I've listened to this stuff so that you don't have to, although I should probably state for the record that I own all of the CDs from which this drivel is sourced and love most of them to varying degrees, so my sneering comes from a place which is otherwise mostly respect. The following should therefore not be mistaken for a twatty middle-aged white bloke scoffing at those hippity-hoppers with their rappers' music on the grounds of it failing to sound like Gentle fucking Giant.
Angry jailbird questions Dr. Dre's sexuality, yet again.
This one is more obviously directed at Eminem, but the joke - if we're going to call it a joke for the sake of argument - is so powerfully lame as to be eclipsed by its own insults. I'm referring here to a skit featured on Death Row's Too Gangsta for Radio compilation of 2001, a compilation which could have been great. I remembered it as being mostly great but listened to the thing this morning and noticed that once you're past a few decent contributions from Above the Law, the LOX, Murder Inc. and a couple of others, it's mostly just Death Row's loyal elves saying the same old stuff on behalf of their master, the most eye-rollingly underwhelming of which is probably a Tupac impersonator ironically named Tha Realest - so I guess the practice of keeping it real must extend to sounding like some other guy's Spitting Image puppet. Among Tha Realest's contributions to Too Talented for Radio is F*** Hollywood which posits that specific celebrities are disgusting faggots who will definitely give you AIDS if you're not careful, and who are therefore unsuitable as role models for our kids. In case this sounds a little homophobic, or even fucking moronic, Tha Realest is careful to make it clear that he ain't hatin' but rather is simply telling it like it is - so that's a relief. Anyway, to get to the point, the skit in question purports to be the testimony of a leading Ku Klux Klan personage as he welcomes Eminem into the fold and explains what his mission is to be, namely to infiltrate rap music so as to make more money from the same than any African American rap artist ever did. The subtext of the skit therefore cleverly implies that Eminem is, in fact, a racist. Do you see? The efficacy of this short audio drama is, however, undermined by the aforementioned Grand Dragon proposing that Eminem will undertake this mission by adopting the name Marshall Mathers, suggesting that whoever wrote the script doesn't actually understand how names work. The Grand Dragon additionally proposes that Eminem - presumably cleverly using his own actual name as an alias - infiltrate the rap business by buddying up with Dr. Dre, formerly of NWA; and here comes the ingenious part - the same is identified as Dr. Gay of a group named either NW AIDS, or NWA but with the W standing for with a dick in his mouth*. Behind this Wildean wordplay lays an implication of Dr. Dre being a homosexual who might therefore justifiably be rebranded Dr. Gay - read the sentence again a few times if it went over your head. It's interesting to note that, regardless of anyone else's sexuality, or even the label's failure to release anything which wasn't mostly shit since its best artists either died or jumped ship, the individual behind the beef seems to have spent one hell of a lot of his time in an all-male correctional environment thinking about deeds involving Dr. Dre's knob, just like the great big heterosexual that he definitely is.
C-Murder's inconvenient phone call.
Bringing this one up feels a little like kicking a dog, but it would be wrong to excuse certain artists from the roll call simply on the grounds of the rest of the album being exceptional, and Bossalinie is an otherwise great album; and never mind a dog, this listing additionally amounts, it might be argued, to kicking a man when he's down, which is never a good feeling. C-Murder is presently incarcerated for a crime which it kinda sorta looks a lot like he didn't do, the sum total of evidence apparently amounting to him being a black man who was in the same club and that he calls himself C-Murder; but unfortunately the skit, which is identified on the inlay as Phone Call, may actually be the absolute lamest of its kind. First we hear a phone ring and C-Murder answers, clearly disgruntled with having been called at 5.30AM by a fan who explains how he got the number from a girlfriend. C-Murder tells the caller to fuck off in no uncertain terms and hangs up, following which we hear his pitiful admirer exclaim damn, because he knows he's given offence to a great man. The fragile reality of the skit is diminished by the stilted acting and the fact of both voices being heard clearly, where that of the caller really should have been treated so as to make it sound like an actual phone call. The import is of course that C-Murder is amazing, a man who finds himself having to put up with all manner of nonsense in his line of work, while the fan is a much lesser person and an idiot. The problem is that C-Murder has already spent an entire CD telling us that he's amazing, and Phone Call fails to add anything of value to the hypothesis; but worse, for something which is presumably intended to be bitterly amusing, it contains no actual joke. It might just about have worked with a better actor speaking at the other end of an actual telephone line but still probably wouldn't have been that funny. C-Murder was never the most original rapper, but he makes up for any shortfall with a powerful and chilling delivery and by playing to his strengths, and skits sadly aren't one of them. That said, I still don't think he should be in the stripey hole.
