"Every last woman on Earth I'll kill off": How Eminem murdered Nicki Minaj on her own shit

A little back story: My girlfriend doesn't like Nicki Minaj.  She doesn't think she's talented, she can't stand her flow, and she doesn't like the way she dresses.  On the flip side, I jumped on the Nicki bandwagon early, singing her praises after I caught wind of her Beam Me Up Scotty mixtape and shelling out a whole $15 for her debut album Pink Friday.  Though I was disappointed with the quantity of verses on the CD (a large portion of the songs inexplicably only containing two 16s), I still felt like it was a solid record and a good move forward for the largely unappreciated (and largely uninteresting) entity of female hip-hop.  Christen and I have been at odds about Nicki ever since (with the exception of her cameo on Kanye's "Monster," which everyone agrees is sick), but I was recently swayed by, oddly enough, Eminem.


I was choosing the music as we drove along one day, and happened upon "Roman's Revenge," one of the stand-out tracks from Pink Friday and one in which Nicki and Slim Shady rap alongside one another.  After listening to the track quietly, she remarked "Man, Eminem really murdered her on that song.  See, this is why I can't like Nicki Minaj.  How are you just going to get murdered on your own track like that?"  The irony of her favorite MC being Jay-Z was surely not lost on her, but it was at this point that I started to seriously re-evaluate Nicki.  Was I into her just because she was a female rapper who could rhyme multi-syllabically?  Was she actually just a mediocre rapper getting by on the novelty of her gender?

It was the first single off of Eminem/Royce da 5'9's collaborative LP Hell: The Sequel that cemented things for me.  "Fast Lane" as a track (and as a single) is pretty fantastic, and the music video is pretty fun, so I'm just going to make you watch it before we talk about it:


http://www.youtube.com/user/BadMeetsEvilVEVO


Did you notice the little bit about the danish?  Let's take a closer look at it:

And you only live it once, so I'm thinkin' 'bout this nice, nice lady
Wait, no, stop me now 'fore I get on a roll (Danish) Let me tell you
What this pretty little dame's name is cause she's kinda famous
And I hope that I don't sound too heinous when I say this Nicki Minaj
But I wanna stick my penis in your anus!

The disturbing mental image of Eminem having anal sex with Nicki Minaj aside, the mocking tone of Shady's imitation of Nicki's flow (which was not missed by the wonderful folks over at rapgenius) seems to indicate that, though Eminem respects her as an artist enough to be on her album, he isn't impressed with her "abuse of punch-line flow."

Hearing one of the 5 most talented lyricists in the history of the game use Minaj's flow comically made me realize the gap between the two.  Revisiting Minaj's verses on "Roman's Revenge", I found some really embarrassing lines that I had let slide on my first few listens (most egregiously, "I am a movie; camera block.").  Christen still maintains that Nicki simply isn't talented, but other sections of "Roman's Revenge" prove that theory false; it seems more likely to me that she has yet to dedicate herself fully to her lyrics.  The real failing of this sort of punch-line flow is that it doesn't bother to incorporate the puns/metaphors into the actual sentence structure of the line, instead opting to just tack nouns and adjectives to the end of statements and let the listener figure out how they are related.  This is laziness; one of the great challenges of the hip-hop lyricist is being able to seamlessly weave metaphors into sentences in a way that doesn't seem forced (see Lupe Fiasco on much of his classic record The Cool).  It isn't that I don't think that Nicki is capable of doing this, it's that I don't think she feels particularly compelled to.  Unfortunately, until she does her lyrics will suffer and her flow will be a fair target for mockery by artists like Em who work hard to find ways to fit their jokes and metaphors into their actual sentences.


Other notes on the new Bad Meets Evil record:


-It's nice to see Nickel finally get some of the props he deserves.  He's been killing it since about 2008 outside of the public eye.


