(I don't keep good records of things, but this was in some issue of Carbon 14 magazine, which is a fine glossy periodical full of smut and wrestling and whores and rock-n-roll.)
I’m old school, so sometimes I like to just lay in the bathtub and read something or other and try to talk my wife into scrubbing my back, which she never does because she’s got a convoluted post-liberation notion that scrubbing your life partner’s back is submissive in some way. So I usually just lay there by myself, reading whatever’s come in the mail lately. The other night I was digging into this article in the March 2007 issue of Skin & Ink magazine, that had a long in-depth retelling of Captain Don Leslie’s life as a tattooed, sword swallowing, circus freak, who’s now dying of mouth cancer and at the end of a long, winding, and colorful life – with all of those adjectives meant literally as well as figuratively. The early part of his life, he had joined the circus and was just working a performers’ concession stand, but he had become captivated by watching the sword swallower work, to the point he would sneak it to watch the dude every day, not because it was fake or to figure out the trick or anything like that, but just because it was such a great thing – to swallow daggers and swords in front of these local bumpkins who had shelled out hard-earned dollars to watch the freak parade.
Eventually, that particular circus’s sword swallower taught Capt. Don the work, but this first sword swallower apparently was not so great, as Capt. Don, even though he didn’t need to, would feign chocking and gagging sounds as he thought that was how it was supposed to be done. A few years later, when being at his own gig, a midget freak watched Capt. Don and was shocked at how amateur his performance was, so told him he’d set up a fellow sword swallowing friend who would be performing nearby to come and check things out. This guy was Alex Linton, who at the time was the Guinness Book of World Records sword swallower. (Ahh… that childhood dream we all had to get into the Guinness Book for something, whether dribbling a basketball or growing our fingernails or eating a bicycle – it called the inner-carny in all of us.) Linton took to Capt. Don, taught him better techniques, and they developed a friendship that carried on into winter lay-offs from individual performing circuits where they would reconnect in Sarasota, where a lot of freaks wintered, and Linton would tell Capt. Don of great sword swallowers from the circus circuit’s past. At the time, Linton was a good thirty-some years the elder to Capt. Don, and he was passing on the stories of these legendary performers who were thirty-some years his own elder – an oral history of people who were near-perfect at something they had dedicated themselves to wholeheartedly, and whom no written word probably had ever been printed over.
This got me to thinking about the concept of the secret oral history and shared secrets involved in carnival-based performances, and how this relates to wrestling, or more specifically, how this relates to my recent conclusion that I don’t really care too much for the professional wrestling, itself a carnival-based performance at its root.
Pro wrestling lost the “It’s real!” charade, publicly, in the past twenty-five years, but that veil had been ripped away long before that 20/20 expose where John Stossel’s little weasel-voiced head got the hearing knocked out of one side of it. (To be fair, John Stossel is just as carny as any wrestler ever was, pretending he helps and cares in his role as fear-mongering household television journalist, and I guess he deserves credit, because his con will probably far outlast any con the wrestling industry can repackage itself into in the coming decades.) I doubt seriously the people of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s thought of a Harley Race or Ric Flair as an athletic parallel to Muhammad Ali or even Larry Holmes. People have known, or at best at least suspected, that wrestling was fake all along for quite some time. But the performance was executed in such a manner that… I don’t know, you just wouldn’t question it because so much had been put into doing it, I’m not sure what made people just go along. I guess that’s what’s drawn me to the wrestling all along, the WHY is this happening?
Post-kayfabe-breaking, the wrestling fan in the past decade or so has dwindled in the tangible world, but has thrived online, so that at most wrestling events, you can break the crowd down into two separate forms of retarded people – one half is physically retarded and probably still has the mental capacity to believe it’s real shit going on inside the squared circle, and I guess they help me enjoy the live wrestling experience a bit, because the other half is the social retard, chanting and yelling clever insider quips, and generally tweaking my own nerves a little too much. This is most likely a results of my own egotism, thinking I’m too good to hang out with the internet wrestling nerd who tends to be the type who loves comic books and actually knows the name of theme songs to Jap cartoons.
The internet wrestling nerd accepts the fact that the professional wrestling is not, nor ever was, real in any sense, and tends to take a scientific approach, considering himself (always himself, and usually not a very attractive himself) a student of the pseudo-sport, and often will be heard saying he “needs” to see this obscure match or some Best of So-and-So in Amarillo 1977 triple DVD set, which is nothing more than absolutely every appearance of So-and-So that the dude who put the collection together could find, with no actual attention being paid to what was best or not best, just a gluttonous grand buffet of one freaky slice of the pseudo-sport.
Within the internet-based Wrestling Nerddom, this creates a backlash where others abandon this scientific attitude and become the ironic lovers of the more strange and stupid gimmicks like Umaga or The Boogeyman, simply because it falls outside of the realm of science, and causes these contrarians great glee to have the analysis-based nerds struggle to explain something.
And with me being, unfortunately, a denizen of the Wrestling Nerddom myself (www.deathvalleydriver.com), I have at times complained about how shitty the wrestling now is compared to whatever it was when I used to still see whatever it was I saw in it. I’ve never really been able to figure out why this was, because it wasn’t as simple as people still pretended it was real, though the easy admission of it not being real combat certainly did add a homoerotic bad taste to sitting around watching sweaty men grapple with each other. But while reading the piece about Captain Don Leslie, I realized that what it is that made me love wrestling, and why I probably hate it now, is not the real or fake, or how it’s done, but the WHY was this happening? And this applies to whether it be pro wrestling or slight-of-hand magician or a sword swallower at the freak show. WHY were these things happening? Why would people pretend to swallow a sword to make a bunch of local bumpkins “ooh” and “ahh” for fifty cents a head? Why would two big guys actually beat each other in a simulated athletic competition, and why would all these other people sitting ringside be so captivated by it? Why was all this happening?
This got me to thinking further about the freak show, featuring sword swallowers and bearded ladies and strong midgets and the such, which would have been run by a promoter. I am assuming the freaks made a decent enough living for being freaky, but I doubt any of them were living high on the hog at all. It was scraps of money – nothing great – but you got to travel around and look at a bunch of weird-looking people be shocked or awed by what you did. And the dude who made the real money off this was the promoter or circus-owner or whoever was running the whole set-up. And it seems the performers were drawn in with a cult-like religious aspect to what they were doing – complete with the passing of inner-secrets and traditions, to make one feel like they were a part of something small and select. And reading about Capt. Don talk of hearing thirty-five years ago from Alex Linton about great sword swallowers from thirty-five years before that… and all this happening outside of earshot of anybody else who need not know these things, that all added to the Why. It allowed a performer like Capt. Don to completely believe in what he was doing, even if what he was doing may not have been what it was perceived to be exactly. This is not to suggest all carnival-based performances are faked, but just that when you add history and cult religion undertones to the performer’s mind, it becomes far more than just what he is doing on the stage, which separated jobs like this from just being a Starbucks or Kinko’s employee or someone sitting in a cubicle shuffling numbers back and forth. One was there to make the bumpkins believe in what was happening, or at least if they didn’t believe it, do it in such grand and well-executed fashion that they dare not ask if it wasn’t really what it looked like, because you’d be insulting the freak carny wrestler midget dagger eater by doing so.
And I would think it’s safe to say that with the professional wrestling being well-established cable TV programming and not something set up in a tent in a field on the outskirts of town, it’s far more of a regular business now than it would’ve been when closer to its circus roots. But even up into the ‘80s, before 20/20 feigning newsworthiness, wrestling’s traditions were carried on in the same way. Wrestlers heard stories from others and learned the subtle details – how to say this or that to an old lady in the front row or how to fall flat on your face on concrete directly in front of little kids – and the old-timers passed these lessons, and these legends of previous purveyors of this secret art, onto the next generation. Some people learned from really shitty old wrestlers (like Capt. Don’s first sword swallowing teacher), and some learned from better ones. Sometimes the guy who looked great in the ring was barely coherent when it came to teaching anyone else what must have just come naturally to him. And sometimes a guy who never did much more than work a three-town circuit for ten years might’ve been the best at laying out the subtle nuances of that little circuit. And the promoters promoted it all to the public, while promoting the special cult-like secret of it all to the wrestlers, to pull them into the religion of the wrestler. Thus, the promoter could make his money off both ends of the bargain – public and wrestlers – to varying degrees, but everyone went home happy at the end of the day. (And who gives a fuck about the end of the life? You have a good run riding the roads and get some ass and scars and great stories out of it, in my opinion, you’re better off than having a padded bank account.)
But we’re twenty-five years removed from this line of thinking, as if it being real or fake was the entire point of it all – the answer to Why – and it’s moved to more of just a merchandising machine, with indie promotions not as concerned about live audiences as they are with DVD sales. I think this misses the whole Why, which like I said, is probably unexplainable, and that frustrates peoples. The unexplained is why we have religion and science, to keep our little minds from fretting over things like this. But still, twenty-five years removed, wrestlers are far more casual about chatting with internet fans on how things are laid out, and pretty much anyone can pay a wad of money to a plethora of wrestlers with varying degrees of personal success to “live their dream” and be trained to be a wrestler or referee on a smaller level. And this has created more and more wrestlers who know it’s fake and never feel the need to ever pretend otherwise too hard, which is fine I guess, but they go through the motions of a wrestling match and try to make it look beautiful to the filter of an analytical mind, turning it to science, abandoning the Why.
This reminds me of this dude who is friends of friends – Penn Rollins – who’s some sort of celebrated minor figure as “seminal member” of math rock (prog punk?) bands from years ago. For Rollins, playing guitar has little to do with feeling or spirit; it’s just points on the guitar that he’s assigned numbers to so he’ll learn a riff, memorize the numerical sequences to put these together, and then proceed to follow the sequence on his guitar neck, to a tee. It allows him the ability to add different mathematical sequences that might seem odd or intriguing to the average musical ear, but there’s no magic or muse involved in the process whatsoever – all pure analysis. And to the analytical mind, it sounds awesome and seems like dude is the greatest guitar player who never got known on a large scale.
This is the wrestler of today – numbers in a sequence strung together so that analysis will find it to be highly acceptable.
And that’s how I realized why I hate wrestling now when I used to love it, because there is no more Why to it anymore. What is happening is far too obvious, and it doesn’t matter how hard two guys actually hit each other in the jaw or kick each other in the back, it’s still all too obvious. And that makes it looks fuckin’ stupid.
Sunday, March 9
Carbon 14 article: Little Red Hendricks & His Damned Roommates
(I don't keep good records of things, but this was in some issue of Carbon 14 magazine, which is a fine glossy periodical full of smut and wrestling and whores and rock-n-roll.)
Even though Carbon 14 can be chock full of adult-oriented material, me being the father of two children and understanding the new-fangled nature of young families steeped in the filthy rock-n-roll environment of post-hip hop America, I know there’s kids toddling around well-kept apartments in bad neighborhoods and in ranch houses that came cheap here and there who have copies of the Carbon 14 laying around their folks’ house, because when you’re kid-friendlying up the house in the morning (which is around 10), cleaning up empty beer bottles and emptying ash trays is obvious, but censoring the literature left lying around is not so obvious. Well, I figured I’d kick in a little something for the kids this issue, so once they get tired trying to figure out what’s going in the Justice Howard pictorials or why the cartoon people in King Velveeda’s pages are poking at each other the way they are, they’d have something to read. You older kids read to the younger ones, because reading is basis for hope for a better future and shit. So here’s a story for you kids…
Once upon a time, there was this dude named Little Red Hendricks, who was a short dude, and he lived with his cousin and his cousin’s homeboy and his cousin’s homeboy’s girlfriend on a farm, where they worked as laborers and shared a dilapidated doublewide the old tobacco farmer kept on the property for his laborers. Except what had happened was, the old tobacco farmer had always been losing money lately, because the companies that bought his crops added cancer to it to exploit it for their own gain, and then the lawyers who look for crap like that to exploit for their own gain got wind of it and made money off the obvious, and what all this meant was that the fast-talking old-timey dude at the tobacco auctions didn’t have to talk fast for so long anymore because the prices were driven down. So the old tobacco farmer sold off his farm to agribusiness that was gonna grow genetically rockified soybeans for use in Funyuns, and Little Red Hendricks and his cousin and his cousin’s homeboy and his cousin’s homeboy’s girlfriend, who had lived in the dilapidated doublewide for at least like a year-and-a-half, moved to the nearby city, to sort of try and find some new work.
It was the beginning of the month on a weekend in the city, which had a big college right there where they moved at, so college kids had all moved to new apartments for coming back to college in August, and there was tons of awesome shit in trash cans or piles in alleys, because the college kids would just throw what they thought was crap away, not realizing one man’s crap is another man’s some awesome shit. It was Friday, and there really isn’t any use looking for a job on a Friday because it just means you didn’t find a job earlier in the week and all the good stuff they save up for the Sunday paper anyways, so Little Red Hendricks was walking through the alleys, looking for good shit to put in his new apartment that he shared with his cousin and his cousin’s homeboy and his cousin’s homeboy’s girlfriend that his cousin’s homeboy’s girlfriend’s aunt had paid the first and last month rent for them on a one-year lease. About two blocks from their new crib, Red found a sweet-ass four-piece sectional sofa in the alley, that had been reupholstered in black and white leopard print fabric. Red dragged it behind an alley garage and covered it with some plastic he found at a construction site dumpster down at the other end, and went back to his apartment to get some help bringing it back.
“Hey, I found a brand new-looking four-piece couch down this alley,” Little Red Hendricks told his cousin, Goosebird Hendricks. Goosebird rolled his eyes.
“Damn, Red, we already got that nice-ass couch in the living room we took off that ol’ farmer dude because he didn’t want to have to move it. We don’t need another couch.”
“I know that, Goosebird, but I thought this one would be nice for putting on the back porch so we could lounge back there and look out on the city and the alley and all that. Why don’t you help me move it down here?”
“Damn, Red, I’m fixin’ to walk down to that campus and watch the college girls walking by. I ain’t gonna help you carry that thing up here.”
“Alright, where your man at?”
“Bulldog? Oh, they’re in the back watching the TV.”
So Little Red Hendricks went to the back room to see if he could find someone to help him bring the sofa back to the apartment. Bulldog got his name because he was sort of fat and his face was all scrunched up looking because of that. He and his girlfriend, Kat, were sitting on the nice sofa they already had watching Montel Williams.
“Hey, Bulldog, I found this nice couch up the street in the alley. Can you help me carry it back down here?”
Bulldog looked over with eyes like a Chinaman. “Do what?”
“Can you help me carry this four-piece sofa I found in the alley down here from up the road?”
“Aw man, Red, I just got high. I ain’t walking up there and sweating and shit to carry some raggedy-ass couch you found in an alley, man.”
Red looked at Kat. “What about you, Kat? Will you help me?”
“Hell naw, Red. Jerry Springer’s ‘bout to come on.”
So Little Red Hendricks went back to the sofa, uncovered one piece, hoisted it up onto his left shoulder and toted it back to the apartment for the back balcony porch. Then he went back and go the second part of it, toting that one back as well. The third piece was a large center piece and heavier than the others, but Little Red Hendricks shifted it up onto his strong little shoulders and wobbled back to the apartment with it. Finally, he carried the last section home, and after that big center piece, this last one was light as a feather. It was while carrying this last piece home, he passed a flyer on a telephone pole for a plasma clinic nearby that paid $25 to a first-time donor. The clinic’s address was like fifteen blocks away, but $25 was $25. Red dragged the last piece of the sofa out onto the balcony porch in the back of the house, set it all up in place, and put two milk crates side-by-side in front of it for a table.
He went back downstairs where Goosebird was making a mayonnaise and hot mustard sandwich. “Hey, Goosebird, I saw a flyer where we can give blood and get $25 today. You wanna go down there with me?”
“Where’s it at?”
“Just past 9th Street.”
“Damn, Red, I ain’t walking all the way down there to give no damn blood. I don’t even like no needles. You know the government’s giving people diseases on purpose in places like that anyways.”
“Do what?”
“Yeah, for real. I saw that shit on TV one time.”
“Whatever, Goose, you’re acting silly. Where’s Bulldog?”
“They’re in the back, watching TV.”
Little Red Hendricks went to the back room, where Bulldog and Kat were still sitting.
“Hey Bulldog, I know a place we can both go and hit a quick lick for $25 each.”
“How long is it gonna take?”
“I don’t know, like an hour or so.”
“Where?”
“Down past 9th Street.”
“Hell naw, Red. I ain’t walking all the way down there. It’s hot as a mug out there.”
Red looked at Kat. “What about you, Kat? You wanna walk down there with me and make some money real quick?”
“Huh? Nah, Red. Springer’s on, and that Maury Povich dude is gonna come on next.” So Red turned to the door to leave.
Bulldog hollered out, “Hey Red, you gonna go down there and do that still?”
“Yeah, Bulldog. Why, you change your mind?”
“Hell naw, Red. I was just gonna see if you could pick me up a peach blunt on the way back.” Red just turned and kept on walking out. “Make sure you get a philly blunt, and not no white owl,” Bulldog called out behind him.
Little Red Hendricks walked all the way down to the plasma clinic, and waited around for a while, then answered all the stupid questions, and the nurse lady was even nice enough to pretend he brought in an ad from the newspaper for an extra ten bucks, so Red was gonna get $35. He sat in the main room and they hooked the machine up to him that took his white blood cells out and replaced it with some cold liquid, and they had cable on the TV monitors, which was showing Good Times, one of the later ones where J.J.’s sister was married to that light-skinned dude who did the cartoon voices all the time. Little Red Hendricks finished up fast, squeezing his palm in and out of fists the whole time, got his $35 in cash money, and walked home. On the way back, he asked some dude he passed where the nearest grocery store was at.
“Well, you got that corner store on 3rd, but if you walk on over past Main Street towards that big baseball field by the college, they got a big grocery store over there, with vegetables and everything.” Little Red Hendricks thanked the stranger, and went back to his apartment, where Goosebird was peeking out the kitchen window at the house next door.
“Hey, Goose, I’m gonna walk over to a store over by that big baseball field. You wanna roll with?”
“What for, Red?”
“In case I need help carrying something back.”
“Naw, Red. I ain’t your slave. Besides, I’m busy,” and he peeked back out the curtain, which was a piece of orange fabric that Kat had stapled over the window at the top.
Little Red Hendricks walked to the back room where he heard Bulldog and Kat laughing.
“Bulldog, I’m gonna walk over to the store by that baseball field. What’re you doing?”
He looked up with the eyes of a tired Chinaman. “I ain’t walking nowhere like that, Red. You must be crazy. I’m gonna sit right here on my big ass and watch Cops.”
“What about you, Kat? You wanna walk with me to the store?”
“We’re watching Cops right now, Red. You know we like to watch Cops.”
