Martorial elegance - Lupe Fiasco edition

Ayo David Drake - how come you're willing to fill me in on Chicago Rap gossip concerning ***** ****'s team using him to launder drug/prostitution money and ******** *** ghost-writing for **** ***** but you ain't bother to tell me Lupe Fiasco had grown himself a Chief Keef fraggle-dreads hairdo, B?


So, I'm reliably informed that the token overbearing crooner on this torta di dick-formaggio of a song is some former Australian Idol winner, which means that the Rapper who once pretended to be a hamburger right chea is finally edging towards his inevitable destiny of making a Best Of Both Worlds type concept LP with that irritating Canadian mall-rawk dipshit who won Rock Star : INXS where he rhymes from the point-of-view of a chicken tikka samosa for the entire album.

You know my Stez'

If you had To The Max on 12" back in the dayz of wayback when people used to pay for music and eat pterodactyl eggs for breakfast, you only needed to own a copy of Stezo's patchy Crazy Noise LP for its amazing cover where he was resplendent in a still-next level stonewashed Canadian tuxedo, and the Girl Trouble joint which was basically Know The Ledge before Know The Ledge was Know The Ledge, albeit way less austere and with the scheming mom dukes of a scorned daughter as its chief villain. A former EPMD back-up dancer really had no business making a song this good :

Stezo - Girl Trouble
(From Crazy Noise LP; 1989)


It obviously doesn't hurt that he's Rapping over one of the funkiest pieces of music to ever emerge out of New Orleans on Girl Trouble, but Stezo deserves credit too for concocting such a compelling set-up narrative and pioneering the gettin'-caught-in-a-unfriendly-neighbourhood-because-of-a-chick sub-genre of Rap that Know The Ledge would perfect a couple of years later. Yo, remember when Rappers used to call guns ‘jammies’? I certainly do, because my buddy O.G Emilyn convinced me they were referring to used tampons as opposed to firearms back when we were chil'ren in the late 80s.

Finally - a new song I like!

And it has a Puffy-on-My Downfall-megaphone-chorus and a bassline to die for! Okay, so if E-40's Concrete sounded like Sherlock Holmes on the trail of some D-Boy scoundrels like Noz once suggested it did, then IamSu!'s Two Eleven here sounds like like London's greatest fictional detective on the trail of some girlfriend-snatching scallywags :

"After the club I'm leavin' early for a reason
left witcha girl took her back to the four seasons
n*ggas be mad 'cause they know that their hoe cheatin'
showin' out in front of they homies sayin' they leavin'
but, homie, that was never my lady so you can keep her
she was just a freak who'd do anything for a t-shirt
cheerleader, shoulda stayed up in the bleachers
they should put ya kid up in the paper, give me the feature.."

IamSu! - Two Eleven
(From Youtube/special Karmaloop edition of KILT mixtape (lol); 2012)


Man, trying to find some good new Rap recently has been akin to Holmes' own search for Irene Adler, so props to IamSu! for coming through in my time of need, and props to him for putting whatever the hell the short movie part of this video is after Two Eleven has finished so I don't have to sit through a 3 minute intro of awkward acting which makes Dr Dre's performance in Training Day look like James Mason in Odd Man Out.

Chick game Master Splinter

"Rat head - chipped nails, chipped toes
Rat head - nappy perm, ripped clothes"

C-Bo ft. Young Meek - Rat Heads
(From West Coast Mafia album; 2002)


Three main reasons why this is my favourite C-Bo joint of the last decade even though I'm a secrete feminist like Nicola McLean - you'd never expect to hear C-Bo Rapping over the sort of scratched-up RAWK guitar sample that was Tone Loc's bread 'n' butter back in the late 80s, Young Meek's "you got the cockpit smellin' like fish & chips" line, and the whole Rat Head concept being a possible homage to Oid School Freddy B's infamous "rat head bitch make me cum!" lyric from Too $hort's Game.

Just sayin', bruv # 4.5 : Wild Thing by Tone Loc goes way harder than any of the more credible RAWK guitar jams by Run Dmc Schoolly D, Ice-T or Public Enemy.

It's ya boy $hamrock AKA Yung Iri$h

AKA First Bourney from the Young Black Poteenagers!

Perhaps I'm being charitable because he recently made a banger with Jackie Chain, or maybe I'm just starved for new Rap since I haven't heard anything I've liked since Problem's Welcome To Molly Wood 2 mixtape a fortnight ago, but this intro from $hamrock's Money Green album really is sounding like an alternate opening track on Lil' Wyte's semi-classic Phinally Phamous CD right now. Whatever the case may be, forgive me, father, for I have truly sinned by posting this one :

"You don't know about this, mane
life started out as a bitch, mane.."

$hamrock - Money Green Intro
(From Money Green album; 2012)


So what if I just happened to be looking for any ol' thinly-veiled excuse to use than YBT pun and talk about why tubby whiggas like $hamrock always feel the need to cultivate chin-strap beards when it only draws attention to their double chins (seriously, why dey do dat dere?), because I'm so dedicated to this blog game shit that I just spent 69p on an MP3 of the Money Green Intro so you don't have to shell out your own skrilla for it. I'm not a fucken' blogger, though, man - I'm just writin' this shit because I love the Rap internet and I love seein' Google diddy-boppin' to my posts.

Rap game ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

When I found myself desperately skimming through pages of Joe Budden goes bowling videos, Joe Budden album artwork and alternate artwork updates, and Joe Budden poses on the cover of some black ppl's Miami Ink tattoo magazine JPGs on 2dopeboyz earlier today because all my usual channels for new Rap haven't been delivering these past couple of weeks, I figured it was time to bite the bullet and finally check out Lil B's Task Force mixtape that's been trumpeted as his long-awaited return to form in certain quarters. Alas, you bastards who've championed it have lead my hopes and expectations on a wild-goose chase before abandoning me in Disappointmentville with no taxi fair home; I couldn't make it through a single song in its entirety, and I contend that Brandon should've retired from Rapping in 2010 and made a move into TV as the host of Come Dine With Me U.S.A before the Red Flame mixtape began his slide into being just-another-Rapper.