-Em's comments about Relapse on "The Reunion" are refreshing for people like me who were huge fans of the CD.  Em's verses on the song portray him bumping the CD in his car with a random girl, who is disgusted with the album's content and tells him that it "sucked," cracking it in half in front of him, which naturally causes him to murder her.  As one Rapgenius commenter suggests, this may indicate that Em's initial distancing of himself from the record was more of an attempt to create a new lane for himself than an accurate representation of how he felt about the record's artistic content.  Perhaps he felt like he had to diss Relapse in order to sell the "recovery" narrative?  The fact remains that this song definitely indicates that the CD is no longer "in [his] trash," since he's playing it in his car.  His interview with Complex confirms that he's no longer on that "fuck Relapse" tip: "I mean, listen, I don’t hate Relapse. I don’t hate it at all, but when I’m looking back at an album I do have a tendency, and especially with that album, to run things into the ground. That was one of those instances where I got in a zone, like, 'Yo I just want to be this demented serial killer on this album.' And part of that was a growing process to get to Recovery, working through those steps, relearning how to rap, and relearning where I need to be at."


-One of the most disappointing rap moments of the year for me was Em's clumsy and over-explained re-use of his brilliant Brett Favre line from the Shady 2.0 Mixtape on "I'm On Everything."  Not only is re-using a line on your very NEXT RELEASE totally weak, it totally cheapened the original line, which was one of my favorites of the year.


-The Shady on Recovery and the Shady on Hell: The Sequel are opposite extremes: the former is often awkward or heavy-handed lyrically but deals with important, real-life issues and the latter is lyrically excellent but basically has nothing to say of importance.  Em's greatest works have resulted in a happy medium of these two extremes, so I'm really pumped to hear what his next record will sound like.

What exactly IS MicClub.net?

After dropping an album so bad that his fans scrambled to declare it satire (also known as The Weezer Effect), Canibus' reputation was at a career low.  3 mediocre-to-bad albums in a row dropped him from the public eye and had many doubting if he could ever release a solid album.  While he worked on his new album, he launched a new website, MicClub.net.  Don't bother going, it's been taken down now.  Luckily, we have the Wayback Machine on our side.


Here's the flash page from 2002, when it first went up.


Here's how it looked in 2005.


And here's what it was like right before it shut down in 2007/2008.


Quite frankly, none of that is helpful.  I decided to join Canibus Central, a Canibus-related messageboard, to find out more.  Here are some of the responses:


Noctournal88: "When he says just 'Mic Club' he's referring to the record label he was on, Mic Club Music, which was his record label, a subsidiary of Babygrande I believe."  Noctournal88's right about that; Mic Club: The Curriculum was indeed released on the Mic Club Music label.  Babygrande owns Mic Club Music and also the rights to all of Canibus' albums from C: True Hollywood Stories to For Whom the Beat Tolls.


TranquilBeast: "He had planned on having that site with exclusive clips,songs,etc. as well as having fans/artist's battle or post tracks. If you think about it, Spitboss is kinda what MicClub.net would have been."  Spitboss?  Spitboss.


Barcs: "Micclub.net was basically a site with Canibus merchandise and music."

dc: "I remember micclub.net quite well, right from its debut.


It was a very ambitious project from Canibus and his manager Lou, whom he later had a serious falling out with, the guy was stealing and had corrupt business practice. It was launched at the same time as the curriculum album.


I think it was intended as Canibus' home page, and as a spot to sell his music and merchandise. When it launched, he even had a kind of contest where rappers would send in their music and he would approve of it and kinda promote it. I don't think this lasted long.


From micclub.net you could order The Curriculum album and, before long, the now rare mixtapes Brainstream and My Name Is Nobody. This is where the problems (presumably Lou's problems) began. You could also order autographed copies of CTHS and Micclub (and RTJ? anyone remember?).


Someone on the management team dropped the ball on shipping, presumably Lou, and not everybody got their merchandise. This can only lead to bad things and damage an artist who is in a critical post-major label phase of his career. They tried to correct the problem but some were still without merch. (I never received my 2 copies of brainstream for example, but after a complaint I did get MNIN, but I understand and am forgiving about it). The shipping problem became well known, and I suspect people tried to email in for free stuff, creating a clusterfuck of people saying they never got their orders when they never even ordered in the first place! This speculation has to be the explanation for why they ran out of Brainstreams and I couldn't even repurchase.