So Little Red Hendricks walked all the way over to the strip mall. He cut through a couple of alleys to make the trip shorter, where he passed a young, dark-as-night dreaded dude. Making eye contact, on a lark, since the kid looked thuggish but had gentle honest eyes, Red asked if the kid knew where he could get some weed. The kid already had him covered, so after Red promised he wasn’t the police, he bought himself a dimebag. At the grocery store, he grabbed a case of Natural Ice, and a peach white owl. He was gonna get some chicken from the deli, but he saw a Burger King across the street outside, so he just paid for his case of beer and blunt and went to the Burger King, where he got a Triple Whopper value meal, king-sized, and still had like seven dollars leftover. He walked all the way back to the apartment, waiting to eat his fast food and drink a beer on the couch he dragged home today. When he walked in the door, Goosebird was trimming his beard in the bathroom mirror, and smelled the food when Red walked past. He followed the smell.
Red walked through the back room to take the stairs up to the back balcony porch. Bulldog saw him walk through with the case of beer and jumped up to see what was going on. Kat cut off the second episode of Cops and followed as well.
Little Red Hendricks sat down on the four-piece sectional sofa he had dragged back piece by piece, tucked the case of beer beside the end of the couch, pulling out one can and popping the top, and took his king-sized value meal out the bag, ripping the bag open to dump his fries out on along with some ketchup. He saw Goosebird, Bulldog, and Kat standing at the door, surveying the scene.
“Who will help me eat this Whopper and drink up all these beers and smoke this blunt I’m about to roll, chilling out on this zebra-printed couch?”
“I WILL! I WILL! I WILL!” they all said together, excitedly.
“Oh no you won’t. Ain’t nobody help me carry this couch up here, and ain’t nobody go with me to the clinic, and ain’t nobody even wanna walk to the store either.” And Little Red Hendricks sat there comfortably, ate his burger, got high, and drunk as hell to boot, and didn’t share any of it with nobody.
Even though Carbon 14 can be chock full of adult-oriented material, me being the father of two children and understanding the new-fangled nature of young families steeped in the filthy rock-n-roll environment of post-hip hop America, I know there’s kids toddling around well-kept apartments in bad neighborhoods and in ranch houses that came cheap here and there who have copies of the Carbon 14 laying around their folks’ house, because when you’re kid-friendlying up the house in the morning (which is around 10), cleaning up empty beer bottles and emptying ash trays is obvious, but censoring the literature left lying around is not so obvious. Well, I figured I’d kick in a little something for the kids this issue, so once they get tired trying to figure out what’s going in the Justice Howard pictorials or why the cartoon people in King Velveeda’s pages are poking at each other the way they are, they’d have something to read. You older kids read to the younger ones, because reading is basis for hope for a better future and shit. So here’s a story for you kids…
Once upon a time, there was this dude named Little Red Hendricks, who was a short dude, and he lived with his cousin and his cousin’s homeboy and his cousin’s homeboy’s girlfriend on a farm, where they worked as laborers and shared a dilapidated doublewide the old tobacco farmer kept on the property for his laborers. Except what had happened was, the old tobacco farmer had always been losing money lately, because the companies that bought his crops added cancer to it to exploit it for their own gain, and then the lawyers who look for crap like that to exploit for their own gain got wind of it and made money off the obvious, and what all this meant was that the fast-talking old-timey dude at the tobacco auctions didn’t have to talk fast for so long anymore because the prices were driven down. So the old tobacco farmer sold off his farm to agribusiness that was gonna grow genetically rockified soybeans for use in Funyuns, and Little Red Hendricks and his cousin and his cousin’s homeboy and his cousin’s homeboy’s girlfriend, who had lived in the dilapidated doublewide for at least like a year-and-a-half, moved to the nearby city, to sort of try and find some new work.
It was the beginning of the month on a weekend in the city, which had a big college right there where they moved at, so college kids had all moved to new apartments for coming back to college in August, and there was tons of awesome shit in trash cans or piles in alleys, because the college kids would just throw what they thought was crap away, not realizing one man’s crap is another man’s some awesome shit. It was Friday, and there really isn’t any use looking for a job on a Friday because it just means you didn’t find a job earlier in the week and all the good stuff they save up for the Sunday paper anyways, so Little Red Hendricks was walking through the alleys, looking for good shit to put in his new apartment that he shared with his cousin and his cousin’s homeboy and his cousin’s homeboy’s girlfriend that his cousin’s homeboy’s girlfriend’s aunt had paid the first and last month rent for them on a one-year lease. About two blocks from their new crib, Red found a sweet-ass four-piece sectional sofa in the alley, that had been reupholstered in black and white leopard print fabric. Red dragged it behind an alley garage and covered it with some plastic he found at a construction site dumpster down at the other end, and went back to his apartment to get some help bringing it back.
“Hey, I found a brand new-looking four-piece couch down this alley,” Little Red Hendricks told his cousin, Goosebird Hendricks. Goosebird rolled his eyes.
“Damn, Red, we already got that nice-ass couch in the living room we took off that ol’ farmer dude because he didn’t want to have to move it. We don’t need another couch.”
“I know that, Goosebird, but I thought this one would be nice for putting on the back porch so we could lounge back there and look out on the city and the alley and all that. Why don’t you help me move it down here?”
“Damn, Red, I’m fixin’ to walk down to that campus and watch the college girls walking by. I ain’t gonna help you carry that thing up here.”
“Alright, where your man at?”
“Bulldog? Oh, they’re in the back watching the TV.”
So Little Red Hendricks went to the back room to see if he could find someone to help him bring the sofa back to the apartment. Bulldog got his name because he was sort of fat and his face was all scrunched up looking because of that. He and his girlfriend, Kat, were sitting on the nice sofa they already had watching Montel Williams.
“Hey, Bulldog, I found this nice couch up the street in the alley. Can you help me carry it back down here?”
Bulldog looked over with eyes like a Chinaman. “Do what?”
“Can you help me carry this four-piece sofa I found in the alley down here from up the road?”
“Aw man, Red, I just got high. I ain’t walking up there and sweating and shit to carry some raggedy-ass couch you found in an alley, man.”
Red looked at Kat. “What about you, Kat? Will you help me?”
“Hell naw, Red. Jerry Springer’s ‘bout to come on.”
So Little Red Hendricks went back to the sofa, uncovered one piece, hoisted it up onto his left shoulder and toted it back to the apartment for the back balcony porch. Then he went back and go the second part of it, toting that one back as well. The third piece was a large center piece and heavier than the others, but Little Red Hendricks shifted it up onto his strong little shoulders and wobbled back to the apartment with it. Finally, he carried the last section home, and after that big center piece, this last one was light as a feather. It was while carrying this last piece home, he passed a flyer on a telephone pole for a plasma clinic nearby that paid $25 to a first-time donor. The clinic’s address was like fifteen blocks away, but $25 was $25. Red dragged the last piece of the sofa out onto the balcony porch in the back of the house, set it all up in place, and put two milk crates side-by-side in front of it for a table.
He went back downstairs where Goosebird was making a mayonnaise and hot mustard sandwich. “Hey, Goosebird, I saw a flyer where we can give blood and get $25 today. You wanna go down there with me?”
“Where’s it at?”
“Just past 9th Street.”
“Damn, Red, I ain’t walking all the way down there to give no damn blood. I don’t even like no needles. You know the government’s giving people diseases on purpose in places like that anyways.”
“Do what?”
“Yeah, for real. I saw that shit on TV one time.”
“Whatever, Goose, you’re acting silly. Where’s Bulldog?”
“They’re in the back, watching TV.”
Little Red Hendricks went to the back room, where Bulldog and Kat were still sitting.
“Hey Bulldog, I know a place we can both go and hit a quick lick for $25 each.”
“How long is it gonna take?”
“I don’t know, like an hour or so.”
“Where?”
“Down past 9th Street.”
“Hell naw, Red. I ain’t walking all the way down there. It’s hot as a mug out there.”
Red looked at Kat. “What about you, Kat? You wanna walk down there with me and make some money real quick?”
“Huh? Nah, Red. Springer’s on, and that Maury Povich dude is gonna come on next.” So Red turned to the door to leave.
Bulldog hollered out, “Hey Red, you gonna go down there and do that still?”
“Yeah, Bulldog. Why, you change your mind?”
“Hell naw, Red. I was just gonna see if you could pick me up a peach blunt on the way back.” Red just turned and kept on walking out. “Make sure you get a philly blunt, and not no white owl,” Bulldog called out behind him.
Little Red Hendricks walked all the way down to the plasma clinic, and waited around for a while, then answered all the stupid questions, and the nurse lady was even nice enough to pretend he brought in an ad from the newspaper for an extra ten bucks, so Red was gonna get $35. He sat in the main room and they hooked the machine up to him that took his white blood cells out and replaced it with some cold liquid, and they had cable on the TV monitors, which was showing Good Times, one of the later ones where J.J.’s sister was married to that light-skinned dude who did the cartoon voices all the time. Little Red Hendricks finished up fast, squeezing his palm in and out of fists the whole time, got his $35 in cash money, and walked home. On the way back, he asked some dude he passed where the nearest grocery store was at.
“Well, you got that corner store on 3rd, but if you walk on over past Main Street towards that big baseball field by the college, they got a big grocery store over there, with vegetables and everything.” Little Red Hendricks thanked the stranger, and went back to his apartment, where Goosebird was peeking out the kitchen window at the house next door.
“Hey, Goose, I’m gonna walk over to a store over by that big baseball field. You wanna roll with?”
“What for, Red?”
“In case I need help carrying something back.”
“Naw, Red. I ain’t your slave. Besides, I’m busy,” and he peeked back out the curtain, which was a piece of orange fabric that Kat had stapled over the window at the top.
Little Red Hendricks walked to the back room where he heard Bulldog and Kat laughing.
“Bulldog, I’m gonna walk over to the store by that baseball field. What’re you doing?”
He looked up with the eyes of a tired Chinaman. “I ain’t walking nowhere like that, Red. You must be crazy. I’m gonna sit right here on my big ass and watch Cops.”
“What about you, Kat? You wanna walk with me to the store?”
“We’re watching Cops right now, Red. You know we like to watch Cops.”
So Little Red Hendricks walked all the way over to the strip mall. He cut through a couple of alleys to make the trip shorter, where he passed a young, dark-as-night dreaded dude. Making eye contact, on a lark, since the kid looked thuggish but had gentle honest eyes, Red asked if the kid knew where he could get some weed. The kid already had him covered, so after Red promised he wasn’t the police, he bought himself a dimebag. At the grocery store, he grabbed a case of Natural Ice, and a peach white owl. He was gonna get some chicken from the deli, but he saw a Burger King across the street outside, so he just paid for his case of beer and blunt and went to the Burger King, where he got a Triple Whopper value meal, king-sized, and still had like seven dollars leftover. He walked all the way back to the apartment, waiting to eat his fast food and drink a beer on the couch he dragged home today. When he walked in the door, Goosebird was trimming his beard in the bathroom mirror, and smelled the food when Red walked past. He followed the smell.
Red walked through the back room to take the stairs up to the back balcony porch. Bulldog saw him walk through with the case of beer and jumped up to see what was going on. Kat cut off the second episode of Cops and followed as well.
Little Red Hendricks sat down on the four-piece sectional sofa he had dragged back piece by piece, tucked the case of beer beside the end of the couch, pulling out one can and popping the top, and took his king-sized value meal out the bag, ripping the bag open to dump his fries out on along with some ketchup. He saw Goosebird, Bulldog, and Kat standing at the door, surveying the scene.
“Who will help me eat this Whopper and drink up all these beers and smoke this blunt I’m about to roll, chilling out on this zebra-printed couch?”
“I WILL! I WILL! I WILL!” they all said together, excitedly.
“Oh no you won’t. Ain’t nobody help me carry this couch up here, and ain’t nobody go with me to the clinic, and ain’t nobody even wanna walk to the store either.” And Little Red Hendricks sat there comfortably, ate his burger, got high, and drunk as hell to boot, and didn’t share any of it with nobody.
Friday, March 7
S14: CAA Tournament's Top Returning Scorers
The Colonial Athletic Association is my local area's mid-major basketball conference, home to my alma mater VCU, and the small-time hoops league that's made noise in the NCAA tourney the past couple years. George Mason had their wacky run to the Final Four two years ago, and then VCU upset Duke last year. Their conference tourney started today in Richmond, and hopefully if motherfuckers pay their bills to me, me and my man D-mo will ride up to catch the semifinals on Sunday.
Anyways, a theme I wanted to run with in the sporting 14 categories, is guys who have scored the most points the previous 3 seasons in conference tournaments. Traditional basketball lifetimes for a college player were four straight years, although with red-shirting and early exit for the NBA (which usually doesn't affect the CAA), that's all shot to hell. So what I did was go back through the previous three years' worth of CAA conference tournaments, and come up with a list of the top 14 scorers in those tournaments who are on a team again this year, returning to battle it out for a title that means nothing outside of the 12 schools involved, and is the only guaranteed way any of these teams have to getting into March Madness.
#1: Antoine Agudio (Hofstra guard, 106 previous CAA tournament points) - Agudio is Hofstra's all-time leading scorer and the CAA's leading scorer this year. A scrappy little sculpted-beard Puerto Rican dude, I imagine after his senior year runs it's course in the Richmond Coliseum this year (as Hofstra has it's worse regular season record in five years), he'll poke around minor league basketball for a number of years, because when you score tons of points, making little money playing basketball in little towns or overseas is far better than just going back home and using your business degree or whatever the fuck to run a construction company.
#2: Will Thomas (George Mason forward, 83 previous points) - Part of the Patriots' crazy appearance in the Final Four a couple years back, getting his last run. George Mason is a #2 seed, and has a couple of senior leaders who have more post-season experience than anybody after the previous couple years, so they should cause some damage. And even though I list him as a forward, at 6'7", and with his talent, he's about as imposing an inside threat as there is in the CAA, where the only 7-footers who ever come through usually have long Eastern European names lacking on vowels.
#3: T.J. Carter (UNC-Wilmington guard, 76 previous points) - Was CAA tourney player of the year two years ago when they beat George Mason for the conference title, but missed last year due to injury, which makes his placement this high on the list pretty impressive. The Seahawks are the #2 seed coming into the tournament, and if they fire on all cylinders behind Carter, stand a chance to walk away with nets hanging around their necks on Monday night.
#4: Folarin Campbell (George Mason guard, 70 previous points) - Another key roleplayer from that GMU Final Four team, now along with Thomas providing the senior leadership on this team. I think he was the dude that had the awesome afro then, but the press guide pics of this dude are close-cut standard respectable black guy hair, so I'm not sure. A guy named Folarin with a ragged fro is something I can get behind, but regular hair? Not so much. I support freak flags flying.
#5: Dre Smith (George Mason guard, 69 previous points) - Only a junior, and it's odd to realize that even with three of the top five returning scorers in this year's CAA tourney, George Mason has not won this thing in 7 years. But it also highlights the same thing that helped them get to the Final Four two years ago: that this is a team full of contributors who can all step in and take each other's places. It's not as deep in the respect as it was in '06, but it's a team trait nonetheless.
#6: Eric Maynor (VCU guard, 55 previous points) - CAA player of the year, and the guy who made all the headlines last year by single-handedly getting VCU the conference championship (he scored the final six points in the championship game against George Mason, in amazing fashion), and then by daggering Duke with a last second game-winner in the NCAA tournament, which as a fan, was the most heart-palpitating moment I've ever experienced. Being a graduate of VCU is nothing I'm proud of or anything, like I don't roll around with sweatshirts and shit, but I will always root for the basketball team, even though I know they are in all likelihood coddled thugs with four babies who attend less classes than I did in semesters where I disappeared after my financial aid check cleared the bank. Maynor is actually so good that there is talk he may declare for the NBA draft, even though he has one more year of eligibility. He is, at this point, prognosticated as one of the top five or so point guards, meaning he could be a high second round pick. Coming from the CAA, for someone to even to be considering leaving early is amazing. Anthony Grant, coach of the VCU Rams, who will be gone probably at the end of this season to a higher profile job, like he almost took last year before Billy Donovan decided to stay at Florida, and Eric Maynor lucked into each other, because although both have individual talents as a coach and player, they've helped make each other far more marketable at the next level.
#7: Brian Henderson (Old Dominion guard, 53 previous points) - The senior floorleader on a team that was struggling and now starts three freshmen. He is not an imposing gamebreaker so much as a guy who has contributed ever since his own freshman year.
#8: Leonard Mendez (Georgia State guard, 50 previous points) - Two of the most exciting points scored in last year's tournament were Mendez's well-beyond-the-arc buzzer beater to down William & Mary to end the first round last year. They meet again, and Mendez again is a merciless small college point scorer, not afraid to throw it up. Georgia State, however, has never been much more than an afterthought in their limited time in the CAA. This year will be no different.
#9: Frank Elegar (Drexel center, 49 previous points) - At 6'9", he is about as close to a true center the CAA has, and leads the league in rebounds and blocked shots. His presence should not be felt beyond the first day, with Drexel being a #10 seed, though.
#10: Todd Hendley (UNC-Wilmington forward, 45 previous points) - Solid starter for the Seahawks, who have a wave of interchangeable scorers after their immediate top threat of T.J. Carter. Another senior, like everybody on this list thus far except for Maynor and Dre Smith.
#11: Michael Anderson (VCU forward, 42 previous points) - Another senior, enjoying his best year to date at VCU. You figure in a mid-major conference tournament like this, him being a senior, and VCU only having to ride five minutes to the tournament site from campus, should all factor into him being ephedrined up for this weekend.
#12: Herb Courtney (Delaware forward, 38 previous points) - Solid player for a team not really in the hunt to win it all this weekend. Courtney comes in on a roll, but four games in four days seems impossible for Delaware, a #7 seed in this tourney. But I guess that's why they call it madness, because anything is possible.
#13: Deven Dickerson (Georgia State center, 33 previous points) - It's amazing a team with such little tournament presence as Georgia State could end up with two guys in the top 14, much less their low-scoring center, who must've had a game somewhere along the way the past two years where he went nuts, because him being here goes against all conventional logic, as he's probably not even considered a major threat in his first round game today, much less in the tournament as a whole.
#14: Darryl Monroe (George Mason guard, 32 previous points) - He is listed on their roster, but the capsule previews in the local papers make no mention of him, so he must be injured or some shit. But if he is on their stupid team roster, then he is eligible for my list of sports dorkery.
Anyways, a theme I wanted to run with in the sporting 14 categories, is guys who have scored the most points the previous 3 seasons in conference tournaments. Traditional basketball lifetimes for a college player were four straight years, although with red-shirting and early exit for the NBA (which usually doesn't affect the CAA), that's all shot to hell. So what I did was go back through the previous three years' worth of CAA conference tournaments, and come up with a list of the top 14 scorers in those tournaments who are on a team again this year, returning to battle it out for a title that means nothing outside of the 12 schools involved, and is the only guaranteed way any of these teams have to getting into March Madness.