Names mispronounced with hilarious yet revealing consequences.
At the risk of enraging simpletons, I'd say that 2Pac was somewhat overrated, which is doubtless something to do with the James Dean effect in relation to his unfortunate passing. True enough, when he was good, he was amazing, and he recorded a couple of exceptional albums prior to disappearance down the Death Row rabbit hole; but those posthumous double CDs really ain't great. With one or two exceptions, the beats are mostly lackluster, and for the most part those discs seem to be the work of someone who wasn't very well, who was succumbing to toxic levels of paranoia, and who had apparently stopped caring. There might be a single decent album's worth of material among all that posthumous stuff, but the rest is just more of the same bollocks about bitches, money, loyalty, enemies, just how much 2Pac doesn't care about what those enemies be saying, and words prefixed with thug to the point of absurdity - thug passion, thug nature, thug life, thug somnambulism, thug unintentional homoeroticism, thug collectible figurine display case and so on and so forth. The laboriously titled Makaveli the Don Killuminati: The Seven Day Theory isn't a bad album for all that it's no 2Pacalypse Now, but is nevertheless one of seemingly hundreds which open with a news report live from the launch party for the much anticipated new album from controversial rap artist 2Pac Shakur, and this much anticipated new album is usually the album we're listening to - which makes no fucking sense whatsoever - because some rap dude releasing a new album would obviously make the evening news. Usually the reporter tells us that he or she is trying to see what's going on, and we can hear an excitable crowd in the background, possibly with some guy letting off a few rounds from his AK47 in a generally irrepressible spirit of excitement. The reporter then inevitably goes on to explain how whichever rap rivals 2Pac had fallen out with that week have been reportedly crying and shitting their pants like lil' bitches, terrified of what this new masterpiece from the wise one will reveal about them and how it shalt demonstrate their own inane bleatings to be as unto the folly of simpletons. To this effect, the reporter who calls in Makaveli the Don Killuminati: The Seven Day Theory specifically identifies Mobb Deep and Notorious BIG as among those now in tears and running for their respective mummies, except he erroneously mispronounces their names as Mobb Sleep and Notorious PIG - which is hilarious, obviously. Biggie was quite a large gentleman so mistakenly referring to him Notorious PIG seems uncannily fitting, and so much so that I half suspect it may even have been deliberate. Jay-Z is also mentioned, although the reporter misses a trick in failing to refer to him as Gay-Z, so I imagine the Death Row brains trust still had that one in development at the time of the release party which didn't actually happen. Possibly, having come up with Dr. Gay as an hilarious yet revealing rebranding of Dr. Dre, they didn't want to confuse the issue. Maybe the whole thing would have worked a little better had 2Pac ever released an album as good as Ready to Die, The Infamous, or Illmatic. What a waste.
Puffy's sexy cultural experience.
The internet reckons a skit is a short comedy sketch or piece of humorous writing, especially a parody, which coincides with my understanding of the word, but not with a great number of the skits found on rap albums, many of which constitute po-faced dramatised affirmations of the artists in question being bigger, harder, better paid, more lyrical, or more violent than the rest of us, and with not much in the way of chuckles. Puff Daddy, or whatever he's calling himself these days, is a man who has never been afraid to take himself far too seriously, and his skits accordingly tend to be merely wry at best, but executed with such ham-fisted determination as to actually make us feel a little bit sorry for him. This one turns up uncredited at the close of Señorita from 1997's No Way Out and constitutes a seemingly candid recording of Puffy fooling around in bed with some Hispanic woman. The listener is invited to assume that they've just finished having it off so we hear various sighs and the occasional slurping sound as Puffy addresses his lady friend. He playfully tells her that he wants to learn Spanish so as to be able to deliver certain romantic exclamations in her own language when shooting his load. The cross-cultural aspect of their union is emphasised by the music we hear in the background, which is clearly in the Latin tradition. In fact, it seems to be emphasised with such force that I'm surprised Puffy doesn't ask her to fix him a nice spicy taco or a half coconut of tequila. As skits go, while this one isn't even remotely funny, neither is it particularly stupid or offensive, but the problem is that it seems to go on forever, at least beyond the point at which the listener begins to feel awkward. We get that he really, really, really fancied Jennifer Lopez, and that she was doubtless amazing in the sack, but this sort of eulogy - along with those fucking tracks on later albums where he was begging her to come back - is simply embarrassing. It's like the teenager who mentions the name of some specific girl every five minutes, regardless of the general thrust of the conversation. You could be talking about Chairman Mao and he'll just happen to mention that he saw Karen going into the Chinese takeaway on the high street on Tuesday night. He's pretty sure she ordered sweet and sour chicken. At least that's what it looked like. No-one needs to hear it, and neither did anyone need to know so much about what it's like inside Puffy's head. Sometimes it's good to keep stuff to yourself.