The shipping problems eventually dissolved but micclub never developed into its full potential, and eventually Canibus and Lou parted ways. Canibus planned to release a Curriculum 2 album, but that got transmuted mostly into Melatonin Magik as I understand it."




So there you have it.  TranquilBeast's commentary is particularly helpful, as the site depicted in Canibus' descriptions of MicClub.net is, in fact, quite Spitboss-ian.  For example, here's the intro track to Mic Club: The Curriculum: 


Enter the Mic Club.  This is where it all starts
Emcees defend they honor at all costs.
Cycle of winners, this ain't for beginners.
I'm the sinner.  State your name, rank, and business.
When I pass you the mic, you better burn it.
Don't be squirmish.  You want respect, you gotta earn it.
This is where we define purpose, how much heart lies beneath the surface,
what's hidden behind the curtain?
Besides tight verses, nothing in life is certain.
If you live as long as your words, you make life worth it.
Writing rhymes gives me a buzz, I do this for the love.
Welcome to the Mic Club.


In this context, Mic Club obviously means the record itself, but Bis is also welcoming his listeners to the concept of Mic Club as a Spitbossian entity; a world in which MCs enter, state their "name, rank, and business," and compete with one another on the basis of lyrics alone.  For Bis, a rapper who has been frank about his distaste for the music industry's de-prioritizing of talent, Mic Club is a true MC's utopia.  That it apparently never materialized on the site MicClub.net (from what I can tell) does not tarnish the Bis' beautiful (though idealistic) vision of a world where everyone is given an equal chance to be on top and success is tied solely to one's skills on the mic. 

Albums Other People Thought Were Crap: iSouljaBoyTellem

It may surprise you to learn that 2007's souljaboytellem.com, aside from being the worst-named album in hip-hop history, received mixed reviews from critics.  While there were some who hated it (me, Ice T, Snoop Dogg, Entertainment Weekly), others praised the rapper's "unique skills" and the album's "gratifying logic" and said music-critic things like "there are enough sonic strokes here to keep the wrong bizzer in ringtone rappers for a year."  That's the way the music business works sometimes.  The website Rate Your Music lists it as the WORST ALBUM OF ALL TIME.  Hm.


2008's iSouljaBoyTellEm, however, only got one type of review: horrible.  PopMatters said,

By now, Soulja Boy is used to hearing that he’s the bane of rap music, a symbol of its over-commercialization and creative drought.  On “Soulja Boy Tell’em”, he throws money and MySpace stats at critics:  “Three times platinum yeah I broke the record / If you can’t respect that tell me what is you respectin’?”  The obvious answers here—creativity, art, passion, and music with a soul—seem to evade Soulja Boy.  He’s a depressing end game for any genre: he only sees industry, refusing to place value on anything that doesn’t relate to album sales or online social network popularity.  If Soulja Boy could turn a profit from defecating into a microphone and selling it, I’m pretty sure “Shit That” would be his next single.

Allmusic called the album "juvenile beyond belief" and SputnikMusic's review ended with the line, "We can only hope that without a hugely successful single to promote it, this album will instantly sink and be forgotten about forever and ever."


So yeah, apparently it sucked.  But how MUCH did it suck?  The only way to find out, sadly, is to listen to it. 

As with every terrible rap record (and really, all rap records, terrible or no), iSouljaBoyTellem, begins with an intro track.  In this cause, it's I'm Bout Tha Stax, a 3 minute ode to money and the things it can purchase.  Having never listened intently to a Soulja Boy Tell'em track (there's no way I'm going to type that out every time, guys), I was troubled by my inability to understand what it was he was saying.  Soulja Boy's delivery is monotone and awful and he doesn't enunciate at all, making it difficult to differentiate one word from another, much less figure out what the words being used are.  Luckily, we have the Internet.  First, listen to the song and see if you can deciper what he's trying to communicate:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vh-trK428rU

Did you get anything out of that?  Me either.  Luckily, the Internet is here to help us out.