#1: Antoine Agudio (Hofstra guard, 106 previous CAA tournament points) - Agudio is Hofstra's all-time leading scorer and the CAA's leading scorer this year. A scrappy little sculpted-beard Puerto Rican dude, I imagine after his senior year runs it's course in the Richmond Coliseum this year (as Hofstra has it's worse regular season record in five years), he'll poke around minor league basketball for a number of years, because when you score tons of points, making little money playing basketball in little towns or overseas is far better than just going back home and using your business degree or whatever the fuck to run a construction company.
#2: Will Thomas (George Mason forward, 83 previous points) - Part of the Patriots' crazy appearance in the Final Four a couple years back, getting his last run. George Mason is a #2 seed, and has a couple of senior leaders who have more post-season experience than anybody after the previous couple years, so they should cause some damage. And even though I list him as a forward, at 6'7", and with his talent, he's about as imposing an inside threat as there is in the CAA, where the only 7-footers who ever come through usually have long Eastern European names lacking on vowels.
#3: T.J. Carter (UNC-Wilmington guard, 76 previous points) - Was CAA tourney player of the year two years ago when they beat George Mason for the conference title, but missed last year due to injury, which makes his placement this high on the list pretty impressive. The Seahawks are the #2 seed coming into the tournament, and if they fire on all cylinders behind Carter, stand a chance to walk away with nets hanging around their necks on Monday night.
#4: Folarin Campbell (George Mason guard, 70 previous points) - Another key roleplayer from that GMU Final Four team, now along with Thomas providing the senior leadership on this team. I think he was the dude that had the awesome afro then, but the press guide pics of this dude are close-cut standard respectable black guy hair, so I'm not sure. A guy named Folarin with a ragged fro is something I can get behind, but regular hair? Not so much. I support freak flags flying.
#5: Dre Smith (George Mason guard, 69 previous points) - Only a junior, and it's odd to realize that even with three of the top five returning scorers in this year's CAA tourney, George Mason has not won this thing in 7 years. But it also highlights the same thing that helped them get to the Final Four two years ago: that this is a team full of contributors who can all step in and take each other's places. It's not as deep in the respect as it was in '06, but it's a team trait nonetheless.
#6: Eric Maynor (VCU guard, 55 previous points) - CAA player of the year, and the guy who made all the headlines last year by single-handedly getting VCU the conference championship (he scored the final six points in the championship game against George Mason, in amazing fashion), and then by daggering Duke with a last second game-winner in the NCAA tournament, which as a fan, was the most heart-palpitating moment I've ever experienced. Being a graduate of VCU is nothing I'm proud of or anything, like I don't roll around with sweatshirts and shit, but I will always root for the basketball team, even though I know they are in all likelihood coddled thugs with four babies who attend less classes than I did in semesters where I disappeared after my financial aid check cleared the bank. Maynor is actually so good that there is talk he may declare for the NBA draft, even though he has one more year of eligibility. He is, at this point, prognosticated as one of the top five or so point guards, meaning he could be a high second round pick. Coming from the CAA, for someone to even to be considering leaving early is amazing. Anthony Grant, coach of the VCU Rams, who will be gone probably at the end of this season to a higher profile job, like he almost took last year before Billy Donovan decided to stay at Florida, and Eric Maynor lucked into each other, because although both have individual talents as a coach and player, they've helped make each other far more marketable at the next level.
#7: Brian Henderson (Old Dominion guard, 53 previous points) - The senior floorleader on a team that was struggling and now starts three freshmen. He is not an imposing gamebreaker so much as a guy who has contributed ever since his own freshman year.
#8: Leonard Mendez (Georgia State guard, 50 previous points) - Two of the most exciting points scored in last year's tournament were Mendez's well-beyond-the-arc buzzer beater to down William & Mary to end the first round last year. They meet again, and Mendez again is a merciless small college point scorer, not afraid to throw it up. Georgia State, however, has never been much more than an afterthought in their limited time in the CAA. This year will be no different.
#9: Frank Elegar (Drexel center, 49 previous points) - At 6'9", he is about as close to a true center the CAA has, and leads the league in rebounds and blocked shots. His presence should not be felt beyond the first day, with Drexel being a #10 seed, though.
#10: Todd Hendley (UNC-Wilmington forward, 45 previous points) - Solid starter for the Seahawks, who have a wave of interchangeable scorers after their immediate top threat of T.J. Carter. Another senior, like everybody on this list thus far except for Maynor and Dre Smith.
#11: Michael Anderson (VCU forward, 42 previous points) - Another senior, enjoying his best year to date at VCU. You figure in a mid-major conference tournament like this, him being a senior, and VCU only having to ride five minutes to the tournament site from campus, should all factor into him being ephedrined up for this weekend.
#12: Herb Courtney (Delaware forward, 38 previous points) - Solid player for a team not really in the hunt to win it all this weekend. Courtney comes in on a roll, but four games in four days seems impossible for Delaware, a #7 seed in this tourney. But I guess that's why they call it madness, because anything is possible.
#13: Deven Dickerson (Georgia State center, 33 previous points) - It's amazing a team with such little tournament presence as Georgia State could end up with two guys in the top 14, much less their low-scoring center, who must've had a game somewhere along the way the past two years where he went nuts, because him being here goes against all conventional logic, as he's probably not even considered a major threat in his first round game today, much less in the tournament as a whole.
#14: Darryl Monroe (George Mason guard, 32 previous points) - He is listed on their roster, but the capsule previews in the local papers make no mention of him, so he must be injured or some shit. But if he is on their stupid team roster, then he is eligible for my list of sports dorkery.
Thursday, March 6
MNZ: Oxford American Spring 2006 issue 53
Found this in the free bin outside the library and automatically grabbed that bizzlenitch. The Oxford American is filled with retarded pretentiousness, which all at once completely pisses me off and also gives me great hope to one day be paid to wax long-windedly about the idiotic things I have filled my sharp drunkard brain with. This is one of their Best of the South issues, which are always goofy as fuck. But there is an article on that Billy Mitchell dude from the King of Kong documentary that’s out now that you should probably see. He’s the mullet guy who is adamant about keeping his Donkey Kong record. The movie is a great movie, even with your expectations about “Haha, these nerds,” since it’s about grown dudes playing Donkey Kong. And the article in this magazine about him, and him being the first person to ever play a perfect game of Pac-Man, is just as great. In fact, it made me wish the documentary had explored Billy Mitchell more instead of just leaving him as this weird, self-important freak stuck in the ‘80s. He is obviously a mastermind that somehow got warped, except in the process of the warping, his mind stayed sharp, just he uses it for queer instead of good. Although I don’t think he’s queer at all, and he would probably condescend at me if he heard me say it.
Had I money to waste, Oxford American would be like in top five magazines to subscribe to, although I am 95% certain I would regret that decisions two issues in.
Had I money to waste, Oxford American would be like in top five magazines to subscribe to, although I am 95% certain I would regret that decisions two issues in.
S14: introduction to new dork feature
#1: I had originally set up a separate blog for this Sporting 14 idea, where I list 14 things of a sporting nature, and oftentimes of a dorked out calculated obsessive compulsive disorderly nature, thinking other people may eventually join me in such a thematic blog. But let’s be serious, no one else ever shares your own retarded vision (assuming you even have a vision, as most seem to be the walking fucked lately), so why bother? I’m going through the manual motions of bringing a bunch of stupid things from other blogs back into rojonekku to have one compendium of Raven’s multi-faceted stupidiocy odyssey, so I might as well just start this one here as well and not waste the months.
#2: When I was a kid, I had thousands of baseball cards. I would put them bitches in order by like ERA for pitchers and batting average for batters. For days. And as soon as I was done, for like an hour I’d bask in the glory of my success, and then I’d re-order them by year. Or I’d pick out ones that you could see the dude’s number and put them in number order and split them up randomly onto teams. Bask, repeat in some other different order. Constantly. This is some of the same, except I’m far too old enough to know better.
#3: I always like sports, but probably not what you like, and it fills my AM airwaves and brainwashes me into arguments over the minutiae, and oftentimes stat geeks don’t stat up the stupid shit I think of, so I figured I’d fill that void, for myself.
#4: Math is fundamental, and I still love math even though I don’t ever do it except practicing my rainman lite in my head from time to time. There used to be this dude named Sandor on Grace Street in Richmond who had a used book store (meaning he sold old porn mags) and he was autistic and would always be playing like big band music off the AM radio, and you’d carry like four or five magazines and he’d just say the prices out loud and figure up tax and tell you the total just like that. I remember years later, I read about someone robbing his store and shooting at him, and that bothered me. I don’t like weird autistic dudes who sold me porn getting shot at during armed robberies in my ideal world.
#5: I am a believer in numerology and that all things are fixed and even chaos has order, so when you scratch at numbers all the time, eventually you figure out things they didn’t expect you to figure out. And when I say “they”, I mean those who control everything, whether they be lizards or aliens or jews or whatever.
#6: I secretly want to be one of those dumbasses who write for ESPN page 2, and I figure this is a good gimmick.
#7: One day when I was skipping work, I sat around in the Northside Library reading Hey Rube by Hunter S. Thompson. HST is one of my all-time faves when it comes to retarded words, but man, his sports columns in that Hey Rube fucking sucked. I know it’s theorized he was suicided for getting too close to the truth about homo escorts and senators and bohemian grove and all, but I think he just realized his time was done and all his self-destructiveness hadn’t done the job, so he had to take it into his own hands, or accelerate things.
#8: I have drank more than a 35-year-old man should have drank by this point, not to mention all the LSD I used to take when I was selling it in college, so making good decisions is not always part of my repertoire.
#9: I don’t play video games nor watch TV really, so I need some form of mindless bullshit to suck away the days of my life so that I don’t think too hard about my lack of actual soul-satisfying moments that would cause me to question being a productive little fuckface wasting away my life.
#10: I was gonna say, “In honor of #14...” but then I couldn’t think of a numbered fourteen athlete who I unnecessarily idolized because of the way he played a game on my television set. But still, the thought is there.
#11: Thinking up 14 reasons to do this is real hard, especially when most of the lists will end up being some nonsense numerical thing I spent like five hours tabulating using the internet’s endless amount of useless knowledge, and it’s really fucking dorky when I think about it too hard. And sad. So even beyond like the first three reasons, there is no reason. But I’ve created this 14 gimmick, so I have to force myself to stick with it, even in the beginning. Which is also ridiculous, because I always stifle myself with these odd parameters that really don’t mean anything.
#12: This thing will ultimately explain itself, except it will get lost and mixed in with all the other nonsense. That, in itself, is funny to me, because someone will come because of beerbox haiku and find lists of some retarded basketball college nature, or they’ll come to read the unfinished EWA Hot 100 Jamz of All-Time list, and automatically get skeeved out by my obvious fruitiness.
#13: I do it for the kids, to hopefully steer them away from looking at the internet porn, to save it for me. I don’t like when I find a really hot girl to masturbate at if other people look at her, even though I know that’s the whole point of her being photographed naked. Still, it upsets me. What I have with her is special.
#14: Ha! I did it. Wait till you see how fucking stupid some of these lists are gonna be. I’m shooting for like 2 to 3 a week, but I’m sure that will wax on and wane off according to my real life dictations of stress and hatefulness, not to mention once it gets warm and me and the old lady start having sex out in the back yard under the apple trees again.
#2: When I was a kid, I had thousands of baseball cards. I would put them bitches in order by like ERA for pitchers and batting average for batters. For days. And as soon as I was done, for like an hour I’d bask in the glory of my success, and then I’d re-order them by year. Or I’d pick out ones that you could see the dude’s number and put them in number order and split them up randomly onto teams. Bask, repeat in some other different order. Constantly. This is some of the same, except I’m far too old enough to know better.
#3: I always like sports, but probably not what you like, and it fills my AM airwaves and brainwashes me into arguments over the minutiae, and oftentimes stat geeks don’t stat up the stupid shit I think of, so I figured I’d fill that void, for myself.
#4: Math is fundamental, and I still love math even though I don’t ever do it except practicing my rainman lite in my head from time to time. There used to be this dude named Sandor on Grace Street in Richmond who had a used book store (meaning he sold old porn mags) and he was autistic and would always be playing like big band music off the AM radio, and you’d carry like four or five magazines and he’d just say the prices out loud and figure up tax and tell you the total just like that. I remember years later, I read about someone robbing his store and shooting at him, and that bothered me. I don’t like weird autistic dudes who sold me porn getting shot at during armed robberies in my ideal world.
#5: I am a believer in numerology and that all things are fixed and even chaos has order, so when you scratch at numbers all the time, eventually you figure out things they didn’t expect you to figure out. And when I say “they”, I mean those who control everything, whether they be lizards or aliens or jews or whatever.
#6: I secretly want to be one of those dumbasses who write for ESPN page 2, and I figure this is a good gimmick.
#7: One day when I was skipping work, I sat around in the Northside Library reading Hey Rube by Hunter S. Thompson. HST is one of my all-time faves when it comes to retarded words, but man, his sports columns in that Hey Rube fucking sucked. I know it’s theorized he was suicided for getting too close to the truth about homo escorts and senators and bohemian grove and all, but I think he just realized his time was done and all his self-destructiveness hadn’t done the job, so he had to take it into his own hands, or accelerate things.
#8: I have drank more than a 35-year-old man should have drank by this point, not to mention all the LSD I used to take when I was selling it in college, so making good decisions is not always part of my repertoire.
#9: I don’t play video games nor watch TV really, so I need some form of mindless bullshit to suck away the days of my life so that I don’t think too hard about my lack of actual soul-satisfying moments that would cause me to question being a productive little fuckface wasting away my life.
#10: I was gonna say, “In honor of #14...” but then I couldn’t think of a numbered fourteen athlete who I unnecessarily idolized because of the way he played a game on my television set. But still, the thought is there.
#11: Thinking up 14 reasons to do this is real hard, especially when most of the lists will end up being some nonsense numerical thing I spent like five hours tabulating using the internet’s endless amount of useless knowledge, and it’s really fucking dorky when I think about it too hard. And sad. So even beyond like the first three reasons, there is no reason. But I’ve created this 14 gimmick, so I have to force myself to stick with it, even in the beginning. Which is also ridiculous, because I always stifle myself with these odd parameters that really don’t mean anything.
#12: This thing will ultimately explain itself, except it will get lost and mixed in with all the other nonsense. That, in itself, is funny to me, because someone will come because of beerbox haiku and find lists of some retarded basketball college nature, or they’ll come to read the unfinished EWA Hot 100 Jamz of All-Time list, and automatically get skeeved out by my obvious fruitiness.
#13: I do it for the kids, to hopefully steer them away from looking at the internet porn, to save it for me. I don’t like when I find a really hot girl to masturbate at if other people look at her, even though I know that’s the whole point of her being photographed naked. Still, it upsets me. What I have with her is special.
#14: Ha! I did it. Wait till you see how fucking stupid some of these lists are gonna be. I’m shooting for like 2 to 3 a week, but I’m sure that will wax on and wane off according to my real life dictations of stress and hatefulness, not to mention once it gets warm and me and the old lady start having sex out in the back yard under the apple trees again.
Monday, March 3
rebirth
So I'm starting this blog back up as a home to a bunch of odd projects I've done. I am going through the manual ass project of importing posts from other places. Not that anyone is here to see this, but just in case robots are tracking my actions, I want this written for them to understand.
Wednesday, February 6
$20 Record Challenge
We had some shit on the message board from forever ago (like 7 months, which is actually two or three internet forevers) where you could drop $20 at the used record store and then share upon what which you founded in the dusty dirty ass dank bins of your local dinosaur ass record store still offering up vinyl, probably in some homo ass college part of town where dudes who purposely make their hair messed up walk by dripping with calculated irony. And as much as I hate those dudes, they are a refreshing break from the internet where everything is collected, datafied, proffered, and gobbled up by others like cybertronic Pac Men trying to eat up everything they'll never listen to and hope they dodge ghostly viruses or overloaded hard drives. Fucking faggots.
Anyways, my wife asked me what I wanted for my birthday (Valentine's Day, in case you fucking faggots want to pretend to be my real friend and go like "Happy B-day Raven" in the stupid cbox like the fucking social misfit robot world faggots you truly are), and I thunk it over and over, and it occurred to me I hadn't been record digging in forever. So she said take $40 and do that shit (which is a lot because up until about a week ago, we were steadily two months behind on the mortgage all winter long... lazy economy and lazy dude don't make a good tag team for financial success), so I did that shit, and have been secretly listening to them in the camper so my kids don't know I already got my present. They'll wrap them up next week and I can open them on my birthday and act surprised. Well, I broke this shit up into two $20 challenges, since I wanted to, and this the first $20 I literally spent at the record store. (Props to Plan 9 Records in Richmond, VA, with the a giant selection of shit in the basement. I'm also glad that homo that prices records only knows hipster bullshit so I could get some awesome shit for cheap. Haha you eastern European looking fuckers... why is it record store nerd dudes who tell you how much you get for your records you stole and are trying to sell always look like eastern European dudes with Fader magazine subscriptions?)
Nashville Original Motion Picture Soundtrack - $1
This is some Robert Altman flick from the '70s starring Karen Black that my local shithole small town video store used to have on VHS. Basically, Karen Black is physically abused as a kid, runs away to be a country singer, gets sexually abused by a couple of Nashville heavyweight superstars, and then I don't remember what happens, but I assume since it was the '70s, she somehow succeeded beyond her wildest dreams and the abusive people all wrecked cars and died or got shot or some bullshit. I got this record looking for samples for the weird country-ish hip hop group Prolo I'm in. At first quick listen, it just sounded like generic crappy made-for-movie country songs, but I didn't give it a solid listen, much less one with the speed slowed down all the way when you really find good samples. The song titles seem promising though ("Keep A-Goin'", "I'm Easy", and "Tapedeck in His Tractor" for example), and a couple of songs were actually written by Karen Black, and if my muddled hipster fuckface mind is working right, she's some sort of awesomely tragic figure from back then, so maybe her songs are glimpses into mad brilliance.
Star Wars Soundtrack - $1
I am no Star Wars nerd by any means. I never had the toys because my folks were poor so I was actually quite resentful of other little snotnosed fuckers sporting all them Han Solos and Chewbaccas and shit when I was a kid - especially kids that had like 13 stormtroopers, just wasting money on toys, and I didn't even have a fucking R2D2 coloring book. But still, this is the straight soundtrack, it was clean as fuck, double album, and only for a buck. How can I lose? I can just slow down the shit like DJ Screw, throw and ASR10 beat behind it, and freestyle sci-fi nonsense and become one of those nerd rappers or whatever they call that stupid shit I read about one time.