Ganksta Nip interviews himself.
The chorus of Ganksta Nip's Texas Chain Saw from his 1998 album on the Rap-A-Lot label, Interview With a Killa runs Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Blacula, Daytime: walking zombie, nighttime: evil Dracula, which is actually just an arbitrary list of slightly mismatched scary things - first naming two fairly dissimilar horror movies, and then two states of being between which Ganksta Nip purportedly divides his daily existence. Specifically, he spends the day as a walking zombie, so he claims, then each night transforms into an evil Dracula, which is something quite different to those good Draculas you're always hearing about it. This, I would suggest, illustrates the main pitfall of rap careers undertaken by those who watch way too many horror movies, namely how easy one can end up looking like a fucking idiot, as should be pretty obvious from a quick glance at all heavy metal. The key to getting it right seems to be either keeping a sense of humour regarding the absurdity of one's performance while pulling those scary faces, or else walking the walk with such conviction that you come across as certifiable and probably a danger to yourself - which is presumably how Insane Clown Posse, NATAS, and Three-6-Mafia got away with it. Unfortunately, Ganksta Nip goes one further on this album by conducting an interview with himself as both into and outro. I'm sure we've all heard those fake news reports about the impressive notoriety or criminal prowess of such and such a rapper who is also so obviously also playing our on the spot reporter, but Ganksta Nip interviewing himself is worse. It's not so much that he doesn't have a whole lot to say or that what he says isn't anything like so scary as he seems to believe, but the delivery and execution are such as to suggest he must have been about twelve at the time, which he clearly wasn't, otherwise he would have been working on his first album at the age of five. Both interviewer and Ganksta Nip speak slowly during their notional meeting of mind, an affectation which is probably supposed to sound sinister, and Ganksta Nip replies as himself in a laboured scary voice possibly based on that of the Leprechaun from the movies of the same name; but the touch which really reduces this already shaky production to ham-fisted idiocy for me is the peculiar phrasing of the questions, at least two of which are suffixed with the interviewer adding, let me know. I suppose let me know might be a quirk of language, some regional equivalent of asking what's that all about? immediately following did I see you wearing a Wonder Woman costume outside Toys-R-Us earlier today?, for example, but I'm not from Houston so for me it's something you say when communicating with a person to whom you're not actually speaking, when writing a letter, for instance.
Dear Sir, thank you for kindly sending me the 1979 Hornby Railways catalogue. I wish to order the R.629 Level Crossing with Opening Gates but am unable to find the correct price and postage. Might I ask that you provide these in your response, for which I enclose a stamped addressed envelope. Let me know.
Let me know somehow makes the whole thing seem ridiculous, which is a shame because Ganksta Nip is clearly not without talent and is very listenable when he's not doing silly voices or discussing different types of Dracula.
When even the toilet scene has its down side.
