet hataz should show up to air their grievances with him mano-a-mano. Frank responded with pictures of himself writing rhymes which he claimed would end Technique's career and posing with a shotgun which he suggested he'd use if Technique didn't apologise profusely to him in person :
He also threatened to kidnap Technique and hold him hostage in a dungeon wall-wardrobe he called GAY'S CLOSET where he claimed he'd subject Technique to rectal rape via a plunger once a day :
While Frank's taunts of what would happen were amusing, nobody thought he'd actually show up in New York since he resided hundreds of miles away in Florida. It's unsure what exactly happened at Fat Beats that day - the rumour that Frank put Technique in a Figure-4 Leglock remains uncomfirmed - but here's what's known for sure via various witnesses: Frank caught an unsuspecting Technique alone on the staircase leading up into Fat Beats, where he headbutted Technique square in the face which caused him to fall down the stairs arse over tit.
After word got back to the internet of the fracas, Technique was quick to call UGHH.com owner Adam "Quest" Walder and have all evidence of it deleted. Quest complied as he didn't want his site implicated in any legal shenanigans stemming from the situation, particularly with Frank having posted pictures of himself with firearms. This, unfortunately, is why so little documentation of their behemoth beef is left online now.
Frank soaked up the glory for a few months before retreating back to spamming the board with pictures of his flaccid penis and stories about picking up teenage hookers. Last we heard he joined the military in 2005, got sent to Iraq and then got sent back to America after being caught smoking heroin. He then attempted vehicular assisted suicide before he was sectioned under the same mental heath act which saw Britney institutionalised. The last picture he posted of himself was with his mother at the airport in DC on his way to the specialist ex-military loony bin he ended up at. His head injuries from the suicide attempt are visible :
We dunno if Frank is playing with his own shit in a cell like Alvarez from Oz right now, or if he's even still alive. But here at The Martorialist we applaud his dedication to humiliating rappers who make arses of themselves on the internet and we crown his beef with Immortal Technique the greatest rap message-boarding of the noughties. Salutations are due, kicko.
Ram Sweeney: [praying at Heather's funeral] Jesus, God in Heaven, why'd you have to kill such hot snatch?
I know bulimia's so '87, but the more Brittany Murphy succumbed to Winehouse-Syndrome the past year or two, the more she resonated with my loins. 'S all about them pale bamboo boned chicks with eating disorders and drug addictions :
So, for the past couple of years I've had no success with my Betfair death-pool where I've predicted both Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan will cark it within 365 days of each other, but I figure if you were to combine the two you've basically got Brittany Murphy so I deserve some sort of each way payout right now. Give up the goods, yo.
Anyhoo, R.I.P to Miss Murphy as she was in a handful of good movies like Clueless, Freeway, Spun and Sin City, and was scheduled to appear in The Expendales next year. More pertinently, I think I cracked one out to her after going to see 8 Mile and it's always sad to see someone you had a late-night wank over die, innit?
Stay off the snarf and stay eatin', kidz.
Too $hort - City Of Dope
On a Heathers and Brittany related note, Dom P also pays tribute over at IchLugeBullets, a blog which is 2nd in title only to Voguing To Danzig.
With the fragmented way we live our lives these days, where technology has enabled us to submerge ourselves in our interests and niche information, it's hard not to feel distanced from your fellow man when making polite chit-chat at the water cooler or on public transport, but if there's one thing Bob from the accounts department or that dude who was tryna tell me about his moped on the train last week and I can agree on it's that there is no greater feeling - other than watching Liverpool's season in utter turmoil before Xmas, obviously - than getting your schlong sucked. Luckily, rappers also agree with us, so here's the 5 best rap songs about fellatio.
Too $hort - Blowjob Betty
$hort's The Bitch Sucks Dick was the first rap song about oral stimulation to zee cock, but Blowjob Betty is his masterpiece in the realm of odes to gettin' yer johnson sucked due to the death-by-nut finale and the delightful union of trademark $hort synth funk and the Bam Bam sample. All rap songs about receiving head which came thereafter had to aspire to this level of detail and greatness.
Akinyele - Take A Lick
Put It In Your Mouth gets all the plaudits from squares, but real headz (lol headz - geddit?) know that Take A Lick is Ak's preeminent paean to the art of gettin' some brain with it's narrative game of cat-and-mouse between Ak' and his hesitant-to-suck British bird, which ends in a compromise of mutual bliss via a 69. We all gotta eat, yo, and shame on y'all for having the nerve to think all rappers are selfish, misogynistic pigs.