Willie Nelson Sings Kristofferson - $1
I'm a big Willie Nelson fan when he's not doing pop country bullshit, and the satellite radio's outlaw station has been playing that new "Gravedigger" song fairly regularly, and it's a great ass song. I really loved that shit he did with that Calexico spic group too. But I've got at least double and triple copies of most of the important Willie records (for your information if you dabble in good country music - Redheaded Stranger, Phases and Stages, Yesterday's Wine, and Shotgun Willie are your best start), but finding one with him doing all Kris Kristofferson songs was intriguing to me. This is partly because double K has become this weird counter-culture figure with me after watching too many old Sam Peckinpah movies where Kristoffersen plays outlaw Jesus to perfection (get Convoy from Netflix if you've never seen it, that shit's easily the greatest made-for-TV movie ever), but also because he writes fucked up soulful degenerate songs. So hearing Willie do "Sunday Morning Comin' Down" is gonna be worth the dollar on it's own, and everything else is gravy.
The Good Times in Country Music - Various Artists - $1
This is a shitty sampler by Columbia Records, but it's a double LP and has a bunch of Hank Thompson songs, and I don't have any Hank Thompson on vinyl. It also has, for kitschy factor, Grandpa Jones of Hee Haw doing "Mountain Dew" (which is awesome), and Jim Nabors aka Gomer Pyle aka that singing hillbilly fag dude doing "Wichita Lineman" (which is hilariouser than fuck). Worth a dollar, but it's also one of those records that I'll file in my one section of vinyl that's I call the Raven-might-be-gay section, because it's the type of stuff I imagine metrosexual homos (haha - an oxymoron, I know) would be playing while drinking weird mixed drinks that taste like Altoids yet get you drunker than hell.
The Late Great Red Sovine - Phantom 309 - $1
If you do not know who Red Sovine is, please steal from these robotnets either "Phantom 309" or more importantly "Teddy Bear", or even "Colorado Kool-Aid". Red Sovine is this weird ass old country singer who did tales of ghosts or crippled children or judgemental people being burned by God or whatever. He is one strange fucker. I have only heard about two or three songs out of the ten on this album, including the "Phantom 309" (which is about a hitchhiker who catches a ride with a ghost-driven tractor and trailer without knowing it until he gets dropped off at a diner and tells everybody about the ride he just got), but I haven't listened to the rest, because I KNOW Red Sovine will deliver... no doubt in my mind, so I'm waiting till the weekend to get crazy ionospherically baked up and sit around with headphones on listening to that shit while masturbating to old Penthouse magazines from 1978.
Blood, Sweat & Tears 3 - $1
This is purely for sampling purposes for Solaris Earth Pipeline, because PSY-OPS played me a beat where he had sampled "And When I Die" by these guys, without even knowing we had hooked up a separate beat together a few months back that was a breakbeat snippet of the b-side to the 45 for that song. I don't think we even put anything over top that sample except maybe a drum kick or two. I will listen to this when I am in a "let's listen to a bunch of potentially shitty ass records and try to find golden nuggets of samplitude within".
Sorrells Pickard - self-titled - $1
I have never heard of this guy, but he looks like a crazy fucker and the album sleeve has a glowing endorsement by Kris Kristofferson, talking about how Pickard was a major voice in the anti-commercial underground sound of Nashville at that time. A lot of times when digging, I'll find shit like this and will go to the date to know whether to go for it or not. This one is from 1972, so it's post-hippie early-outlaw era country time, so this might be an undiscovered gem. It also might be butt ass terrible. Usually with unknown country music, my cutoff date is 1976, because after the bicentennial everything got kinda hokey and country radio became too powerful due to the Jews that moved to Nashville to live in a warmer climate while still screwing musicians and songwriters out of their well-deserved royalties. There's also some great ass song titles on this LP that sound exactly like the type of rural back roads hip hop bullshit themes I'd be writing for the Prolo CD we've been fucking around with lately. It also has radio station call letters Sharpied onto the front and back covers, which always makes me happy because that means a radio station had this album at some point. Basically, I'd like to own a mountain and move this camper trailer I do my musical creative bullshit inside of to the top, get a transmission tower, and have my own AM station. So when I see shit with call letters on it, it reminds me of that. I am a romantic at heart, and a cynic online.
David Banner - Cadillac on 22s 12-inch - $1
This is one of my favorite songs ever, and the one track I always try to hype people up to, so if I had found this for $10, I might've bought it. But there it was, tucked into the dollar racks, not a blemish on the vinyl, and I actually looked up and laughed at the eastern Eurotrash crooked face fucker at the counter, mocking his pretentious ignorance. Not only do I have this on vinyl now to play for parties when I am coaxed into spinning records like a retard from my monstrous collection for cookouting ass drunk people, but the single has the instrumental. I don't think I can even explain to you how stoked that makes me. I, to this day, play certain instrumentals off vinyl on at least a bi-weekly basis. David Banner's beat for Trick Daddy's "Thug Holiday" is always in heavy rotation, and I don't think I could honestly tell you one lyric from it because all I ever spin is the instrumental. But this beat is one of my all-time favorites, and actually what I made Boogie Brown listen to with me like 17 times in a row one night, which led to him hooking up some weird ass beat that ended up being this song "South 15 Rider", which is probably my favorite song I've ever made, except unless you grew up in southside Virginia, you wouldn't understand half the references. The great thing about this record too is that both my oldest two kids love that song and know the whole thing (one is almost 9 and the other just turned 4), and they will be stoked to give it to me for my birthday. I mean fuck, I have five turntables of various import in three different parts of our compound, with records scattered throughout the house, a ton in the camper (most of my good shit is there), and even a couple of crates in the trunk of the Datsun sitting in the front yard that has pink Christmas lights strung up in outline of it. They understand me, love me, and know how amped I'll be to get that single. I'm sure they'll expect me to play it, drink my beer, and we'll play our freestyle game while dancing like hyper-ballerinas, which usually degenerates into doing the robot. I'm a white guy so about all I can do is the robot, and I can't even do that very good.
Crime Mob - Circles 12-inch - $1
This is my favorite song I never admitted to in the EWA from last year, and the beat is a major reason for it, although I have to admit when you have a soulful ass beat with those Memphis style kicks behind it, someone like Princess rhyming over it sounds pretty sweet. There's just something about that sound/voice combo, and it's why the various bitch MCs in Three Six over the years always sounded so great too. I have already played this instrumental like seven times and I just got the shit yesterday. There is a b-side called "Shine Cause I Grind" featuring Mike Jones, and as much as I love Mike Jones and as much as I love this "Circles" song, I have yet to develop the stomach to actually listen to that side, because I know rap music, and I know this will be far from a b-side wins again scenario. I'd prefer to just scratch that side out with some fabric scissors and not worry about even trying to listen to it. In fact, I will do that right now...
The O Band - Look to the Left, Look to the Right 12-inch single - $1
This is a random ass disco single from 1977, with b-side songs called "A Smile is Diamond" and "Fine White Wine", and it's on red vinyl. I have a ton of disco singles because after I got heavy into DJ Screw, and pretty much everything on earth had been sampled to death (and Madlib was taking care of any open genres at like three per year), I started buying up a ton of dollar disco singles and playing them as slow as you could make the turntable play them. It was extra perfect when they were actually 45 rpm 12-inch singles, because then you could just put it on 33 rpms, and let it play. There are tons of breaks in disco, but you have to listen all the way through to find a good part with no stupid organs or homo-sounding horns or pianos or anything. Oftentimes, I couldn't find anything good. Even with all the initial promise, I gave this O Band single a first listen tonight, and it sounds like one of those pieces of shit that will go in a milk crate for the Salvation Army. Although the red vinyl would look good hanging on my woodshed by a nail. In fact, fuck a second listen, I will do that right now...
Max Edwards - Rockers Arena 12-inch single - $1
Man, the dub version of this song was great and spooky, as was the b-side called "Still Alive", which is a case of the b-side winning again, was even better and a thousand times awesome. Then I realized it was a 45 rpm single and I was playing it at 33 rpms. At the proper speed, it was just a shitty reggae single from 1978.
Loveable & the Grippa Riddim - Various Artists - $1
The album cover has a chick in leopard skin dress and promises "THE TOP SOCA ARTISTS of the Caribbean..." I think Fader magazine might've talked about soca music a couple of times (which stands for soul calypso), and this is like the third or fourth soca record I've bought used because I'm assuming at some point it will pay off. Except this record, even stronger than the previous two times, just reinforces the fact - not belief, but straight up fact - that soca music is the absolute shittiest godawful music ever created. It's like if you took every ounce of soul from black people, but then told them they had to make music for people to try to dance to. I thought that maybe, just maybe, I'd get at least a goofy party jam out of "100% Wine" by Screw Face at the end of the first side, except no. Even that song, by that artist, seemingly impossible to suck, sucks.
Too Short - Life is Too Short 12-inch single - $3
My first non-dollar purchase, and I would buy this every day any day. This is one of Short's classics, maybe his most classic non-sex song, and to have it on 12-inch now is one of my life's greatest accomplishments this week. The single has an 8 minute long extended clean remix (which is good, because when I spin at parties, it's usually drunk ass families with kids running around fighting with sticks and shit or messing up the horseshoe game, so I only spin clean or radio versions of the rap songs, since I don't need to teach kids to say "fuck", "bitch", and "shit"; I'll let the public schools take care of that), plus the instrumental. I used to make 60 minute tapes of instrumentals where I'd just loop one single instrumental over and over on one side of the tape, and do a second instrumental on the other side. My truck doesn't have a tape player, but I'm getting new tires on the '91 Volvo stationwagon to get that back on the road, and it has a tape player, and I'd say chances are pretty fucking high I'm gonna make a 60 minute mixtape with one side all "Life is... Too Short" instrumental, and the other side all "Cadillac on 22s" instrumental. Fuck, I might end up driving to Oklahoma drunk with a tape like that in the Volvo if it's a warm day and I open the sun roof.
Noreaga - Super Thug 12-inch single - $1
I only found out like last year that the Neptunes did this beat, because I always remembered this as that awesome song where N.O.R.E.'s dressed like a sheik in the desert, and the beat's crazy wild. I've also always assumed, from what I've known they've done when I heard it, that Neptunes beats were mad gay and mad stupid and mad unloungin'. But I like the beat, and had gotten kinda slowed down tonight from playing things on slow-mo, plus listening to Too Short (I'll never spell that shit with a dollar sign - that's some fucking stupid shit), so I just pumped this beat, but it didn't sound right until I slowed the speed down. That's a fat ass beat when you slow it down enough to be shielded from amyl nitrate hits in dance club unisex bathrooms where you are tricked into homosexual activities by the gay dude holding your fucked up ass up on the left side while you are concentrating too hard to kissing the hot slut holding you up on your right side. At regular speed, you run the risk of doing what others have done, and making a point to claim it's not gay if you don't actually physically touch a dick, so having a cute guy named Pete suck your dick isn't technically gay.
Riddim Driven 12-inch single - various artists - $1
I wrongly assumed this was gonna be dancehall instrumentals, but even knowing that such a wrong assumption was easy to make, I felt safe since there was an Elephant Man song and a Capleton song on here. Guess what? It all sucked. I was very sad listening to this. The type of sad where you are listening to something you bought at the used record store and you know you have no use for it ever again. They have turntables there for you to preview shit, but I always think that's a crazy goofy way to buy vinyl. I mean, if I was sinking $15 into a Hawkwind record, I'd probably want to do that, but I'm a dollar bin type of motherfucker, and if you can't throw a dollar away on a gamble for a good record, then you're not a music aficionado. Shit, that's the music nerd's lottery right there, hoping you drop a buck and find some crazy wild classic nobody else ever told you about.
Goodie Mob - Cell Therapy 12-inch single - $3
Damn, another song off the EWA 100 All-Time Jams I found, with an instrumental. I don't have the first Goodie Mob tape anymore, so I didn't have access to "Cell Therapy" in non-robotic format, which geeked me up to find this. Making it even better was the fact on the b-side is the album version of "Soul Food", which is one of the singles I sold last time I forgot what a pain in the ass ebay is in actuality and I decided to sell of some bullshit. I have missed my "Soul Food" single a bunch of times, because it's a great song too, and if you could just eliminate T-Mo's stupid fucking "fuck Chris Darden, fuck Marcia Clark" verse, it'd be potentially even more classic than "Cell Therapy". Oddly, also on the b-side of this single is Outkast's "Benz of Beamer" song, since both were down with each other and on the same record label. "Cell Therapy" instrumental in effect. There's also a remix by some dude named Sideeq which is crazy retarded, but not retarded meaning good but retarded meaning bad.
Anyways, my wife asked me what I wanted for my birthday (Valentine's Day, in case you fucking faggots want to pretend to be my real friend and go like "Happy B-day Raven" in the stupid cbox like the fucking social misfit robot world faggots you truly are), and I thunk it over and over, and it occurred to me I hadn't been record digging in forever. So she said take $40 and do that shit (which is a lot because up until about a week ago, we were steadily two months behind on the mortgage all winter long... lazy economy and lazy dude don't make a good tag team for financial success), so I did that shit, and have been secretly listening to them in the camper so my kids don't know I already got my present. They'll wrap them up next week and I can open them on my birthday and act surprised. Well, I broke this shit up into two $20 challenges, since I wanted to, and this the first $20 I literally spent at the record store. (Props to Plan 9 Records in Richmond, VA, with the a giant selection of shit in the basement. I'm also glad that homo that prices records only knows hipster bullshit so I could get some awesome shit for cheap. Haha you eastern European looking fuckers... why is it record store nerd dudes who tell you how much you get for your records you stole and are trying to sell always look like eastern European dudes with Fader magazine subscriptions?)
Nashville Original Motion Picture Soundtrack - $1
This is some Robert Altman flick from the '70s starring Karen Black that my local shithole small town video store used to have on VHS. Basically, Karen Black is physically abused as a kid, runs away to be a country singer, gets sexually abused by a couple of Nashville heavyweight superstars, and then I don't remember what happens, but I assume since it was the '70s, she somehow succeeded beyond her wildest dreams and the abusive people all wrecked cars and died or got shot or some bullshit. I got this record looking for samples for the weird country-ish hip hop group Prolo I'm in. At first quick listen, it just sounded like generic crappy made-for-movie country songs, but I didn't give it a solid listen, much less one with the speed slowed down all the way when you really find good samples. The song titles seem promising though ("Keep A-Goin'", "I'm Easy", and "Tapedeck in His Tractor" for example), and a couple of songs were actually written by Karen Black, and if my muddled hipster fuckface mind is working right, she's some sort of awesomely tragic figure from back then, so maybe her songs are glimpses into mad brilliance.
Star Wars Soundtrack - $1
I am no Star Wars nerd by any means. I never had the toys because my folks were poor so I was actually quite resentful of other little snotnosed fuckers sporting all them Han Solos and Chewbaccas and shit when I was a kid - especially kids that had like 13 stormtroopers, just wasting money on toys, and I didn't even have a fucking R2D2 coloring book. But still, this is the straight soundtrack, it was clean as fuck, double album, and only for a buck. How can I lose? I can just slow down the shit like DJ Screw, throw and ASR10 beat behind it, and freestyle sci-fi nonsense and become one of those nerd rappers or whatever they call that stupid shit I read about one time.
Willie Nelson Sings Kristofferson - $1
I'm a big Willie Nelson fan when he's not doing pop country bullshit, and the satellite radio's outlaw station has been playing that new "Gravedigger" song fairly regularly, and it's a great ass song. I really loved that shit he did with that Calexico spic group too. But I've got at least double and triple copies of most of the important Willie records (for your information if you dabble in good country music - Redheaded Stranger, Phases and Stages, Yesterday's Wine, and Shotgun Willie are your best start), but finding one with him doing all Kris Kristofferson songs was intriguing to me. This is partly because double K has become this weird counter-culture figure with me after watching too many old Sam Peckinpah movies where Kristoffersen plays outlaw Jesus to perfection (get Convoy from Netflix if you've never seen it, that shit's easily the greatest made-for-TV movie ever), but also because he writes fucked up soulful degenerate songs. So hearing Willie do "Sunday Morning Comin' Down" is gonna be worth the dollar on it's own, and everything else is gravy.
The Good Times in Country Music - Various Artists - $1
This is a shitty sampler by Columbia Records, but it's a double LP and has a bunch of Hank Thompson songs, and I don't have any Hank Thompson on vinyl. It also has, for kitschy factor, Grandpa Jones of Hee Haw doing "Mountain Dew" (which is awesome), and Jim Nabors aka Gomer Pyle aka that singing hillbilly fag dude doing "Wichita Lineman" (which is hilariouser than fuck). Worth a dollar, but it's also one of those records that I'll file in my one section of vinyl that's I call the Raven-might-be-gay section, because it's the type of stuff I imagine metrosexual homos (haha - an oxymoron, I know) would be playing while drinking weird mixed drinks that taste like Altoids yet get you drunker than hell.
The Late Great Red Sovine - Phantom 309 - $1
If you do not know who Red Sovine is, please steal from these robotnets either "Phantom 309" or more importantly "Teddy Bear", or even "Colorado Kool-Aid". Red Sovine is this weird ass old country singer who did tales of ghosts or crippled children or judgemental people being burned by God or whatever. He is one strange fucker. I have only heard about two or three songs out of the ten on this album, including the "Phantom 309" (which is about a hitchhiker who catches a ride with a ghost-driven tractor and trailer without knowing it until he gets dropped off at a diner and tells everybody about the ride he just got), but I haven't listened to the rest, because I KNOW Red Sovine will deliver... no doubt in my mind, so I'm waiting till the weekend to get crazy ionospherically baked up and sit around with headphones on listening to that shit while masturbating to old Penthouse magazines from 1978.
Blood, Sweat & Tears 3 - $1
This is purely for sampling purposes for Solaris Earth Pipeline, because PSY-OPS played me a beat where he had sampled "And When I Die" by these guys, without even knowing we had hooked up a separate beat together a few months back that was a breakbeat snippet of the b-side to the 45 for that song. I don't think we even put anything over top that sample except maybe a drum kick or two. I will listen to this when I am in a "let's listen to a bunch of potentially shitty ass records and try to find golden nuggets of samplitude within".
Sorrells Pickard - self-titled - $1
I have never heard of this guy, but he looks like a crazy fucker and the album sleeve has a glowing endorsement by Kris Kristofferson, talking about how Pickard was a major voice in the anti-commercial underground sound of Nashville at that time. A lot of times when digging, I'll find shit like this and will go to the date to know whether to go for it or not. This one is from 1972, so it's post-hippie early-outlaw era country time, so this might be an undiscovered gem. It also might be butt ass terrible. Usually with unknown country music, my cutoff date is 1976, because after the bicentennial everything got kinda hokey and country radio became too powerful due to the Jews that moved to Nashville to live in a warmer climate while still screwing musicians and songwriters out of their well-deserved royalties. There's also some great ass song titles on this LP that sound exactly like the type of rural back roads hip hop bullshit themes I'd be writing for the Prolo CD we've been fucking around with lately. It also has radio station call letters Sharpied onto the front and back covers, which always makes me happy because that means a radio station had this album at some point. Basically, I'd like to own a mountain and move this camper trailer I do my musical creative bullshit inside of to the top, get a transmission tower, and have my own AM station. So when I see shit with call letters on it, it reminds me of that. I am a romantic at heart, and a cynic online.