It's called I'm a H-O-E and is specifically identified as a skit in brackets on the second Ruff Ryders label compilation, but takes the form of a song rather than the usual minute or so of unconvincing dialogue. I say song because it has a beat and a tune, but really it's more like a horrible nursery rhyme with commentary. What are you, bitch? asks our narrator, to which the response is sung back, I'm a H.O.E. - not an acronym but simply spelling out the short form of whore in a way which conveniently sets up the rhyme scheme for the rest of the number. Are you really? asks our man, and if the young lady's response is indirect, providing no clear statement of either positive or negative confirmation, it is difficult to miss the import of I'll fuck the whole family. The import is that our man is dealing with a sexually promiscuous individual, and so naturally he becomes excited as the young lady sings the rest of the nursery rhyme, in doing so revealing that she is keen to take it up the wrong 'un, facilitate a gang bang, and to have her partner - or possibly partners - urinate and defecate upon her person during their romantic liaison. Our man's reaction to these promises is mostly that he can't wait to tell his boys about this one and that he can't believe his luck - which probably works better, or is at least more amusing, if you're into what I understand is referred to as the toilet scene. I'm not, so I find it bewildering unless it's supposed to be funny. Unfortunately, it doesn't really seem to work as humour either so far as I'm able to tell. Anyway, the cloud surrounding this silver lining - or golden brown lining, I suppose - that is to say the punchline to I've found a lady who will let me do a sexy poo on her and I can't believe my luck is that the lady in question is unfortunately HIV positive, doubtless as a consequence of her sexual exploits. Ultimately, I found it difficult to keep from feeling sorry for everyone involved in this one minute and twenty seconds of witless drivel.
Swizz Beatz likes to partake, if you know what I mean.
I don't know what went wrong with Swizz Beatz. One moment he was a mysterious background figure crafting genuinely weird minimalist beats, like some some guy trying to pull a track to pieces to see if he could keep all those plinky-plonky Casio presets balanced on the very edge of falling apart, resulting in something like the sonic equivalent of Japanese minimalist horticulture; next, he's this goon jumping up and down pulling faces in the background of a Bontempi organ set to carnival sounds as it pulls on a leather jacket in the hope of seeming at least as hard as Michael Jackson in whatever that video was - you know the one I mean. Here on G.H.E.T.T.O. Stories, Swizz Beatz' first approximately solo album - and I dread to think what G.H.E.T.T.O. stands for - he additionally takes up rapping, which is ill-advised given that his raps tend towards the simplistic, frequently rhyming words with themselves, which is actually just repeating rather than rhyming. Probably the most annoyingly stupid example would be Who's Real from Jadakiss' Last Kiss album, upon which Swizz drops the following science:
He's phony, she's fake.
That's the type of people I hate.
If you real and you know it clap your hands.
If you real and you know it clap your hands.
Wait a minute - who's real, who's not?
She's real, but he's not.
One possibly shouldn't over-analyse club bangers - as they're known in the trade - but this one was really giving it away, beginning with a brave denouncement of not only phonies but also fakes, two groups of people generally loved and admired by most of the populace, and yet Swizz Beatz here takes a stand, declaring that actually he doesn't like phonies or fakes very much at all! This is followed by a vocal call to identify real people and to distinguish them from the fake and phony demographic by having them clap their hands, then concluding an intriguing examination of this duality in greater depth wherein the word not is cleverly rhymed with the word not. With this degree of cerebration in evidence, it's probably obvious that Swizz Beatz is not averse to the old space fags, if you know what I mean, and his enthusiasm is communicated at length on G.H.E.T.T.O. Stories, most wearyingly in the Alien skit. First we hear Swizz talking to himself as one does when off one's fucking cake. The story seems to run that Swizz has smoked so much dope as to have summoned an actual alien presence, presumably voiced by the man himself using a pitch change effect. The alien has apparently travelled half way across the galaxy principally so as to encourage Swizz Beatz in his dope smoking by exhorting him to smoke that shit, boy, and the like, which would imply that the album Carl Sagan glued to the side of the Voyager space probe was almost certainly wasted on the boring green cunts. Swizz duly smokes that shit and in such quantity as to render himself unconscious. This upsets the alien who first exclaims, oh fuck! Not again! before concluding, my work here is done, presenting the confusing possibility of an unfamiliar extraterrestrial value system riddled with apparent contradiction in which one may be upset and even distressed by that which one successfully achieves, unless it's simply that the skit was written, most likely improvised, by a fucking idiot. This announcement is followed by our extraterrestrial visitor exclaiming, I'm the space alien blunt smoker, either seeking to remind himself of his own identity, or providing gratuitous and perhaps even unnecessary quantification on our behalf. This skit is probably hilarious if you've just smoked one, but then under such conditions it's possible that everything is hilarious, therefore reducing this incoherent bollocks to two minutes of your life you'll never get back.