I'm 'bout the swagg.

I'm 'bout the ice.
I'm 'bout to cop me one tonight.
I don't really care da' price, 'cuz my bank roll right.
Ridin' on.

That's how we get it, dog.

South, I was holdin; 45; listen, dog.

45 tickets stashed in my new Dickies, man.

A S.O.D charm piece; man, dat's 50 grand.

Arab tatted up, and got it up the whole guap.

SODGang, 6 figures, quarter million.

2nd verse:

I'm bout to bank.

I'm 'bout to vote.

I'm 'bout to...this ain't what you thought.

I'm ridin' clean; I got guap

Im doin' me; I'm on the top.

I'm 'bout tha ice.

I'm 'bout the shine.

I'm 'bout tha work.

I'm 'bout tha grind.

I'm 'bout tha get'em, got'em, see'em, saw'em; gettin' every dolla, dog.

When you see me, pop ya colla.

I'ma throw out every dolla.

Soulja Boy is not a scholar, backpack full of a million dollas.

Get'em SOD, we got'em.

Scream SOD, we hollarin'.

Too much swagg, extra ballin.  I'ma moneyholic.

You may be wondering what "SOD" stands for or who SODGang is.  The answer is more embarrassing than you might expect:

http://realtalkny.uproxx.com/2008/03/topic/topic/news/soulja-boy-shows-off-his-sod-money-gang-clothing-line/

Yes, Soulja Boy has his own clothing line and/or "gang" and/or LABEL.  Yes, he has a LABEL.  It only has two other artists (both of which ALSO have their own clothing lines), JBar and Arab.  I have to share the website's description of SB himself, even though we're getting way off topic:

Soulja Boy Tell’em is many things to many people. Apparently, prophetic is one of them. What began as juddering camcorder footage in his basement mutated into worldwide phenomenon. You’ve memorized the infectious hooks. The dance has been inexorably burned into your muscle memory. And the numbers confirm what you already know: 400 million views on YouTube; over five million downloads of the pandemic single "Crank That (Soulja Boy)"; seven weeks atop Billboard’s Hot 100 singles’ chart; more than five million ringtones sold; platinum status and beyond for debut album Souljaboytellem.com.

Juddering!  Anyway, let's get back to the album.  The second track, Bird Walk, was meant to be the "Crank Dat" of this record.  To wit, it's a mindless, snapping-fingers-beat song that explains the steps to a new kind of dance. In fact, it's really almost exactly the same as "Crank Dat", only it isn't as catchy and the dance is more stupid-looking.  Also, it rhymes "touched" with "mugged."  And "talk" with "truck."  But, of course, it has a music video, so why tell you about it when I can show you?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L81maEBjvgc

Not only is this music video preposterous in its assumptions that people enjoy Soulja Boy concerts and that he could play football (what does he weigh, 115 pounds?), it also serves to highlight the fact that SB is a 18 YEAR OLD KID who has been given complete creative control over every aspect of his image.   

By the way, I have a feeling that this is going to be a rarity, so I'm going to take a moment and compliment a quatrain of SB's that I thought was actually decent from this song:

My doggie, I'm fresh.  Ya, I'm clean, so crispy.

Throwin' dat money like your boy got a Frisbee.
Soulja Boy Tell'em, for da kids like Disney.
Chain 360, make your head dizzy.

Not bad, right?  Enjoy it, folks.  I don't expect much more of that.

Turn My Swag On is the next cut, and, as predicted, it contains no clever verses.  In fact, I was halfway through the song before I realized that SB was just taking it off entirely, opting not to rap at all but instead to just kind of lazily croon about his swag and his popularity.  There have rarely been more worthless songs than this one.  Of course, it has a music video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yRme0C2pmI

That was.  Hilarious.  Is it possible that Beezy is a satire of the rap game?  How cool would that be, right?  I can only dream...