David Banner - Cadillac on 22s 12-inch - $1
This is one of my favorite songs ever, and the one track I always try to hype people up to, so if I had found this for $10, I might've bought it. But there it was, tucked into the dollar racks, not a blemish on the vinyl, and I actually looked up and laughed at the eastern Eurotrash crooked face fucker at the counter, mocking his pretentious ignorance. Not only do I have this on vinyl now to play for parties when I am coaxed into spinning records like a retard from my monstrous collection for cookouting ass drunk people, but the single has the instrumental. I don't think I can even explain to you how stoked that makes me. I, to this day, play certain instrumentals off vinyl on at least a bi-weekly basis. David Banner's beat for Trick Daddy's "Thug Holiday" is always in heavy rotation, and I don't think I could honestly tell you one lyric from it because all I ever spin is the instrumental. But this beat is one of my all-time favorites, and actually what I made Boogie Brown listen to with me like 17 times in a row one night, which led to him hooking up some weird ass beat that ended up being this song "South 15 Rider", which is probably my favorite song I've ever made, except unless you grew up in southside Virginia, you wouldn't understand half the references. The great thing about this record too is that both my oldest two kids love that song and know the whole thing (one is almost 9 and the other just turned 4), and they will be stoked to give it to me for my birthday. I mean fuck, I have five turntables of various import in three different parts of our compound, with records scattered throughout the house, a ton in the camper (most of my good shit is there), and even a couple of crates in the trunk of the Datsun sitting in the front yard that has pink Christmas lights strung up in outline of it. They understand me, love me, and know how amped I'll be to get that single. I'm sure they'll expect me to play it, drink my beer, and we'll play our freestyle game while dancing like hyper-ballerinas, which usually degenerates into doing the robot. I'm a white guy so about all I can do is the robot, and I can't even do that very good.
Crime Mob - Circles 12-inch - $1
This is my favorite song I never admitted to in the EWA from last year, and the beat is a major reason for it, although I have to admit when you have a soulful ass beat with those Memphis style kicks behind it, someone like Princess rhyming over it sounds pretty sweet. There's just something about that sound/voice combo, and it's why the various bitch MCs in Three Six over the years always sounded so great too. I have already played this instrumental like seven times and I just got the shit yesterday. There is a b-side called "Shine Cause I Grind" featuring Mike Jones, and as much as I love Mike Jones and as much as I love this "Circles" song, I have yet to develop the stomach to actually listen to that side, because I know rap music, and I know this will be far from a b-side wins again scenario. I'd prefer to just scratch that side out with some fabric scissors and not worry about even trying to listen to it. In fact, I will do that right now...
The O Band - Look to the Left, Look to the Right 12-inch single - $1
This is a random ass disco single from 1977, with b-side songs called "A Smile is Diamond" and "Fine White Wine", and it's on red vinyl. I have a ton of disco singles because after I got heavy into DJ Screw, and pretty much everything on earth had been sampled to death (and Madlib was taking care of any open genres at like three per year), I started buying up a ton of dollar disco singles and playing them as slow as you could make the turntable play them. It was extra perfect when they were actually 45 rpm 12-inch singles, because then you could just put it on 33 rpms, and let it play. There are tons of breaks in disco, but you have to listen all the way through to find a good part with no stupid organs or homo-sounding horns or pianos or anything. Oftentimes, I couldn't find anything good. Even with all the initial promise, I gave this O Band single a first listen tonight, and it sounds like one of those pieces of shit that will go in a milk crate for the Salvation Army. Although the red vinyl would look good hanging on my woodshed by a nail. In fact, fuck a second listen, I will do that right now...
Max Edwards - Rockers Arena 12-inch single - $1
Man, the dub version of this song was great and spooky, as was the b-side called "Still Alive", which is a case of the b-side winning again, was even better and a thousand times awesome. Then I realized it was a 45 rpm single and I was playing it at 33 rpms. At the proper speed, it was just a shitty reggae single from 1978.
Loveable & the Grippa Riddim - Various Artists - $1
The album cover has a chick in leopard skin dress and promises "THE TOP SOCA ARTISTS of the Caribbean..." I think Fader magazine might've talked about soca music a couple of times (which stands for soul calypso), and this is like the third or fourth soca record I've bought used because I'm assuming at some point it will pay off. Except this record, even stronger than the previous two times, just reinforces the fact - not belief, but straight up fact - that soca music is the absolute shittiest godawful music ever created. It's like if you took every ounce of soul from black people, but then told them they had to make music for people to try to dance to. I thought that maybe, just maybe, I'd get at least a goofy party jam out of "100% Wine" by Screw Face at the end of the first side, except no. Even that song, by that artist, seemingly impossible to suck, sucks.
Too Short - Life is Too Short 12-inch single - $3
My first non-dollar purchase, and I would buy this every day any day. This is one of Short's classics, maybe his most classic non-sex song, and to have it on 12-inch now is one of my life's greatest accomplishments this week. The single has an 8 minute long extended clean remix (which is good, because when I spin at parties, it's usually drunk ass families with kids running around fighting with sticks and shit or messing up the horseshoe game, so I only spin clean or radio versions of the rap songs, since I don't need to teach kids to say "fuck", "bitch", and "shit"; I'll let the public schools take care of that), plus the instrumental. I used to make 60 minute tapes of instrumentals where I'd just loop one single instrumental over and over on one side of the tape, and do a second instrumental on the other side. My truck doesn't have a tape player, but I'm getting new tires on the '91 Volvo stationwagon to get that back on the road, and it has a tape player, and I'd say chances are pretty fucking high I'm gonna make a 60 minute mixtape with one side all "Life is... Too Short" instrumental, and the other side all "Cadillac on 22s" instrumental. Fuck, I might end up driving to Oklahoma drunk with a tape like that in the Volvo if it's a warm day and I open the sun roof.
Noreaga - Super Thug 12-inch single - $1
I only found out like last year that the Neptunes did this beat, because I always remembered this as that awesome song where N.O.R.E.'s dressed like a sheik in the desert, and the beat's crazy wild. I've also always assumed, from what I've known they've done when I heard it, that Neptunes beats were mad gay and mad stupid and mad unloungin'. But I like the beat, and had gotten kinda slowed down tonight from playing things on slow-mo, plus listening to Too Short (I'll never spell that shit with a dollar sign - that's some fucking stupid shit), so I just pumped this beat, but it didn't sound right until I slowed the speed down. That's a fat ass beat when you slow it down enough to be shielded from amyl nitrate hits in dance club unisex bathrooms where you are tricked into homosexual activities by the gay dude holding your fucked up ass up on the left side while you are concentrating too hard to kissing the hot slut holding you up on your right side. At regular speed, you run the risk of doing what others have done, and making a point to claim it's not gay if you don't actually physically touch a dick, so having a cute guy named Pete suck your dick isn't technically gay.
Riddim Driven 12-inch single - various artists - $1
I wrongly assumed this was gonna be dancehall instrumentals, but even knowing that such a wrong assumption was easy to make, I felt safe since there was an Elephant Man song and a Capleton song on here. Guess what? It all sucked. I was very sad listening to this. The type of sad where you are listening to something you bought at the used record store and you know you have no use for it ever again. They have turntables there for you to preview shit, but I always think that's a crazy goofy way to buy vinyl. I mean, if I was sinking $15 into a Hawkwind record, I'd probably want to do that, but I'm a dollar bin type of motherfucker, and if you can't throw a dollar away on a gamble for a good record, then you're not a music aficionado. Shit, that's the music nerd's lottery right there, hoping you drop a buck and find some crazy wild classic nobody else ever told you about.
Goodie Mob - Cell Therapy 12-inch single - $3
Damn, another song off the EWA 100 All-Time Jams I found, with an instrumental. I don't have the first Goodie Mob tape anymore, so I didn't have access to "Cell Therapy" in non-robotic format, which geeked me up to find this. Making it even better was the fact on the b-side is the album version of "Soul Food", which is one of the singles I sold last time I forgot what a pain in the ass ebay is in actuality and I decided to sell of some bullshit. I have missed my "Soul Food" single a bunch of times, because it's a great song too, and if you could just eliminate T-Mo's stupid fucking "fuck Chris Darden, fuck Marcia Clark" verse, it'd be potentially even more classic than "Cell Therapy". Oddly, also on the b-side of this single is Outkast's "Benz of Beamer" song, since both were down with each other and on the same record label. "Cell Therapy" instrumental in effect. There's also a remix by some dude named Sideeq which is crazy retarded, but not retarded meaning good but retarded meaning bad.
Saturday, February 2
Expert Whiteboy Analysis Super Bowl Sunday Top 10
SUPER BOWL SUNDAY EXPERT WHITEBOY ANALYSIS TOP TEN (or the ten most notabled thangs that sprang from the sphere of hip hop at a marketing angle that caught our eyeballs recently - cut back from 25, and no longer monthly but completely random)
WHO WE ARE:
RM: Raven Mack, although I have been calling myself Mr. 2009 lately. I make a lot of t-shirts with iron-on letters, and I've got both an emerald green with white letters and a bright orange with black letters MR. 2009 t-shirt thus far. I am manifesting my riches to be cashed out that year, although when I gave that too much thought while nursing a pinched nerve torn shoulder internal part with some codeine the other night, I figured I should also make some Dr. 2006 shirts too, as the self-taught science that has been building to that 2009 pay-off was graduated in 2006. Of course, like any doctor, I had been studying that bullshit for a decade in advance. Don't doubt my metaphysical status.
MD: My name is Mike Dikk. I work at a popcorn factory now. There's an old dusty 386 here and I rigged some stuff together using spare computer parts I had around the house so I can use the internet on my lunch breaks (where I am allowed to eat all of the free popcorn I want, except the White Cheddar, but I do get a good discount on it). It has one of those gigantic old school monitors with the green screen. So it's a trip viewing the internet on it, or at least the parts of the internet the archaic graphics card can handle, which isnt much to tell you the truth... Everything looks like fucking War Games or something. I fully expect this thing to bust out with WOULD YOU // LIKE TO // PLAY // A // GAME?? at any moment.
JD: I was the one that championed not ending this, but alas I became the slacker in this Top 10 deal. But shit is real for me now. I am doing the full-on dress rehearsal for my future career, so I am putting all of my time into dealing with first grade kids that are all sons and daughters of the soil. What I did notice was something that Raven mentioned in a quick blurb while we were having our cool internet chatter in homo code in the Clubhouse. There is a high amount of sexualization even at a young age in the public school system. For example, during a spelling test, these words were "randomly" put in order:
BIG
BUT
BLACK
CHICK
MAKE
COME
I insist that this was coincidence because all the teachers are straight laced, but who the fuck knows? Also, we were playing a phonics game and when the kids laid out the game pieces and there was a word chunk of "ore", and the beginning sound piece sitting right next to it was "wh". Finally, every exercise with the high frequency words ends up at some point with all the kids chanting BALLS over and over.
So maybe Raven is right? Or maybe he is some paranoid motherfucker and I am just justifying his paranoia by telling my stories of what an everyday first grade is like? Or maybe we are both stupid fucks who want to defend our educational positions by making up shit? Maybe glue tastes good? Who the fuck knows, but what I do know is I am balls deep in it for the long haul.
#1: INTERWEB LEAK OF NEW EMC RECORD
MD: If you're reading this on the internet, it means you haven't discovered some way to telepathically download our words to your brains without a wi-fi connection. It also means, you probably already know EMC is Masta Ace's new group with some other guys. I've now listened to this record two times back to back, which is something I don't do too often, but my computer recently had a seizure and I had to erase one of my hard drives in order to get it back in working order, so my iTunes is very limited at the momenet, and it was either listen to that record a couple times, sit in silence, or go through all of my unalphabetized, uncategorized records to find something decent to listen to. I guess I could have listened to one of my four remaining CDs, but that's besides the point.
I already forgot where I was going with all that, but it was something about how I don't really want to give this CD a proper review, because every other blog known to man will cover that ground, and the only thing I'm curious about is whether the average internet rap nerd's boner and following orgasm was bigger when they saw this record finally listed on a blog and they hit the download button or if it was bigger when they actually got around to listening to the record. I'm guessing it was the former because we all know the first one of the day is the biggest and produces the most fluid volume.
I'd also like to mention that Torae mixtape that's making the rounds without giving it its own spot, since we've downgraded the number of entries on these lists and I don't want to waste space. The Torae CD came out of nowhere while all us blog nerds were waiting with baited breath on the EMC record, but it still had the same outcome (or outcum). Torae is definitely a dude I have never ever heard of but he has his finger on the pulse of the internet, because his record features every producer that has been jocked over the past year. I'm not dissing, because the dude can rap too, and the record is really, really good, but at the same time, it's definitely good in a very uniform blog-acceptable way, so I can't muster up the energy to write anything creative about it, because I know there will be 400 similar opinions on the internet within the week, just like the EMC record.
I guess my point is, I like stuff just like you do, but sometimes there's no point in really writing about it when a gang of European kids already beat you to it since their time zone is like 12 hours different than our's, and they already wrote about it while you were still sleeping. Except for me. I don't sleep, because sleep is the cousin of death, but I'm generalizing here.
JD: Like Mike, I am not going to get into a track-by-track analysis of the album like some other blogs have done, but I will get into it a tad deeper than Mike. This album is beyond fantastic, and during a time when all these releases are coming up in the next few months, I really don't see how it could get better. The production is great but not overwhelming, the lyrics are insane (my early frontrunner for line of the year is when Punchline says, "I'll fight for my fam like Antonio Davis"), and even though it is a "concept" album, it doesn't get all hokey with doing songs about walking down the street and other inane bullshit that a concept album can wander into becoming.
Before I wrote this, I watched the Youtube videos of the group members talking about the leak, and I know it must suck to have your album just given away. But to be honest, I am going to buy this no doubt when it comes out, and in the age of stealing shit being so easy, that is the highest compliment you can give an album.
(P.S. I hipped Mike on Torae, trying to steal my heat son.)
#2: KOOL G. RAP'S "ON THE RISE AGAIN" SONG
RM: Forgive me because I'm thinking disparaging thoughts about someone I consider one of the greatest five MCs of all-time, and I probably won't type them out because it is uncomfortable enough to even have "Has G. Rap flipped his cabbage out there in Arizona?" thoughts two-stepping through my white head.
I mean, I have to admit after my initial reaction of "This is awesome!" when I heard him with LL and G-Unit on that song a couple months back, I eventually settled into, "Why the fuck is G. Rap fucking with G-Unit?" I mean, I could understand LL Cool J, because he's been a pop star for purt near two decades. And I eventually just decided that it's wack of me to be all Hip Hop Holier Than Thou about an MC legend wanting to deposit some G-Unit checks into his bank account.
But a song with Haylie Duff on the hook? I'm not gonna be like every faggot blog I found when I google searched "Kool G. Rap and Duff" to figure out how to spell that young bitch's first name correctly, who basically did thirteen variations on "Signs of the Apocalypse. Dogs fucking cats. Blah blah blah I'm an unclever homo who loves to dramatically employ really played out cliches in the hopes some other homo types 'LOL, let's link blogs' in my c-box." For me, it just seems questionable in a way I never thought I'd question Mr. Kool Genius Rap the IV. And honestly, I've not been able to let myself listen to it yet. I downloaded it after hearing DJ Premier talk about it on his radio show, and Premo (who made the beat) expressed his own discomfort with Haylee Duff being on the track, but that there was no time to change it and G. Rap sent him the thing with her on it to mix down, so Premo added the cuts over her hook to try and at least mute it down some. I don't know... it worries me over this shit. Although I'm enough of a Kool G. Rap mark that I'm just going to assume this is trickery on his part to fool all the rap fag nerds who know way more than they really know, so that when his real shit drops and makes people go, "Oh yeah, for-real rap music," he can laugh at us.
MD: I figured I'd throw something up on this already failing top ten idea (originally cut down from 25 after everyone lost interest, and soon it will become the top 2 because only me and Raven will write for it, and then I will replace everyone else with people who know absolutely nothing about rap music and 16 year old girls) because Raven's been bitching and it's a slow day at the popcorn factory I now work at. On top of that, the main boss dude keeps firing all of my co-workers so I don't have anyone looking over my shoulder every five minutes and asking me what I'm looking at while talking to me about sugar gliders and couches they found on Craigs List.
Anyway, I haven't heard this Kool G. Rap song yet either, but I could have told you a year ago that bad things were in Kool G's future. You see, I am on Kool G. Rap's Myspace friends list, which is weird all together, because I'm not friends with a lot of people I don't know in real life, but I could be thinking of one of my Myspace profiles for one of my 3,000 side projects where I am friends with everyone, but I digress.
So at some point, Kool G. Rap, or whoever controls Kool G. Rap's Myspace page, sent out a Myspace bulletin saying that G. Rap was available to do features and had listed prices. That is something a rookie should be doing, not a fucking rap legend. So right then and there, I knew any douche with a grand to blow was going to have a shitty G. Rap verse on their shitty album that no one will ever hear outside of their hometown. Luckily, I haven't heard of any of those tracks popping up yet (except that brand new one, where it's G. Rap, and RA The Rugged man, then some jobber, and of course the track is from the jobber's record), so if the worst thing to happen to G. Rap since that Myspace bulletin is making a bullshit song with Hailee Duff, we should all be thankful. It's only a matter of time before MC Dudebro420 from Vermont's new hardcore street track featuring G. Rap surfaces.
#2: YEAR END WRAP-UP ISSUE CORRECTIONS
RM: I failed to rememberize Evel Knievel when I did my Heaven Needed A Something-or-Other write-up. And that is a ridiculous oversight on my part. Evel Knievel had all the pomp, flash, calculated recklessness, gold jewelry, tricked out cars, and sluts by the dozens that any rapper could ever dream about. And if you can be THAT hip hop, all while being a bitter old racist fucker, then goddamnit right, props to you Evel. I hope they didn't let you in Heaven, so you jumped the pearly gates on a KX80, fucked God's wife in the ass, then bolted to mujahadeen heaven, where there's mad virgins to be fucking. (Special note: the virgins awaiting terrorism martyrs is misinformation, as it's not actually virgins but instead unpolluted women, meaning they don't bleed at all. Virgins still menstruate, and their period blood touching your ass is as bad as Grandma Deepwater Baptist finding your milk crate full of thrash metal records from 1986 in the attic. Also to specially note: no gods or heavens or actual people named Grandma Deepwater Baptist, although she's more likely than an eternal country club with an open bar on a cloud.)