Crying Thug is surprisingly not so tough as he may seem.
Crying Thug is the name of a contestant on a nonexistent game show which was originally broadcast uncredited at the end of Crush Tonight on Fat Joe's Loyalty album. Considering all that Fat Joe was going through at the time, it's impressive that he even managed to record an album, let alone one as good as Loyalty, but it really could have done without the skits. Admittedly there are only two requiring use of the skip function, but they nevertheless detract from the whole and this one really is utter bollocks. Skits based on game shows seem to be fairly common on rap albums, the punchline usually being that the prize is a gun or a nice car or some hoes, or whatever. Of its kind, The $20 Sack Pyramid on Dr. Dre's Chronic album is probably the only one that's actually funny. Rep Your Set roughly duplicates the formula with theme tune, smooth talking host, and wild audience sounds, requiring that three contestants rep their respective sets in order to either win a gun or, in the case of the losing contestant, avoid being beaten up. By way of example, the second contestant reps his set with the following statement:
Chi-town motherfucking hustler bang a motherfucker cash money murder man Gotti.
Ludicrous slurping noise.
I can't even remember which album this turns up on, or even whether it's just one skit as I'm sure I've heard several variations on the scenario. I thought it was either some Dr. Dre or Three-6-Mafia album but have drawn blanks on both counts and can't be bothered with searching further. The skit, as I recall it - albeit with some reluctance, depicts a romantic liaison between a young woman and the man, or possibly men in the plural, who rap on whatever the CD may be. In essence, she's attempting to provide oral stimulation of either his penis or their penises but isn't doing it right, much to the bemusement of whoever is on the receiving end. The unhappy customer or customers then provide instruction on how the young woman might do it better, prompting her to ask you mean like this? in a voice conveying a somehow unpleasant degree of innocence, followed by a ludicrous slurping noise suggestive of a mean spirited child loudly and demonstratively licking an ice lolly so as to antagonise another child who has no lolly. Quite aside from the question of what qualifies the unhappy customer or customers in the dispensation of blow job advice, it simply doesn't sound like that. I appreciate that the artist or artistes responsible were attempting to convey a sexual transaction with no distinctively associative sound, but the result suggests sexual acts as imagined by persons with little or no actual sexual experience, which is marginally more amusing than whatever boorish porno crap they were originally intending to communicate.
Master P raises them right.
I'm convinced I've heard a skit wherein Master P dispenses fatherly advice to his kid, then about five or six-years old, regarding how he's getting on at school. The advice divides into two categories, firstly the regular stuff about working hard and being respectful to your teacher, then the inevitable ghetto gibberish about how you should be true 2 da game, and always look a man in the eye before you kill him - amongst other suggestions which seem to run contrary to those in the first category. I feel as though I've heard this skit a number of times so I'm sure it exists and yet I can't find it on any of my CDs, so it may even be my imagination blending spoken parts of otherwise unrelated songs into a single conversation. Anyway, the next best thing is probably the thematically similar dialogue which opens Goodfellas, the first album by Master P's 504 Boyz. Dad, asks the boy, is Tupac still alive? prompting a request for clarification by his father, not unreasonably given that all rap music had spent the previous five years banging on about the aforementioned Tupac being very much deceased. I heard, the boy explains, that you got a nigga, Krazy, sounds just like 'Pac. Here he's referring to the rapper Krazy, then newly signed to Master P's No Limit stable, whose delivery betrays a pronounced Tupac influence - although it would be unfair to suggest that Krazy sounds exactly like Tupac. Broken down, the question operates by a form of logic which might just as well be extended to presuppose that, for example, David Bowie is still alive because Phil Cornwell was on the telly doing an impersonation of him just now. Master P gives no answer, instead allowing his son to ask another question before launching into an extended account of an argument with another child in the school playground, the usual crap about frontin' and stuntin', keepin' it real, and so on and so forth, all of which suggests that, since the previous skit - assuming I didn't just imagine it - our boy has ignored almost all of the advice belonging to the first of the two categories with regard to his education, the little bollix.
No comments:
Post a Comment