Anyway, if you read my review of Bizarre's latest CD, you'll remember my discussion of that point in listening to a bad rap record when you start checking to see if the next song has anyone else on it other than the featured artist.  The good news is that Gucci Bandana does, in fact, have two other rappers aside from Soulja Boy.  The bad news is that those two rappers are notorious suckMCs Gucci Mane and Shawty Lo.  Ugh.  SB raps "so much ice, I got you lookin' like Chinese," Gucci Mane literally ends every line of his verse with the word "Gucci" (THAT'S NOT RHYMING), and Shawty Lo's verse was so uninteresting that he repeated the first few bits of it over again at the end because he knew no one was listening.

Eazy, whose chorus includes SB using the word "ish" instead of the curse word it stands for, made me wonder if he ever curses, and, if not, whether that doesn't have something to do with his marketability.  I'll keep a close eye on this.  I will not, however, keep a close eye (ear) on "Eazy" because it totally sucks and the Soulja Boy calls himself "Scarface Beezy" in it.

JUST WHEN YOU THOUGHT IT COULD GET NO BETTER, Kiss Me Thru the Phone, the album's second single, is here to remind you that IT CAN INDEED GET BETTER.  By better, of course, I meant "worse, worse, worse."  This slow dance song is Soulja Boy's romantic lamentation to his girl; even though we can't be together, he explains, we can still achieve romantic and sexual gratification by means of digital communication.  It has a music video, naturally, so I'll just let you draw your own conclusions:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47Fbo4kU2AU

Did I mention this song features the singing of someone named "Sammie"?  No, I didn't, and I'm not going to.  Also, who raps in THE FOREST?

Booty Got Swag (Donk, Part 2) is apparently the sequel to some other booty-related track at some point in Soulja Boy's past.  I don't know anything about that song, but this one is terrible.  Also, "her booty so big, I can hang my hang my chain from it" doesn't really make any sense if you think about it.

Rubber Bands starts off with random-background-hype-man yelling "Listen to this track!", no doubt aware of my desire to just turn this crap off and do something productive with my evening.  This song contains what I consider to be an interesting (though not thoughtful or well-crafted) line: "Got the Mona Lisa hanging from the wall in my crib / right next to the rubber bands, dog, for real."  The juxtaposition of perhaps the most famous painting of all-time (which, of course, not even Soulja Boy's money could allow him to purchase) being hung next to a collection of rubber bands (symbolizing SB's connections to the drug trade, which I don't buy at all) suggests...something.  Probably that he's a bad rapper and that I'm overthinking things.

Hey You There begins, as does every other track on this album, with Soulja Boy restating his name in case you forgot it (which isn't unlikely, given how unwieldy it is).  Beezy then tells a story about being accosted by a mall cop, which segueways into quite possibly the worst song ever in the history of everything.  Soulja Boy affects some sort of weird (mocking white people?) accent and proceeds to whisper-talk, yell nonsense words, call himself "sticky," and fart.  He also makes a Rick James reference in the outro.  It's pretty surreal, so I'm going to make you listen to it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phG6rEp1wZU

I was unsure who was the featured artist on Yamaha Mama, but luckily it began with "Hey, what's up, what's up?  This ya boy, Soulja Boy Tell'em."  Whew!  Thanks, Soulja Boy!  And then he gives me his phone number!  Are you coming on to me, Soulja Boy?  Oh, your "neck tastes like chocolate?"  That's...uh...nice.  I think maybe we should take it slow, Beezy, especially since you had Sean Kingston sing the hook on this song and he blows.

I was unfamiliar with the Yums referenced in the title of With My Yums On, so I went to Google to find out more.  It appears that Yums are "a Dallas grounded and new age lifestyle for footwear and apparel which depicts a southern hip hop and aesthetic look and also a graffiti perspective with an encouragement of art."  So now you know.  Also, you need to "catch up 'cuz you're still in the mustard."  So now you know that too.

Go Head has a guest spot for someone named Juney Boondata, who wrests the belt for Stupid Rap Name Champion, 2010 away from King Gordy.  Meanwhile, Soulja Boy "blows [his] nose on the track, so bring [him] a tissue."  I'm running out of interesting things to say about how bad this record is, so consider this: "You're lookin' retarded 'cuz you're late for the class." 