MD: I have no year-end Wrap Up corrections and no regrets. I'm kind of bummed it was the least talked about 5,000 word project we've done so far, but it was also the least promoted. I'm pretty over promoting my own shit. It's been over a year now. If you want to see the shit, you find it. Even if it's two years from now after we've all given up on it and you're some young stupid kid looking for something unrelated through a search engine and you stumble upon it and get hyped on it, wondering whatever happened to us and why we quit doing this stuff when everything seemed to be going well. I am comfortable with the fact that in our mile a minute world, shit gets slept on for years and rediscovered when the original proponents of said shit have long given up on it. That's how life works now for the starving artist. So fuck promoting, you either see this or you don't. We aren't a real magazine so we don't need the advertising money so fuck it if we go belly up. I am sure just like every other dumb shit thing I've done on the internet, I will be on some random message board several years from this moment and some dude will ask me to dig up something I did on Dumpin.net so he can re-read it, and how he doesn't understand why we ever quit and we should do it again. Story of my life.
#4: STUPID FUCKING NEW YORK GIANTS IN THE SUPER BOWL
RM: You know, I was all set to forever hate the Patriots finally after this QUEST FOR PERFECTION finally trampled upon whatever rah rah Team America subliminal national pride my public education had immunized with, but then the stupid fucking Giants and that retard's little even more retarded brother Eli Manning is going to the Super Bowl. Now, it's bad enough a team I hate is going to the Super Bowl, but it's the Giants. We've come a long ways in the past two decades from when the Bears had to rush to record "The Super Bowl Shuffle". With laptop recording studios and the worldwide web, you might have a dude diss another rapper onstage on a Saturday night, Sunday morning the video is on youtube, Monday afternoon the dissed rapper recording a response track over top a throwaway beat, and by Monday night it's on his myspace page. The whole beef can flare up, simmer down, and be overanalyzed by the end of the week, without the need for Minister Farrakhan at all. This of course means I will probably see Jim Jones Super Bowl songs featuring Michael Strahan, a Saigon/Papoose/three other fuckers posse track featuring Sportscenter soundbites of Plaxico Burress, and just a general hip hop frenzy over this, being New York has been pretty hard-dicked to have something to act like they're running ever since shitty southern pop rap has tooken over the pop rap charts, and older rap heavyweights like Jay-Z, Nas, and the Wu have become sort of uninspiring. I was ready to root for anybody but the Patriots (haha, it always amazes me the coincidental parallels between the Bush regime and the Patriots dynasty), but I could never root for the stupid fucking Giants, especially not now with those stupid red numbers on their road jerseys. But the Patriots? It's like making me choose between having one guy fuck my ass or three guys fuck my mouth (notice I said three, because in my twisted mind the choice between getting one ass-fucking or giving two blowjobs is not even a close debate, so I had to make it three blowjobs)... I guess when it comes to Super Bowl XLT or whatever it is, I'm gonna have to be rooting for Al-Qaeda.
MD: I have become a fair weather fan of the Giants now that they made it to the Super Bowl. Raven's intense bias toward all things New York are really blinding him from seeing the bigger picture. If you follow football at all, you should know that the Giants are incredible underdogs, and they have been through the entire playoffs. That's the beauty of the NFC. The AFC is usually a lock by pre-season for 1 of 4 teams to go to the Super Bowl, while the NFC is like hitting the Random buttom on Madden to pick your opponent because anyone can show up to the Super Bowl as long as they are one of the 6 teams to make the playoffs. Even last year when my Chicago FOOTBALL Bears made it to the Super Bowl and more or less dominated the bullshit NFC for the entire season, I was still pretty worried throughout the playoffs, because I knew ANY team in the NFC could have knocked them off, because that's the nature of the NFC.
So The Giants making it to the Super Bowl was a surprise and it wasn't a surprise. Still, they were the last NFC playoff team people expected. That's not the entire reason I am now a fair weather fan though. The other night before I went to bed, I was flipping through the channels and came across a commercial for the March of Dimes. It was one of those local area commercials (I'm assuming it is local in the greater tri-state area, so perhaps you've seen it) where the audio is all muffled and the video quality makes it look like it's still 1989. You know, some shit your local wacky used car dealership throws together.
Well, this March of Dimes commercial starred Eli Manning, and he was jibber jabbering something about premie babies, but I was so amazed by it. His brother is in something like one out of every five commercials that run on television, while Eli is stammering his way through some late night local area charity spot and now the dude is leading a team to the Super Bowl, much like the Bad News Bears repping Chico's Bail Bonds in Japan. It takes a lot of serious Jew Media magic to turn any New York team (besides the horrendous Knicks) into a serious on-field performance AND off-field media underdog, but they've succeeded big time, and I am so pumped right now to see the Giants beat the shit out of the Boston bullshit Patriots like they were on some 1980 Winter Olympics DO YOU BELIEVE IN MIRACLES shit.
JD: Outside of the game, one of the best parts of the Super Bowl is the legal troubles/ill shit that comes to the forefront about one of the players on one of the Super Bowl teams. So far, the best of these stories has been about N.Y. Giants defensive end Osi Umenyiora. A "magazine model", whatever the fuck that is, started her own blog here to announce dude likes to shit on his girls. She spells out how he wanted her to get double teamed, but she said no, so she had a friend come over and Osi shit on her in a bathtub. She then wrote about how he paid her bills and bought her jewelry so he could shit on her as well.
I am an open dude. If Osi wants to shit on girls, then that is his deal, but I am sure people would read what she wrote and think of him as some sort of sicko freak. But who really is the freak here? Osi would never have come up with this sort of fetish unless a girl let him pinch a log on her, so is it Osi's fault that turns him on? It takes two to tango, kids, and if dropping a few g's gets him a toilet with a vagina, then she is just as freaky as he is. Unless Eli gets caught giving footjobs to Cooper Manning in the trunk of Joe Montana's car while he is in a gay bar doing double anal on Elton John with Joe Klecko, this Osi story should stand tall as the illest shit (ha, shit) to come out of the Super Bowl hype.
RM: Mike mentioned to me that somebody has a New York Giants song now, but he said it was a rapper. The other day in the truck I heard them play a Collie Buddz song "Blind to Them" (or something along those lines) about the Giants and how they'll crush the Patriots and fuck the haters. I hope this is the song Mike heard, but even if not, it's funny. It's not bad as a throwaway dancehall song, but haha all the Giants have backing them is a white dancehall dude from Bermuda. I guess when you don't know about Collie Buddz, he still sounds awesome, but once you learn all about him and his fake Jamaican patois, he just seems like a fucking first class chump. Although he's a white guy so he may be googling himself and find this and send me a "cease and desist this shit yo" email.
#5: AMY WINEHOUSE SMOKES CRACK
RM: I am the type of know-it-all hipster douche who's all like "LOL, yeah Amy Winehouse is sooooo great. What about Sharon Jones, asshole? Don't you know every obscure soul singer who does a retro schtick in 2008? God." But I have to admit with Winehouse being all ugly and drugged up, and not just regular white American people drugs but crack - I didn't even know they had crack in England - it sort of makes her awesome in a different way. Sharon Jones seems pretty straight-laced and into doing the "I'm an older black woman sanging some soul" thing, but the degradation of drug abuse unlocks a tortured part of your soul, or creates it, and as long as someone's taping her attempting to mangle some R&B classics on Protools files that'll eventually get touched up by Mark Ronson in between them videoing her smoking rock to throw up on youtube, I'm straight. It's also funny to me that my four-year-old can actually sing "Rehab". I'm such a hipster douche.
JD: Really who cares? But she did get a hip hop rep of sort for singing old school soul music with crackling horns and all that other bullshit that people tend to think is cool even though they would never own a record of her's. Fuck her though. I think if you want to truly emulate some old, black singer, you should get hooked on heroin for years and years like Ray Charles, Miles Davis, and that one lady from France, but still put out classic music. See, I am sure there are people out there doing way worse shit than crack, and are still contributing something to society rather than looking massively haggard, wearing 16 lbs of eye makeup, and not washing your hair. Smoke on up stupid bitch, because the only way now you are going to get jocked is if you die - coming back all clean is pussy. If you are retarded enough to videotape yourself sucking a glass dick, then you should live that shit and just do it on stage at some Brit Pop awards show when you get a Lifetime Achievement Award based off your one jocked album.
#6: MEXICAN COKES
RM: So we had an in-depth discussion on the merits of Mexican Cokes from the Mexican stores, made with for-real sugar instead of damned weak-ass fructose syrup Americanized sodey pops, in The Secret Clubhouse message board a few months back, and ever since, I've been meaning to buy a couple. Well, it just so happened a couple of yesterdays ago I found myself right at a la tienda mexicana, so I went in to get me some sugar sodas to hopefully accelerate the diabetes because I don't really need both feets. They didn't have no Cokes in there, but they did have Pepsis, so I got two of those plus a jug of that strawberry banana Guava nectar (my kids love that shit).
The best thing about the Mexican Pepsis were they are bottled in some old school 1979 hard bottles that you could beat people to death with, with paint and a capped top. At the counter, there was a full-on "no ingles" chick holding her toddler and a bi-lingual chick who rung me up. I am always susceptible to the allure of a spanish chick (except Puerto Ricans, which are like annoying New Yorkers, but brown), but this chick was something else, with her dyed hair, and when she said, "I'm sorry..... I have no cents today," so she shorted me two pennies and her "r"s in "sorry" rolled ever so sexually enough, I wanted to make children with her right away, because that's how my brain works.
Instead, I took my 1979 ass sugar Pepsi outside on the street side and sat there pretending I was in a futuristic sci-fi flick from 1981, where Mexicans were trapped as slaves in a world where white people zipped by in rounded sleek silvery cars and had little white machines with earbuds playing music straight to their brains. Unfortunately, there was no revolutionary climax to my daydreaming, because a very obviously modern Mexican dude rolled up in a giant white Nissan Titan with plenty chrome and a big vinyl thing in his back tinted window saying "PAPA GARCIA", and he jumped out with horn-driven breakbeat mongrel ass Mexican music blaring when the door opened. This reminded me that I also had meant to get a couple Los Tigres Del Norte CDs, but I had to get home to put my chivos back in their pen before it got dark and cold as fuck.
MD: I don't really know the joys of a Mexican Coke because there are very few Mexicans living in the northeast, at least legally. There's a good chance I didn't even see a real live Mexican until my 20s.
I do like how name brand sodas are specifically formulated to appeal to the countries they are being shipped to. All soda is, really, is really shitty chemicals, and the fact that they do enough research to know how to tweak those chemicals for certain countries is just bonkers to me. I've had Mexican soda before, in Mexican restaurants run by white people, so I know the whole sugar cane thing, but I've never had an honest to goodness Pepsi or Coke. I did have an Indian Pepsi before though, along with the preferred brand of Pakistani soda, called Pakola. It's supposed to taste like ice cream, but it tastes more like horrible perfume a grandma wears. I'm not even sure if the Indian Pepsi I had was actual Pepsi. The colors, logo and bottle look like Pepsi, but it's called Thumbs Up! It's rather spicy, which is not something I look for in a cola. Kind of like shitty Moxy or something.
Lastly, I had something called Vimto, which is India's answer to Dr. Pepper, and it resembled a store brand knockoff of Dr. Pepper, so there's not really much to talk about.
I am hoping to one day break into Japanese soda because those Japs are all about weird flavorings and have like watermelon cola and pumpkin seed root beer. I've had that one Jap soda that is engineered like a Rube Goldberg device where you have to take the pin out and push down a marble and watch the carbonation rush up to the top of the bottle, but it just tastes like Sprite once all the hullabaloo is over. I want that freaky shit. I need some white chocolate mango Pepsi ASAP.
#7: LIL WAYNE BUSTED FOR THE ASSORTED DRUGS
RM: You know, I like some of Wayne's stuff but I definitely missed the boat on the internerd rapdork "OMG WEEZY'S THA BEST!!!" train, because I don't see it. However, I am hoping beyond anything I've hoped for in rap music in probably fifteen years that there's some master plan going on here. I am hoping that somebody - maybe Baby, maybe some Jew Overlord, whoever really - is engineering things along, learning from the wasted marketing potential of DJ Screw's death, learning from the megamillions struck when Cobain swallowed a mouth full of buckshot, learning from the eternal soundscan flame that was Biggie and Tupac until recently, and someone has kept all the best Wayne shit, like 3000 times more retardedly wonderful than all that bullshit from Tha Carter III mixtape you fags acted like was awesome, and is just sitting on it, giving Wayne his daily per diem in pocket cash, and allowing him all the exorbitant drugs and sex he wants, waiting for the big overdose to hit him one night. Then - BAMM! - you get the for-real Lil Wayne album finally out, and it's the first rap record in forever to go multi-platinum because motherfuckers are geeked for it and want to honor his stupid little gay ewok rapper face by actually purchasing the thing instead of just stealing it like we would've normally done. That's what I'm hoping is going on.
(Also, I was high the other night sitting in my truck in the backyard listening to satellite radios when it occurred to me that Lil Wayne is pretty much a black Eminem for all the white rap fags who want to like some oddball corny tattooed dude with predictable yet wacky linguistical patterns but not really too much cleverness to actually say, so that if they are a true expert whiteboy loving rap, there is no way they could ever love another whiteboy because that goes against the basic principals of being an expert whiteboy rap fan, so now they can love Lil Wayne which is basically Eminem but smudged yet not stained with the ghetto. So before you fags post, "Why you hating on the best rapper alive?" I can say, "Haha you stupid fags wanting to suck a black Eminem dick.")
MD: I want to use this space to mention that Lil Wayne is working on a mixtape with Mick Boogie called Hello Brooklyn where he "revisits" Brooklyn hip hop classics. The only song confirmed so far is "Who Got The Props 2008" and the only audio available is Buckshot's new verse from that song. This mixtape will be the true test to see if Wayne can hang on to all of his internet dicksuckers. On one hand, it's the first thing Wayne has done that I cared about hearing, and on the other hand, all of the current people hanging from his nuts will have to decide whether their carnal love for all things Wayne will override the pre-programmed internet opinion that you cannot revisit previous East Coast classics unless they contain scrapped Biggie verses that were locked up in a vault somewhere.
I think a lot of people forget that Cam'ron was once in Wayne's spot, and as far as I'm concerned, Cam put out the mixtape of the year last year, and there was nary a peep from internet thug rap sympathizers because they were too busy waiting for leaks from Drought Carter VII to show up on a blogsite. Both Cam and Wayne were rappers previously written off as fads and flashes in the pan before their resurgences as "Greatest Rappers Alive", so the real question is, who's going to take Wayne's spot? Drag-On? Magoo? Red Hot Lover Tone? Only time will tell.
#8: THE RELEASE OF THE LAST AIR JORDANS
JD: Being the resident sneaker freak, now is a big time in that realm because Nike is now releasing the last of the true Air Jordans, the Jordan XX3. Normally, this would be a big deal, but with Jordan being retired and the general dislike towards the Jordan Brand by the sneaker community, it is barely causing a blip in the mainstream sports/hip hop world.
I am not sure if any of you people heard of this website called gamefaqs.com? Basically it is the cauldron of all video game nerds; every dorky detail of that culture can be unearthed by going through those gamefaqs message boards. I find alot of similarities between that world and the world of the sneaker collector. From browsing places like uptempoair, ISS, and Niketalk, to the non-sneakerhead, the place can be just as dorky as people talking about video games. There are threads about keeping your sneaker crease-less, pictures of the sneakers people bought and own, and general bitching about the quality of what is being released. Most importantly, I think the people who are mainstays in both of these geek factories are more similar than you think. The video game shit is older dudes who shouldn't care that much about video games, or kids who are just into it to the point where they come off as huge speds. The sneaker forums are older dudes who spend the electricity bill loot on the $185 new Jordans, or suburban thug kids who have mommy and daddy drive them across the state to the one Finish Line that carried the Flint/gray XX3s that were carried in only 23 stores and cost around $300.
Being an older guy with a wife, potential career, and trying for a kid, I have become a voyeur to the sneaker game. It is funny to see kids shit their pants over Jordans I used to buy when I was 13 and end up wearing to cut the grass after a few months. But don't think this "last" Jordan is going to be the end of the Jordan Brand. I am sure there will be generations of Filipinos who will be locked in a windowless factory sewing into shoddy leather making retro Jordans that will retail for $300 when it takes about $7 of man power/material to make.
RM: Honestly, the one thing I have never understood, and this was probably due to necessity as a broke ass kid, was high dollar clothing trends. My parents were younger than fuck, drunker than fuck, and broker than fuck, so the pimpest pair of shoes I had as a youth was a pair of sky blue Kangaroos that I equipped with matching fat laces. No matter how hard I'd beg and plead, my parents just didn't understand, and I was usually sporting the most derivative bobos to be found. In fact, I had the bobos version of the first Air Jordans, which of course, as Bobos are apt to do, only looked good for like four hours. And being in a predominantly black school, wearing bobo Air Jordans just led to mad clowning during P.E. (Haha, at least I didn't live in the projects, although I guess my grandmother was forced by her own racial intolerance to move into a trailer park and out of the projects.) After a little wear and tear, the bobo Jordans went from high top to low top, because the upper shell part just sort of started ripping, so I just tore it off and trimmed them up with a boxcutter. They looked relatively cool then, but more from a degenerate metalhead kid perspective than a put a toothbrush to it to keep it clean fresh kid perspective.
The funny thing is, knowing how twisted and perverse the internet is, I bet there's little circles of people who collect bobos and show off their shit amongst each other, claiming bobos are better because they were less cared for and more likely to be gone now, so ultimately it's a more pure form of sneaker, all talking down on each other for wearing Nikes, and having signature pictures of photoshopped Chuck D holding up some bobos with his power fist and the words "I like Nike but wait a minute!" Fucking fruity ass internets.
#9: MURS "BETTER THAN THE BEST" VIDEO/SONG
RM: I would assume this has been in circulation for a long minute, but I guess the "official" release of MURS first major-label song/video just happened this past week, and I used my internet welfare for about 40 minutes to dl the video off of Youtube, just to see what was going on. I slept on MURS but got into him well enough late, and never really understood the move to a major label. Like, what did Warner Brothers see in him that separated him from whatever else was out there amongst the three million competent ass rappers there are to make them think they could recoup some money off him in a day and age when no one sells records anymore?
This first video and song is okay - probably to the average human ears it outshines all the wack anabolic steroid ass TV title rappers in heavy rotation (but then again the average ears probably love that stupid shit), but I'm not sure what makes it super awesome to make some skater kid in rural Indiana go drop fifteen bucks on a CD. I guess at this point, as the recording industry continues to self-destruct, I assume they would have some grand vision to trick people into giving up their money again. But instead it seems like they kind of want a new Pharcyde dude, but without all the crack addiction, and therefore not quite as amusing. Props to MURS though. I hope he makes enough money back that he's not owing those Jews his guarantee back for the next twenty years of his life.