NWA - Just Don't Bite It
A friend and I once argued over whether this or She Swallowed It is the ultimate NWA blowjob anthem but I refuse to budge over my allegiance to Just Don't Bite It. Both are essentially Ren solo tracks about gettin' your spam javelin wetted up but Just Don't Bite It wins every time for the Eazy skits on the intro and outro, the superior beat, the fact that it doesn't feature one of Ren's lines about sticking broomsticks up butts, and its usage as backing music on much of the infamous pool party footage on the Eful4zaggin dvd. Ren informing us that he's gonna take one of his breezies to "a room, ayo, i mean a restroom/and stick my dick in her mouth like a wet broom" is evidence than NWA were just some ol' romantics at heart.
Three 6 Mafia ft. DJ Unk - I'd Rather Get Sum Head
Good ol' Three 6 and their manyballads dedicated to gettin' noshed off. Lesser blogs would've probably chosen Slob On My Knob for their Their 6 selection, but here at The Martorialist we're down with I'd Rather Get Sum Head's mantra of "I love havin' sex, but I'd rather get sum head". Like Cam'Ron opined to Westwood in that video where The Big Dog was driving Dipset and Cam's bird around London, once you get to the age of 30 a nut becomes a nut and you may as well attempt to get it in the most pleasurable way possible. A morning-glory salute (no Jim Dangle from Reno 911) also goes to Three 6's mate Project Pat and his very own superbly trenchant Sucks On Dick.
UGK - Pregnant Pussy
And, finally, the apogee of rap songs about fellatio. Camouflaged as an appraisal of sex with women who are heavily up-the-duff, infrared technology isn't needed to find the true intention behind this tenderly craftly ode to extremely risque oral sex as the "Pregnant pussy is the best you can get, fuckin' a bitch while her baby suckin' dick hook and Pimp C's first verse prove. Parental discretion iz advised indeed :
I guess you could call me a family man 'cause I care for bitch's babies every chance that I can I don't give 'em clothes, or diapers and shit but I like to feed their babies with my big black dick 'Cause I'ma tell you if you didn't know you ain't did shit until you fucked a pregnant hoe The pussy is hotter, it's got an extra kick it feel like hot potato pie around your dick Sometimes I swing high, sometimes I swing low sometimes I like to fuck a pregnant bitch on my flo' Hit it kinda hard, and beat it up bad fuck her chest and give her cherry blisters on her ass 'Cause if she expectin', I can satisfy and at the same time give her kid a pacifer And I love it when I bust that ol' nut 'cause I know her baby just gon' lick it all up.
Feel free to add your own mildly racist ..and to think black American men are often criticized for their parental skills joke in here as a closer, while I make like R. Kelly on the Ignition remix and Bounce, Bounce my ass outta here.
It's very rare that a sequel to or reboot of a perenial favourite lives up to the lofty expectations you have for it, but I'll be damn-diggity-damned if Bad Lieutenant : Port Of Call New Orleans hasn't surpassed my high hopesand even improved on the original movie.
The O.G Bad Lieutenant contains what's my favourite scene ever, but other than a few additional incredible moments, it's not a particularly good watch, is it? Port Of Call New Orleans retains some of the themes of the first movie, but thankfully eschews all the confusing Catholicism and vague pretense of a plot to just let Nic Cage run wild with the character. It's been a lonely existence as a fan of Cage's wide-eyed manic schtick (the Castor Troy scenes in Face/Off and the first 15 minutes of Snake Eyes remain untouchable) for the last decade, but validation has finally come a-knockin' on my door as Herzog agrees with me that the problem hasn't been Cage's overacting, but rather, he just hasn't been given the appropriate movie to fully showcase his lunatic charms in. Given carte blanche to spazz-out here he gives the performance of his career, and even manages appropriate homages to teh gawd Kinski as both Aguirre, with his wild eyes and hunch, and Nosferatu, with his oversized clothes.
And, yeah, nothing can ever top the wanking scene in the Ferrara flick, but if you can tell me with a straight face that these two scenes alone don't body the rest of the original, then you're straight up lying through your teeth like Herzog is when he claims he's never seen the Ferrara movie :
Add in incidental music which sounds like it's from series 1 of Round The Twist, rapper-turned-actor cameos from Xzibit and Chino XL (Xzibit is suprisingly good and with this one role has trumped his entire boring rap career), Cage namechecking Eazy E in front of his black accomplices whilst strung out and blackmailing narcotics possessing club chicks into sex (the police force should loop that scene and then show it in schools across the world as a recruitment initiative video), and we have what amounts to my favourite movie of the year, which is ironic since Cage is also the lead in my least favourite movie of 2009.
And, I was right about this toppling Baller Blockin' from its ivory tower as my favourite New Orleans based movie.
Bonus New Orleans beats
The best song from the Baller Blockin' soundtrack; and the last song Weezy did with Mannie in 2005, which is better than anything either of them have done since :