Gucci Mane returns, bringing along with him Yo Gotti (??), for the comically faux-thug Shoppin' Spree, which, I swear, starts off with the same gunshots from Nas' "Made You Look".  Beezy ups the ante by saying "damn" during the hook, but I know better.  You're not a thug.  You're a fun-loving kid!  And I know it because the space where you were going to say "motherfucker" in the bridge was blanked out.  After SB brags "You can't say I'm just one hit" (can and will, SB), Gucci does his traditional "worthless thug rhymes" schtick.  Yo Gotti is up next and, hey, it's not the worst verse ever.  In fact, he's probably the best rapper on the whole CD.  To put that in perspective, he would be the 5th best rapper if he was part of 2Pac's Outlawz.  That puts him behind HUSSEIN FATAL.

The next track is called...wait...what?  It's called Soulja Boy Tell'em, creating a terrifying bad-name spiral if you were ever to try to direct someone to it.  "Oh yeah, you should listen to Soulja Boy Tell'em's new joint 'Soulja Boy Tell'em' off his new album iSouljaBoyTell'em.  How does it start?  With him saying, 'It's Soulja Boy Tell'em,' of course."  Luckily, there will never be such a scenario, as the track is abysmal.  With its Arthur theme song-esque beat and its missing-the-point rebuttals ("I'm doin' interviews addressin' all these critics / tryin'a under rate me, sayin' I ain't got no lyrics. / 3 times platinum, yea, I broke the record. / If you can't respect that, tell me what is you respectin'?"), this track would be the embodiment of everything that's wrong with Soulja Boy if we hadn't already listened to "Hey You There" earlier. 

I'd like to just do a little aside about the last track's status as a diss track.  It's clearly directed in part to Ice T, who famously called Beezy "garbage" and told him to "eat a dick."  SB accuses a "clown" of dissing him, but then asks "Where is his album sellin'?"  He later remarks, "The rap game?  Don't get me started. / My lyrics get recycled but yours is just garbage" and accuses "old rappers" who "need to retire" of "copying [his] technique."  It's hard to take this as a real diss because it doesn't really address Ice T specifically.  Ice T came out with an album in 2006 (the year before SB's debut), making it hard to buy that he is copying Soulja Boy's style and lending little credence to the idea that he (or ANYONE) recycled his lyrics.  And if I may chime in on the Ice T vs. SB feud: lame.  Ice T, this was a sad attempt to get people to pay attention to your new record.  Of course Soulja Boy is garbage.  But what does you calling him out on Youtube do aside from make you look old and silly?  And, I'm going to be real with you for a minute, man.  Yeah, you had an impact on the game and some hot tracks.  But you were and are NOT a particularly talented lyricist.  Go back and listen to O.G.: Original Gangster again.  It's brave and important, but it's not lyrically interesting.  And Soulja Boy?  Listen, man, you should just feel grateful you got hot for 20 seconds.  Your career will probably be over in another album or so.

Getting back to the CD, Whoop Rico is, sadly, not a Rico Suave diss track, but is instead...just confusing.  I really have no idea what's going on, but, whatever it is, it's not interesting.  It has a video.  You figure it out.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aT_C2pOfmCA

I Pray (Outro) mercifully ends the album with a mock prayer for SB's haters, adding sort-of-blasphemy to Soulja Boy's list of sins.  The song is about SB's family and would sort of cool if he wasn't so, so definitely an awful rapper.  In the middle, he ominously warns us that he "can't stop rappin'."  Say it ain't so, Beezy, say it ain't so!

And it's over!  Man.  That was difficult to get through.  It turns out that Soulja Boy is worse than I thought, which seemed impossible a mere hour ago.  This record is lyrically WORSE than Bizarre's, but at least slightly more interesting, so it evens out and it gets 1.5 stars, just like his.