JD: Back when we did the Top MCs thing at another website what seemed like a thousand years ago, MURS was upset in the first round by Eminem. This was back before we officially started doing these EWA blurbs, and before I really held major resentment towards the average hip hop internet fan. In my early "trying to be some underground cool guy" days, my then-girlfriend, now wife, would make me mix CDs of random tracks of underground dudes, to which I would go home and listen to in my Discman becuase I had not yet stepped into the iPod generation. One of the many reasons I married her was that she was hip enough to my desire to be hip to go out on the internets herself to find the name of "underground" dudes she would put on the CDs. She would also make these cool CD covers with shit that I liked like John Stockton, Doug Gilmour (the St. Louis Blues version), sneakers, and like pictures of graffitti.
Once I became a full-fledged white man on the internet, I went out and got every MURS track I could find. I had a promo version of Why Ask Why? for the longest fucking time that I would force myself to listen to because I can't stand that promobot voice.
It seems out of place MURS is now signed to a major label and is on the cover of magazines. Shit, he even has a number you can dial to get MURS updates. Honestly, like Raven said, I hope he recoups all the loot he is dropping out of his own pocket to pimp this upcoming album. But with the way the world spins, the same time he drops that solo album, Eminem will come out with his new fat, bloated record that all the same people who thought he was a better MC during our stupid poll, will go out and buy that shit while MURS is buried behind the person who finished third on American Idol's solo album.
#10: IN DEFENSE OF T-PAIN
RM: You know, it's common meme to hate on T-Pain for his bionic microphone, and fair enough. But for people to go so far as to be like, "Snoop did it on his stupid song and it's just as good," or "Madd Skillz did the same shit on his 2007 wrap-up song," it's stupid. Yeah, anybody can sing into a robot, but they can't have T-Pain's pre-robot voice to make the same robot effect. He's the one who came out with this in the latest incarnation of the robot voice schtick, and he's the one who's best at it. The fact he looks like a crack dealer's teddy bear only makes it greater.
Honestly, it's not even an affront to rap music because it's straight pop. And more than that it's a variation on a straight pop music staple - the string arrangement. Music can have all sorts of subliminal effects with dissonance and all that corduroy patch egghead music theory bullshit, but usually pop music is considered "bubble gum" because it's that - stupidly pleasing. You get things stuck in your head you never knew were there. But the old '60s pop music, '70s pop music, a lot of stupid pop shit has hidden soothing strings. Dre uses them a lot. Fucking "Crazy" by Gnarls Barkley was soaked with strings, and it's always nice calming background strings. What I'm getting at here is T-Pain's voice is basically a shitty R&B voice played through the robot with a string effect on it, which is why it works. Rick Ross' "The Boss" and Twista's "Creep Fast" are two songs I really shouldn't like nor do I want to like, but they get in my head. Which is what T-Pain's subliminal stringed voice is supposed to do, and that works its way into my brain and soothes me, against my will. Which is probably for the best. I mean, if it was all conscious lyrics over top of El-P beats, I'd be far too aware how I'm a motherfucking mindless zombie stumbling through my whole life, never moving anywhere ahead of the stagnancy I'm blackened heart deep in, and I'd probably have a blaze orange boxcutter up against your throat, hoping I can find gold inside your blood. You motherfuckers ought to be thankful for T-Pain.
MD: I cannot figure out an angle ("angle" is a fancy word for a pre-conceived lie that you plan to work the public with, i.e., our entire website) to approach Raven's T-Pain revelation from. My first reaction is that he's bullshitting like he always does, but then again, he wrote this a while ago, and with our new approach to list writing, we have no deadlines, so he wasn't trying to make our deadline, so maybe he is really sincere about his feelings for T-Pain.
Personally, I can't stand the guy. Out of all the robot R&B singers, he is by far the worst. He's the only one who definitely has no sort of singing voice outside of studio effects, which is why I have such a problem trying to figure out how the guy got a record contract in the first place. I mean, at some point in his life, he had to have some kind of demo that wasn't so layered in effects as his current product is. The only thing I can think of is that he is a guy that got his deal by literally sucking dick, which I guess isn't too hard to imagine. I am sure that's how most people get record contracts now. It's like that old Mr. Show skit where the one lawyer wanted to become a partner, but first he had to suck all of the other partners' dicks. That is what the mainstream music industry has devolved to: a bunch of old rich elite men getting their dicks sucked by young hungry muscular black men. Perhaps this Mandingo fantasy is what makes Raven like T-Pain. I don't know.
WHO WE ARE:
RM: Raven Mack, although I have been calling myself Mr. 2009 lately. I make a lot of t-shirts with iron-on letters, and I've got both an emerald green with white letters and a bright orange with black letters MR. 2009 t-shirt thus far. I am manifesting my riches to be cashed out that year, although when I gave that too much thought while nursing a pinched nerve torn shoulder internal part with some codeine the other night, I figured I should also make some Dr. 2006 shirts too, as the self-taught science that has been building to that 2009 pay-off was graduated in 2006. Of course, like any doctor, I had been studying that bullshit for a decade in advance. Don't doubt my metaphysical status.
MD: My name is Mike Dikk. I work at a popcorn factory now. There's an old dusty 386 here and I rigged some stuff together using spare computer parts I had around the house so I can use the internet on my lunch breaks (where I am allowed to eat all of the free popcorn I want, except the White Cheddar, but I do get a good discount on it). It has one of those gigantic old school monitors with the green screen. So it's a trip viewing the internet on it, or at least the parts of the internet the archaic graphics card can handle, which isnt much to tell you the truth... Everything looks like fucking War Games or something. I fully expect this thing to bust out with WOULD YOU // LIKE TO // PLAY // A // GAME?? at any moment.
JD: I was the one that championed not ending this, but alas I became the slacker in this Top 10 deal. But shit is real for me now. I am doing the full-on dress rehearsal for my future career, so I am putting all of my time into dealing with first grade kids that are all sons and daughters of the soil. What I did notice was something that Raven mentioned in a quick blurb while we were having our cool internet chatter in homo code in the Clubhouse. There is a high amount of sexualization even at a young age in the public school system. For example, during a spelling test, these words were "randomly" put in order:
BIG
BUT
BLACK
CHICK
MAKE
COME
I insist that this was coincidence because all the teachers are straight laced, but who the fuck knows? Also, we were playing a phonics game and when the kids laid out the game pieces and there was a word chunk of "ore", and the beginning sound piece sitting right next to it was "wh". Finally, every exercise with the high frequency words ends up at some point with all the kids chanting BALLS over and over.
So maybe Raven is right? Or maybe he is some paranoid motherfucker and I am just justifying his paranoia by telling my stories of what an everyday first grade is like? Or maybe we are both stupid fucks who want to defend our educational positions by making up shit? Maybe glue tastes good? Who the fuck knows, but what I do know is I am balls deep in it for the long haul.
#1: INTERWEB LEAK OF NEW EMC RECORD
MD: If you're reading this on the internet, it means you haven't discovered some way to telepathically download our words to your brains without a wi-fi connection. It also means, you probably already know EMC is Masta Ace's new group with some other guys. I've now listened to this record two times back to back, which is something I don't do too often, but my computer recently had a seizure and I had to erase one of my hard drives in order to get it back in working order, so my iTunes is very limited at the momenet, and it was either listen to that record a couple times, sit in silence, or go through all of my unalphabetized, uncategorized records to find something decent to listen to. I guess I could have listened to one of my four remaining CDs, but that's besides the point.
I already forgot where I was going with all that, but it was something about how I don't really want to give this CD a proper review, because every other blog known to man will cover that ground, and the only thing I'm curious about is whether the average internet rap nerd's boner and following orgasm was bigger when they saw this record finally listed on a blog and they hit the download button or if it was bigger when they actually got around to listening to the record. I'm guessing it was the former because we all know the first one of the day is the biggest and produces the most fluid volume.
I'd also like to mention that Torae mixtape that's making the rounds without giving it its own spot, since we've downgraded the number of entries on these lists and I don't want to waste space. The Torae CD came out of nowhere while all us blog nerds were waiting with baited breath on the EMC record, but it still had the same outcome (or outcum). Torae is definitely a dude I have never ever heard of but he has his finger on the pulse of the internet, because his record features every producer that has been jocked over the past year. I'm not dissing, because the dude can rap too, and the record is really, really good, but at the same time, it's definitely good in a very uniform blog-acceptable way, so I can't muster up the energy to write anything creative about it, because I know there will be 400 similar opinions on the internet within the week, just like the EMC record.
I guess my point is, I like stuff just like you do, but sometimes there's no point in really writing about it when a gang of European kids already beat you to it since their time zone is like 12 hours different than our's, and they already wrote about it while you were still sleeping. Except for me. I don't sleep, because sleep is the cousin of death, but I'm generalizing here.
JD: Like Mike, I am not going to get into a track-by-track analysis of the album like some other blogs have done, but I will get into it a tad deeper than Mike. This album is beyond fantastic, and during a time when all these releases are coming up in the next few months, I really don't see how it could get better. The production is great but not overwhelming, the lyrics are insane (my early frontrunner for line of the year is when Punchline says, "I'll fight for my fam like Antonio Davis"), and even though it is a "concept" album, it doesn't get all hokey with doing songs about walking down the street and other inane bullshit that a concept album can wander into becoming.
Before I wrote this, I watched the Youtube videos of the group members talking about the leak, and I know it must suck to have your album just given away. But to be honest, I am going to buy this no doubt when it comes out, and in the age of stealing shit being so easy, that is the highest compliment you can give an album.
(P.S. I hipped Mike on Torae, trying to steal my heat son.)
#2: KOOL G. RAP'S "ON THE RISE AGAIN" SONG
RM: Forgive me because I'm thinking disparaging thoughts about someone I consider one of the greatest five MCs of all-time, and I probably won't type them out because it is uncomfortable enough to even have "Has G. Rap flipped his cabbage out there in Arizona?" thoughts two-stepping through my white head.
I mean, I have to admit after my initial reaction of "This is awesome!" when I heard him with LL and G-Unit on that song a couple months back, I eventually settled into, "Why the fuck is G. Rap fucking with G-Unit?" I mean, I could understand LL Cool J, because he's been a pop star for purt near two decades. And I eventually just decided that it's wack of me to be all Hip Hop Holier Than Thou about an MC legend wanting to deposit some G-Unit checks into his bank account.
But a song with Haylie Duff on the hook? I'm not gonna be like every faggot blog I found when I google searched "Kool G. Rap and Duff" to figure out how to spell that young bitch's first name correctly, who basically did thirteen variations on "Signs of the Apocalypse. Dogs fucking cats. Blah blah blah I'm an unclever homo who loves to dramatically employ really played out cliches in the hopes some other homo types 'LOL, let's link blogs' in my c-box." For me, it just seems questionable in a way I never thought I'd question Mr. Kool Genius Rap the IV. And honestly, I've not been able to let myself listen to it yet. I downloaded it after hearing DJ Premier talk about it on his radio show, and Premo (who made the beat) expressed his own discomfort with Haylee Duff being on the track, but that there was no time to change it and G. Rap sent him the thing with her on it to mix down, so Premo added the cuts over her hook to try and at least mute it down some. I don't know... it worries me over this shit. Although I'm enough of a Kool G. Rap mark that I'm just going to assume this is trickery on his part to fool all the rap fag nerds who know way more than they really know, so that when his real shit drops and makes people go, "Oh yeah, for-real rap music," he can laugh at us.
MD: I figured I'd throw something up on this already failing top ten idea (originally cut down from 25 after everyone lost interest, and soon it will become the top 2 because only me and Raven will write for it, and then I will replace everyone else with people who know absolutely nothing about rap music and 16 year old girls) because Raven's been bitching and it's a slow day at the popcorn factory I now work at. On top of that, the main boss dude keeps firing all of my co-workers so I don't have anyone looking over my shoulder every five minutes and asking me what I'm looking at while talking to me about sugar gliders and couches they found on Craigs List.
Anyway, I haven't heard this Kool G. Rap song yet either, but I could have told you a year ago that bad things were in Kool G's future. You see, I am on Kool G. Rap's Myspace friends list, which is weird all together, because I'm not friends with a lot of people I don't know in real life, but I could be thinking of one of my Myspace profiles for one of my 3,000 side projects where I am friends with everyone, but I digress.
So at some point, Kool G. Rap, or whoever controls Kool G. Rap's Myspace page, sent out a Myspace bulletin saying that G. Rap was available to do features and had listed prices. That is something a rookie should be doing, not a fucking rap legend. So right then and there, I knew any douche with a grand to blow was going to have a shitty G. Rap verse on their shitty album that no one will ever hear outside of their hometown. Luckily, I haven't heard of any of those tracks popping up yet (except that brand new one, where it's G. Rap, and RA The Rugged man, then some jobber, and of course the track is from the jobber's record), so if the worst thing to happen to G. Rap since that Myspace bulletin is making a bullshit song with Hailee Duff, we should all be thankful. It's only a matter of time before MC Dudebro420 from Vermont's new hardcore street track featuring G. Rap surfaces.
#2: YEAR END WRAP-UP ISSUE CORRECTIONS
RM: I failed to rememberize Evel Knievel when I did my Heaven Needed A Something-or-Other write-up. And that is a ridiculous oversight on my part. Evel Knievel had all the pomp, flash, calculated recklessness, gold jewelry, tricked out cars, and sluts by the dozens that any rapper could ever dream about. And if you can be THAT hip hop, all while being a bitter old racist fucker, then goddamnit right, props to you Evel. I hope they didn't let you in Heaven, so you jumped the pearly gates on a KX80, fucked God's wife in the ass, then bolted to mujahadeen heaven, where there's mad virgins to be fucking. (Special note: the virgins awaiting terrorism martyrs is misinformation, as it's not actually virgins but instead unpolluted women, meaning they don't bleed at all. Virgins still menstruate, and their period blood touching your ass is as bad as Grandma Deepwater Baptist finding your milk crate full of thrash metal records from 1986 in the attic. Also to specially note: no gods or heavens or actual people named Grandma Deepwater Baptist, although she's more likely than an eternal country club with an open bar on a cloud.)
MD: I have no year-end Wrap Up corrections and no regrets. I'm kind of bummed it was the least talked about 5,000 word project we've done so far, but it was also the least promoted. I'm pretty over promoting my own shit. It's been over a year now. If you want to see the shit, you find it. Even if it's two years from now after we've all given up on it and you're some young stupid kid looking for something unrelated through a search engine and you stumble upon it and get hyped on it, wondering whatever happened to us and why we quit doing this stuff when everything seemed to be going well. I am comfortable with the fact that in our mile a minute world, shit gets slept on for years and rediscovered when the original proponents of said shit have long given up on it. That's how life works now for the starving artist. So fuck promoting, you either see this or you don't. We aren't a real magazine so we don't need the advertising money so fuck it if we go belly up. I am sure just like every other dumb shit thing I've done on the internet, I will be on some random message board several years from this moment and some dude will ask me to dig up something I did on Dumpin.net so he can re-read it, and how he doesn't understand why we ever quit and we should do it again. Story of my life.
#4: STUPID FUCKING NEW YORK GIANTS IN THE SUPER BOWL
RM: You know, I was all set to forever hate the Patriots finally after this QUEST FOR PERFECTION finally trampled upon whatever rah rah Team America subliminal national pride my public education had immunized with, but then the stupid fucking Giants and that retard's little even more retarded brother Eli Manning is going to the Super Bowl. Now, it's bad enough a team I hate is going to the Super Bowl, but it's the Giants. We've come a long ways in the past two decades from when the Bears had to rush to record "The Super Bowl Shuffle". With laptop recording studios and the worldwide web, you might have a dude diss another rapper onstage on a Saturday night, Sunday morning the video is on youtube, Monday afternoon the dissed rapper recording a response track over top a throwaway beat, and by Monday night it's on his myspace page. The whole beef can flare up, simmer down, and be overanalyzed by the end of the week, without the need for Minister Farrakhan at all. This of course means I will probably see Jim Jones Super Bowl songs featuring Michael Strahan, a Saigon/Papoose/three other fuckers posse track featuring Sportscenter soundbites of Plaxico Burress, and just a general hip hop frenzy over this, being New York has been pretty hard-dicked to have something to act like they're running ever since shitty southern pop rap has tooken over the pop rap charts, and older rap heavyweights like Jay-Z, Nas, and the Wu have become sort of uninspiring. I was ready to root for anybody but the Patriots (haha, it always amazes me the coincidental parallels between the Bush regime and the Patriots dynasty), but I could never root for the stupid fucking Giants, especially not now with those stupid red numbers on their road jerseys. But the Patriots? It's like making me choose between having one guy fuck my ass or three guys fuck my mouth (notice I said three, because in my twisted mind the choice between getting one ass-fucking or giving two blowjobs is not even a close debate, so I had to make it three blowjobs)... I guess when it comes to Super Bowl XLT or whatever it is, I'm gonna have to be rooting for Al-Qaeda.
MD: I have become a fair weather fan of the Giants now that they made it to the Super Bowl. Raven's intense bias toward all things New York are really blinding him from seeing the bigger picture. If you follow football at all, you should know that the Giants are incredible underdogs, and they have been through the entire playoffs. That's the beauty of the NFC. The AFC is usually a lock by pre-season for 1 of 4 teams to go to the Super Bowl, while the NFC is like hitting the Random buttom on Madden to pick your opponent because anyone can show up to the Super Bowl as long as they are one of the 6 teams to make the playoffs. Even last year when my Chicago FOOTBALL Bears made it to the Super Bowl and more or less dominated the bullshit NFC for the entire season, I was still pretty worried throughout the playoffs, because I knew ANY team in the NFC could have knocked them off, because that's the nature of the NFC.
So The Giants making it to the Super Bowl was a surprise and it wasn't a surprise. Still, they were the last NFC playoff team people expected. That's not the entire reason I am now a fair weather fan though. The other night before I went to bed, I was flipping through the channels and came across a commercial for the March of Dimes. It was one of those local area commercials (I'm assuming it is local in the greater tri-state area, so perhaps you've seen it) where the audio is all muffled and the video quality makes it look like it's still 1989. You know, some shit your local wacky used car dealership throws together.
Well, this March of Dimes commercial starred Eli Manning, and he was jibber jabbering something about premie babies, but I was so amazed by it. His brother is in something like one out of every five commercials that run on television, while Eli is stammering his way through some late night local area charity spot and now the dude is leading a team to the Super Bowl, much like the Bad News Bears repping Chico's Bail Bonds in Japan. It takes a lot of serious Jew Media magic to turn any New York team (besides the horrendous Knicks) into a serious on-field performance AND off-field media underdog, but they've succeeded big time, and I am so pumped right now to see the Giants beat the shit out of the Boston bullshit Patriots like they were on some 1980 Winter Olympics DO YOU BELIEVE IN MIRACLES shit.