What happened to the Lil B who scalped Nas on his own One Mic beat, who made the greatest Auto-Tune hit that never was, and who turned a Bow Wow instrumental into the new Mistakes Of A Woman In Love With Other Men, then? My theory is that the vast majority of Rappers are genetically encoded to only ever make a maximum of 30 good songs during their career and so, instead of drip-feeding them across various albums over the course of 8 years like The Jacka, he carpet-bombed the internet with them in the summer 2009 to autumn 2010 period which gave us the I'm Thraxx and 6 Kiss 'tapes, and loosies like Like A Martian, Good Morning, Look Like Jesus, Age Of Information, and Ellen Degeneres.

Nobody couldn't ever accuse California Boy of being a good thing unless they've got a particular penchant for the 4th song on Lemonheads cassette singles from 1993 or they want to rub one out to the preppier & prettier version of the daughter from season 1 of American Horror Story he strolls around with in the video, but at least it was a surprise and an amusing act of trolling; Task Force, on the other hand, is as predictable and as wearying as another new Chief Keef think piece, and I'm kicking myself for ever believing myself it could've been anything other than a dud after I was similarly suckered in by the Bitch Mob Respect Da Bitch Volume 1 'tape hype last year.

Greatest movie scenes ever # 48

What, you thought Black Shampoo was just some half-arsed brainshart which only exists because RZA was a song short for Wu-Tang Forever's second disc and so he ordered U-God to quickly hack out a Poundstretcher Labels about Afro hair products to finish it off? Duh, obv'ously, but at least it's a sloppy album filler which happens to be inspired by one of the seventies Blaxploitation flicks RZA first caught on his trips to Times Square to catch Kung-Fu movies back in the eighties, so it does serve a vague purpose in life unlike fifteen of the other twenty-seven songs on Wu-Tang Forever, the solo careers of U-God, Masta Killa and Inspectah Deck, or RZA's whole Bobby Digital alias experiment.

Black Shampoo begins with the movie's poker-faced hairdresser protagonist Mr Jonathan rinsing away the stench of bologna & wet dog from one of his moneyed white customers before he allows her to pleasure him as Gerald Lee's seedy funk-score builds to a crescendo in the background. Abundantly more radical than anything Spike Lee has ever committed to film and infinitely more erotic than any pornography made since Escort magazine's Girls of Wolverhampton photo shoot where Tina Holmes & Lisa Meredith got their baps and battys out in the Molineux Stadium car park, this is as immaculate an intro as Welles' hallowed opening sequences in Citizen Kane or Touch Of Evil :


‘You ain't never seen a man give head like this before’ as the movie's tagline really should've ran.

I'm one helluva guy

Fly, pelican, fly!

Is there a more fascinating Rap career trajectory from the last decade than that of Hell Rell? From Kool G. Rap on The Symphony-ing the first Diplomatic Immunity album twice with his two over-the-phone-from-jail freestyles and setting himself up as the reincarnation of Rich Porter and Baby 'Maine in one, to his emergence into the sunlight as.... a lilliputian Craig Mack lookalike from the Bronx wearing three separate tall-tees simultaneously who then spent his prime years ripping off at least one Lox punchline per song before ending up as the ultimate butt of 'hood DVD/WSHH video jokes via Tru-Life, Prodigy, and Max B and French Montana. You don't have to be Brain the dog from Inspector Gadget to figure out that he couldn't possibly have been in jail at the time of Diplomatic Immunity since he tells some chick in the background to be quiet at the start of the second freestyle, so could the mysterious Ma in question have actually been his mother, thus giving the whole situation a sorry whiff of that scene in The King Of Comedy where Rupert puts together an audition tape for Jerry Lee Lewis in his basement-bedroom as his ma dukes screams at him to keep the noise down?

"Mommmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm - I'm not gonna lower it, I have to do this now!"


The greatest argument one can put forth that Twitter, Tumblr and Instagram are the pitchfork which'll eventually disembowel the entire internet is that, now they've become the three primary mediums Rappers use to exhibit their goonery/unintentionally embarrass themselves, classic video clips like Max & French Montana clowning Hell Rell, the legendary riposte to Tru-Life and Memphis Bleek by Hell Rell, a black-eyed Cam trying to talk shit whilst wearing a pair of Daisy Dukes, Gillie Da Kid calling out Wayne, Cassidy's super-awkward apology to Gillie, Chopper & his suit Vs. Ness, Charles Hamilton getting socked in the face by a chick, Beanie making rape-faces at Peedi Crakk and whispering sweet nothings into his ear, Tru-Life and his crew posing with Jim Jones' and JR Writer's stolen chains, and Lil B getting knocked out by a poof have all but dried up in 2012 but for the grace of Game. Like, two or three years ago, instead of taking a grainy Instagram picture of him getting dome that's only use is in making "Word is bond, son, I had that bitch down on my shit like DIS!" memes, a character like Chief Keef would've trolled his detractors by posting an explicit clip of him getting slurped and burped up on WSHH.com which ends with him staring dead-eyed into the camera and saying "BANG BANG!" as he shoots a wad over his ladyfriend's grill.

We went from 50 prank-calling Shyne and buying Rick Ross' baby-momma a couple of furs in exchange for his IRL deets and sexual favours, to Freddie Gibbs' Youtube tour-vlogs and Joey Bada$$' Tumblr page... this can't be life the Rap internet in 2012.