As a bonus, white guy reads SB tweets in a serious voice:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=poUOPJ-u0G0&feature=fvw



The Flawed Hierarchy of Fast Food in "Gold Digger"

I was driving back to my apartment today listening to Kanye West's classic single "Gold Digger" when I realized how misleadingly it portrays the inner workings of a fast food restaurant.


Let me explain.  As a three year veteran of Arby's, I am intimately acquainted with the industry.  And, having recently had to start over to a degree by working in a new Arby's location here in Wilmington, I was reminded of what the most and least respectable positions in the store are.


But first, the relevant lines.  From verse 2:


"He got that ambition, baby.  Look at his eyes;
This week it's mopping floors, next week it's the fries."


This implies, metonymically of course, that mopping floors is the lowest position on the fast food totem pole, whereas working with fries is the highest.  And, to the layman, this may seem reasonably accurate.


But OH NO it is not and luckily you have me here to illumine the situation for you.  As a beginner at Arby's, an employee will be, as one can imagine, given the least complicated and hardest to screw up position: namely, working the fry station.  The fry station requires minimum understanding of product (since the times for how long each item should stay in the fryer are typically noted on the station), little interaction with customers, and only exists as a position for about 2-5 hours a day during lunch rush.  This means that a beginning employee can do little damage, will have little responsibility, and can be sent home fairly quickly with little reprecussions (since the fryer position is to a large degree a luxury the rest of the employees can function without).


In contrast, the positions which require the most experience and knowledge of the story are the closing positions, as each closing employee must man his/her position alone and be responsible for their own success.  Despite what Kanye apparently believes, it is these closing employees who traditionally do the mopping, as mopping is generally only required when the store has been closed.  As I worked my way up the ladder at this new Arby's, my goal was to become the drive-thru closer, a position which includes a great deal of mopping (and also a lot of fry activity).


Therefore, the actual role of the positions Kanye mentions are reversed; someone who only works on the fryer is someone who barely exists as an employee at all, whereas someone who does a lot of mopping is someone who has been trusted to close the store down.  As an added note, managers traditionally don't work fryer OR mop because they are usually charged with bagging the food during lunch rush (which is the only time when the fryer position exists) and with doing nebulous manager stuff during the closing hours when mopping takes place.

So there, Kanye.

Edit: Apparently, the line is a reference to Coming to America, which I've never seen.  While the representation of fast food is still flawed, it's no longer Kanye's fault.  Sorry, Ye.

"You drippin' with wack juice / and you can't get it off": Canibus vs. LL Cool J

In order to understand Rip the Jacker, one must first understand Canibus' history as an artist.  And there's nothing to do but start with his beef with LL because that's really where his career started.  Not to mention that this beef (and its fall-out) is one of major thematic focuses of RTJ. 


So, Bis was pretty hot in '97.  He was getting a lot of respect doing freestyles, mixtapes, and the other underground stuff that a rapper usually has to do before he gets a major deal.  In short, people were feeling him, and his flow and subject matter made people think he might totally change the game in the same was Nas later did.  He was that unique.


Bis eventually got the attention of Wyclef Jean, who decided he would produce his debut album.  Buzz was circulating and the hip-hop heads were intrigued.  Around this same time, already-established LL Cool J was set to come out with Phenomenon, the 7th of what are now 13 records.  13!  He was supposed to have a posse cut with Red & Meth, as well as then-little-known-now-also-kind-of-little-known DMX.  As often happens, everyone laid down their verses before LL did so he could make sure he liked them.


Cool James had one issue; in Canibus' verse, he said, "Yo, L, is that a mic on your arm? / Let me borrow that," a reference to LL's microphone tattoo.  Here's the original verse:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BN8biMDFYU8


LL perceived this as a diss, which seems ridiculous (and IS ridiculous), but makes more sense when you remember that he came up in the rap game by dissing more famous rappers and using his beefs with them to bring himself attention (see: Moe Dee, Kool).  A bit paranoid about someone pulling the same trick on him, LL asked Canibus to change the verse.  Bis did, of course, and presumably thought the whole thing was over.  Here's the changed verse, starting at 1:30:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6rJava11i0