JD: Outside of the game, one of the best parts of the Super Bowl is the legal troubles/ill shit that comes to the forefront about one of the players on one of the Super Bowl teams. So far, the best of these stories has been about N.Y. Giants defensive end Osi Umenyiora. A "magazine model", whatever the fuck that is, started her own blog here to announce dude likes to shit on his girls. She spells out how he wanted her to get double teamed, but she said no, so she had a friend come over and Osi shit on her in a bathtub. She then wrote about how he paid her bills and bought her jewelry so he could shit on her as well.
I am an open dude. If Osi wants to shit on girls, then that is his deal, but I am sure people would read what she wrote and think of him as some sort of sicko freak. But who really is the freak here? Osi would never have come up with this sort of fetish unless a girl let him pinch a log on her, so is it Osi's fault that turns him on? It takes two to tango, kids, and if dropping a few g's gets him a toilet with a vagina, then she is just as freaky as he is. Unless Eli gets caught giving footjobs to Cooper Manning in the trunk of Joe Montana's car while he is in a gay bar doing double anal on Elton John with Joe Klecko, this Osi story should stand tall as the illest shit (ha, shit) to come out of the Super Bowl hype.
RM: Mike mentioned to me that somebody has a New York Giants song now, but he said it was a rapper. The other day in the truck I heard them play a Collie Buddz song "Blind to Them" (or something along those lines) about the Giants and how they'll crush the Patriots and fuck the haters. I hope this is the song Mike heard, but even if not, it's funny. It's not bad as a throwaway dancehall song, but haha all the Giants have backing them is a white dancehall dude from Bermuda. I guess when you don't know about Collie Buddz, he still sounds awesome, but once you learn all about him and his fake Jamaican patois, he just seems like a fucking first class chump. Although he's a white guy so he may be googling himself and find this and send me a "cease and desist this shit yo" email.
#5: AMY WINEHOUSE SMOKES CRACK
RM: I am the type of know-it-all hipster douche who's all like "LOL, yeah Amy Winehouse is sooooo great. What about Sharon Jones, asshole? Don't you know every obscure soul singer who does a retro schtick in 2008? God." But I have to admit with Winehouse being all ugly and drugged up, and not just regular white American people drugs but crack - I didn't even know they had crack in England - it sort of makes her awesome in a different way. Sharon Jones seems pretty straight-laced and into doing the "I'm an older black woman sanging some soul" thing, but the degradation of drug abuse unlocks a tortured part of your soul, or creates it, and as long as someone's taping her attempting to mangle some R&B classics on Protools files that'll eventually get touched up by Mark Ronson in between them videoing her smoking rock to throw up on youtube, I'm straight. It's also funny to me that my four-year-old can actually sing "Rehab". I'm such a hipster douche.
JD: Really who cares? But she did get a hip hop rep of sort for singing old school soul music with crackling horns and all that other bullshit that people tend to think is cool even though they would never own a record of her's. Fuck her though. I think if you want to truly emulate some old, black singer, you should get hooked on heroin for years and years like Ray Charles, Miles Davis, and that one lady from France, but still put out classic music. See, I am sure there are people out there doing way worse shit than crack, and are still contributing something to society rather than looking massively haggard, wearing 16 lbs of eye makeup, and not washing your hair. Smoke on up stupid bitch, because the only way now you are going to get jocked is if you die - coming back all clean is pussy. If you are retarded enough to videotape yourself sucking a glass dick, then you should live that shit and just do it on stage at some Brit Pop awards show when you get a Lifetime Achievement Award based off your one jocked album.
#6: MEXICAN COKES
RM: So we had an in-depth discussion on the merits of Mexican Cokes from the Mexican stores, made with for-real sugar instead of damned weak-ass fructose syrup Americanized sodey pops, in The Secret Clubhouse message board a few months back, and ever since, I've been meaning to buy a couple. Well, it just so happened a couple of yesterdays ago I found myself right at a la tienda mexicana, so I went in to get me some sugar sodas to hopefully accelerate the diabetes because I don't really need both feets. They didn't have no Cokes in there, but they did have Pepsis, so I got two of those plus a jug of that strawberry banana Guava nectar (my kids love that shit).
The best thing about the Mexican Pepsis were they are bottled in some old school 1979 hard bottles that you could beat people to death with, with paint and a capped top. At the counter, there was a full-on "no ingles" chick holding her toddler and a bi-lingual chick who rung me up. I am always susceptible to the allure of a spanish chick (except Puerto Ricans, which are like annoying New Yorkers, but brown), but this chick was something else, with her dyed hair, and when she said, "I'm sorry..... I have no cents today," so she shorted me two pennies and her "r"s in "sorry" rolled ever so sexually enough, I wanted to make children with her right away, because that's how my brain works.
Instead, I took my 1979 ass sugar Pepsi outside on the street side and sat there pretending I was in a futuristic sci-fi flick from 1981, where Mexicans were trapped as slaves in a world where white people zipped by in rounded sleek silvery cars and had little white machines with earbuds playing music straight to their brains. Unfortunately, there was no revolutionary climax to my daydreaming, because a very obviously modern Mexican dude rolled up in a giant white Nissan Titan with plenty chrome and a big vinyl thing in his back tinted window saying "PAPA GARCIA", and he jumped out with horn-driven breakbeat mongrel ass Mexican music blaring when the door opened. This reminded me that I also had meant to get a couple Los Tigres Del Norte CDs, but I had to get home to put my chivos back in their pen before it got dark and cold as fuck.
MD: I don't really know the joys of a Mexican Coke because there are very few Mexicans living in the northeast, at least legally. There's a good chance I didn't even see a real live Mexican until my 20s.
I do like how name brand sodas are specifically formulated to appeal to the countries they are being shipped to. All soda is, really, is really shitty chemicals, and the fact that they do enough research to know how to tweak those chemicals for certain countries is just bonkers to me. I've had Mexican soda before, in Mexican restaurants run by white people, so I know the whole sugar cane thing, but I've never had an honest to goodness Pepsi or Coke. I did have an Indian Pepsi before though, along with the preferred brand of Pakistani soda, called Pakola. It's supposed to taste like ice cream, but it tastes more like horrible perfume a grandma wears. I'm not even sure if the Indian Pepsi I had was actual Pepsi. The colors, logo and bottle look like Pepsi, but it's called Thumbs Up! It's rather spicy, which is not something I look for in a cola. Kind of like shitty Moxy or something.
Lastly, I had something called Vimto, which is India's answer to Dr. Pepper, and it resembled a store brand knockoff of Dr. Pepper, so there's not really much to talk about.
I am hoping to one day break into Japanese soda because those Japs are all about weird flavorings and have like watermelon cola and pumpkin seed root beer. I've had that one Jap soda that is engineered like a Rube Goldberg device where you have to take the pin out and push down a marble and watch the carbonation rush up to the top of the bottle, but it just tastes like Sprite once all the hullabaloo is over. I want that freaky shit. I need some white chocolate mango Pepsi ASAP.
#7: LIL WAYNE BUSTED FOR THE ASSORTED DRUGS
RM: You know, I like some of Wayne's stuff but I definitely missed the boat on the internerd rapdork "OMG WEEZY'S THA BEST!!!" train, because I don't see it. However, I am hoping beyond anything I've hoped for in rap music in probably fifteen years that there's some master plan going on here. I am hoping that somebody - maybe Baby, maybe some Jew Overlord, whoever really - is engineering things along, learning from the wasted marketing potential of DJ Screw's death, learning from the megamillions struck when Cobain swallowed a mouth full of buckshot, learning from the eternal soundscan flame that was Biggie and Tupac until recently, and someone has kept all the best Wayne shit, like 3000 times more retardedly wonderful than all that bullshit from Tha Carter III mixtape you fags acted like was awesome, and is just sitting on it, giving Wayne his daily per diem in pocket cash, and allowing him all the exorbitant drugs and sex he wants, waiting for the big overdose to hit him one night. Then - BAMM! - you get the for-real Lil Wayne album finally out, and it's the first rap record in forever to go multi-platinum because motherfuckers are geeked for it and want to honor his stupid little gay ewok rapper face by actually purchasing the thing instead of just stealing it like we would've normally done. That's what I'm hoping is going on.
(Also, I was high the other night sitting in my truck in the backyard listening to satellite radios when it occurred to me that Lil Wayne is pretty much a black Eminem for all the white rap fags who want to like some oddball corny tattooed dude with predictable yet wacky linguistical patterns but not really too much cleverness to actually say, so that if they are a true expert whiteboy loving rap, there is no way they could ever love another whiteboy because that goes against the basic principals of being an expert whiteboy rap fan, so now they can love Lil Wayne which is basically Eminem but smudged yet not stained with the ghetto. So before you fags post, "Why you hating on the best rapper alive?" I can say, "Haha you stupid fags wanting to suck a black Eminem dick.")
MD: I want to use this space to mention that Lil Wayne is working on a mixtape with Mick Boogie called Hello Brooklyn where he "revisits" Brooklyn hip hop classics. The only song confirmed so far is "Who Got The Props 2008" and the only audio available is Buckshot's new verse from that song. This mixtape will be the true test to see if Wayne can hang on to all of his internet dicksuckers. On one hand, it's the first thing Wayne has done that I cared about hearing, and on the other hand, all of the current people hanging from his nuts will have to decide whether their carnal love for all things Wayne will override the pre-programmed internet opinion that you cannot revisit previous East Coast classics unless they contain scrapped Biggie verses that were locked up in a vault somewhere.
I think a lot of people forget that Cam'ron was once in Wayne's spot, and as far as I'm concerned, Cam put out the mixtape of the year last year, and there was nary a peep from internet thug rap sympathizers because they were too busy waiting for leaks from Drought Carter VII to show up on a blogsite. Both Cam and Wayne were rappers previously written off as fads and flashes in the pan before their resurgences as "Greatest Rappers Alive", so the real question is, who's going to take Wayne's spot? Drag-On? Magoo? Red Hot Lover Tone? Only time will tell.
#8: THE RELEASE OF THE LAST AIR JORDANS
JD: Being the resident sneaker freak, now is a big time in that realm because Nike is now releasing the last of the true Air Jordans, the Jordan XX3. Normally, this would be a big deal, but with Jordan being retired and the general dislike towards the Jordan Brand by the sneaker community, it is barely causing a blip in the mainstream sports/hip hop world.
I am not sure if any of you people heard of this website called gamefaqs.com? Basically it is the cauldron of all video game nerds; every dorky detail of that culture can be unearthed by going through those gamefaqs message boards. I find alot of similarities between that world and the world of the sneaker collector. From browsing places like uptempoair, ISS, and Niketalk, to the non-sneakerhead, the place can be just as dorky as people talking about video games. There are threads about keeping your sneaker crease-less, pictures of the sneakers people bought and own, and general bitching about the quality of what is being released. Most importantly, I think the people who are mainstays in both of these geek factories are more similar than you think. The video game shit is older dudes who shouldn't care that much about video games, or kids who are just into it to the point where they come off as huge speds. The sneaker forums are older dudes who spend the electricity bill loot on the $185 new Jordans, or suburban thug kids who have mommy and daddy drive them across the state to the one Finish Line that carried the Flint/gray XX3s that were carried in only 23 stores and cost around $300.
Being an older guy with a wife, potential career, and trying for a kid, I have become a voyeur to the sneaker game. It is funny to see kids shit their pants over Jordans I used to buy when I was 13 and end up wearing to cut the grass after a few months. But don't think this "last" Jordan is going to be the end of the Jordan Brand. I am sure there will be generations of Filipinos who will be locked in a windowless factory sewing into shoddy leather making retro Jordans that will retail for $300 when it takes about $7 of man power/material to make.
RM: Honestly, the one thing I have never understood, and this was probably due to necessity as a broke ass kid, was high dollar clothing trends. My parents were younger than fuck, drunker than fuck, and broker than fuck, so the pimpest pair of shoes I had as a youth was a pair of sky blue Kangaroos that I equipped with matching fat laces. No matter how hard I'd beg and plead, my parents just didn't understand, and I was usually sporting the most derivative bobos to be found. In fact, I had the bobos version of the first Air Jordans, which of course, as Bobos are apt to do, only looked good for like four hours. And being in a predominantly black school, wearing bobo Air Jordans just led to mad clowning during P.E. (Haha, at least I didn't live in the projects, although I guess my grandmother was forced by her own racial intolerance to move into a trailer park and out of the projects.) After a little wear and tear, the bobo Jordans went from high top to low top, because the upper shell part just sort of started ripping, so I just tore it off and trimmed them up with a boxcutter. They looked relatively cool then, but more from a degenerate metalhead kid perspective than a put a toothbrush to it to keep it clean fresh kid perspective.
The funny thing is, knowing how twisted and perverse the internet is, I bet there's little circles of people who collect bobos and show off their shit amongst each other, claiming bobos are better because they were less cared for and more likely to be gone now, so ultimately it's a more pure form of sneaker, all talking down on each other for wearing Nikes, and having signature pictures of photoshopped Chuck D holding up some bobos with his power fist and the words "I like Nike but wait a minute!" Fucking fruity ass internets.
#9: MURS "BETTER THAN THE BEST" VIDEO/SONG
RM: I would assume this has been in circulation for a long minute, but I guess the "official" release of MURS first major-label song/video just happened this past week, and I used my internet welfare for about 40 minutes to dl the video off of Youtube, just to see what was going on. I slept on MURS but got into him well enough late, and never really understood the move to a major label. Like, what did Warner Brothers see in him that separated him from whatever else was out there amongst the three million competent ass rappers there are to make them think they could recoup some money off him in a day and age when no one sells records anymore?
This first video and song is okay - probably to the average human ears it outshines all the wack anabolic steroid ass TV title rappers in heavy rotation (but then again the average ears probably love that stupid shit), but I'm not sure what makes it super awesome to make some skater kid in rural Indiana go drop fifteen bucks on a CD. I guess at this point, as the recording industry continues to self-destruct, I assume they would have some grand vision to trick people into giving up their money again. But instead it seems like they kind of want a new Pharcyde dude, but without all the crack addiction, and therefore not quite as amusing. Props to MURS though. I hope he makes enough money back that he's not owing those Jews his guarantee back for the next twenty years of his life.
JD: Back when we did the Top MCs thing at another website what seemed like a thousand years ago, MURS was upset in the first round by Eminem. This was back before we officially started doing these EWA blurbs, and before I really held major resentment towards the average hip hop internet fan. In my early "trying to be some underground cool guy" days, my then-girlfriend, now wife, would make me mix CDs of random tracks of underground dudes, to which I would go home and listen to in my Discman becuase I had not yet stepped into the iPod generation. One of the many reasons I married her was that she was hip enough to my desire to be hip to go out on the internets herself to find the name of "underground" dudes she would put on the CDs. She would also make these cool CD covers with shit that I liked like John Stockton, Doug Gilmour (the St. Louis Blues version), sneakers, and like pictures of graffitti.
Once I became a full-fledged white man on the internet, I went out and got every MURS track I could find. I had a promo version of Why Ask Why? for the longest fucking time that I would force myself to listen to because I can't stand that promobot voice.
It seems out of place MURS is now signed to a major label and is on the cover of magazines. Shit, he even has a number you can dial to get MURS updates. Honestly, like Raven said, I hope he recoups all the loot he is dropping out of his own pocket to pimp this upcoming album. But with the way the world spins, the same time he drops that solo album, Eminem will come out with his new fat, bloated record that all the same people who thought he was a better MC during our stupid poll, will go out and buy that shit while MURS is buried behind the person who finished third on American Idol's solo album.
#10: IN DEFENSE OF T-PAIN
RM: You know, it's common meme to hate on T-Pain for his bionic microphone, and fair enough. But for people to go so far as to be like, "Snoop did it on his stupid song and it's just as good," or "Madd Skillz did the same shit on his 2007 wrap-up song," it's stupid. Yeah, anybody can sing into a robot, but they can't have T-Pain's pre-robot voice to make the same robot effect. He's the one who came out with this in the latest incarnation of the robot voice schtick, and he's the one who's best at it. The fact he looks like a crack dealer's teddy bear only makes it greater.
Honestly, it's not even an affront to rap music because it's straight pop. And more than that it's a variation on a straight pop music staple - the string arrangement. Music can have all sorts of subliminal effects with dissonance and all that corduroy patch egghead music theory bullshit, but usually pop music is considered "bubble gum" because it's that - stupidly pleasing. You get things stuck in your head you never knew were there. But the old '60s pop music, '70s pop music, a lot of stupid pop shit has hidden soothing strings. Dre uses them a lot. Fucking "Crazy" by Gnarls Barkley was soaked with strings, and it's always nice calming background strings. What I'm getting at here is T-Pain's voice is basically a shitty R&B voice played through the robot with a string effect on it, which is why it works. Rick Ross' "The Boss" and Twista's "Creep Fast" are two songs I really shouldn't like nor do I want to like, but they get in my head. Which is what T-Pain's subliminal stringed voice is supposed to do, and that works its way into my brain and soothes me, against my will. Which is probably for the best. I mean, if it was all conscious lyrics over top of El-P beats, I'd be far too aware how I'm a motherfucking mindless zombie stumbling through my whole life, never moving anywhere ahead of the stagnancy I'm blackened heart deep in, and I'd probably have a blaze orange boxcutter up against your throat, hoping I can find gold inside your blood. You motherfuckers ought to be thankful for T-Pain.
MD: I cannot figure out an angle ("angle" is a fancy word for a pre-conceived lie that you plan to work the public with, i.e., our entire website) to approach Raven's T-Pain revelation from. My first reaction is that he's bullshitting like he always does, but then again, he wrote this a while ago, and with our new approach to list writing, we have no deadlines, so he wasn't trying to make our deadline, so maybe he is really sincere about his feelings for T-Pain.
Personally, I can't stand the guy. Out of all the robot R&B singers, he is by far the worst. He's the only one who definitely has no sort of singing voice outside of studio effects, which is why I have such a problem trying to figure out how the guy got a record contract in the first place. I mean, at some point in his life, he had to have some kind of demo that wasn't so layered in effects as his current product is. The only thing I can think of is that he is a guy that got his deal by literally sucking dick, which I guess isn't too hard to imagine. I am sure that's how most people get record contracts now. It's like that old Mr. Show skit where the one lawyer wanted to become a partner, but first he had to suck all of the other partners' dicks. That is what the mainstream music industry has devolved to: a bunch of old rich elite men getting their dicks sucked by young hungry muscular black men. Perhaps this Mandingo fantasy is what makes Raven like T-Pain. I don't know.
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