LL decided, despite this, to devote his entire verse to dissing Bis, albiet not explicitly, including multiple references to an "amateur" rapper (who could that be?) and grandiose statements about the inability of anyone to touch/mess with the mic on his arm.  Pretty hard to miss what he was getting at, especially since by this point the video was out, but Bis wasn't in it, LL having made him record his part separately from the rest of the group.  It's unclear whether he also forced him wear the ridiculous football get-up.  Here's the video for the song, the SECOND version which was released with Bis in it:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWI2JPhT1eY&feature=related


By the way, Meth's mummy costume ranks as one of the all-time best music video costumes for a rapper.  He's a MUMMY.  With Scream-mask people in the background!


So, around this time, LL called Bis up and they talked about it like grown men.  How do we know?  WE HAVE THEIR PHONE CONVERSATIONS?!  God, I love the Internet.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvW0LFOVJUI 


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UpUq8mApS0Y&NR=1


The underground track never happened.  Somewhere in here (the chronology is a little convoluted and I'm not sure exactly where everything falls), LL was asked by Dr. Dre to replace Snoop on a song that he had to drop out of called "Zoom."  LL devoted another (unfairly maligned!) verse to dissing Canibus, although more subtly.  Somehow, this song also has a music video.  If there's any lesson we've learned so far, it's that rappers will make music videos out of ANYTHING.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nk9UIFjuRbg


Man, remember when Dre didn't put any time into his verses at all? 


Anyway, Bis was obviously not pleased about how the whole thing turned out.  Being a battle rapper by trade, he came out with his own diss track, the fabulous and fabulously flawed "2nd Round K.O." (a reference to LL's "Mama Said Knock You Out"), which was the lead single off that debut Bis/Wyclef album we were talking about, Can-I-Bus.  Here's the music video for it:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z63cQKWlDgQ


A lot has been written about "2nd Round K.O." because it's one of the most intriguing diss tracks in rap history.  By that I don't mean that it's one of the *best* (although it is), but that it represents simultaneously the zenith and nadir of one of hip-hop's most fascinating "busts."  On the one hand, the song is pretty much sick.  Canibus was always LL Cool J's lyrical superior and he does a good job of detailing LL's ridiculousness throughout the whole creation of their beef.  The video is also sort of cool.


On the other hand, this song is a microcosm of what went wrong with Canibus' career.  It contains one of the worst lines ever uttered in a diss song ("You might have more cash than me, / but you ain't got the skills to eat a nigga's ass like me") and it highlights Bis' unmarketability (has any rapper ever looked more awkward in music videos than Canibus?).  And, of course, while Mike Tyson was pretty much the man in 1998 (he was in the main even of Wrestlemania that year!) when this song came out, he was retrospectively a very poor choice, as he quickly became something of a cultural joke. 


Somewhere I once read (it was probably rapgenius.com) that Bis' biggest flaw was that he was wack at the worst possible times, and that's pretty accurate.  Though Can-I-Bus wasn't great (or even good, really), it had its moments, and there was still a decent amount of buzz for Bis as he dropped his next record, the stunningly mediocre 2000 B.C. (which itself contains approximately 3 good songs).  Two mediocre albums left Bis fading from the public eye, and the death knell for his career was sounded with C: True Hollywood Stories, one of the worst rap albums of the last decade.


Back to the feud, though.  LL came back strong from "2nd Round K.O." with "The Ripper Strikes Back".  The Ripper, for the record, was his name for his beef/diss persona, based on legendary serial killer Jack the Ripper, and comes from his eponymous song from his beef with Kool Moe Dee.  Here's LL's song, which is a classic in its own right:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBYJ0QhIPEw


It doesn't have a music video!  Crazy, huh?  Cool J also dropped a song dissing Wyclef specifically.  It's not that great and isn't particularly relevant.  But I thought I'd mention it.


It was then Canibus' turn.  He fired back with "Rip the Jacker".  Now, at this point, the phrase was simply a bit of wordplay on LL's beef-persona, as indicated in this line: "Jack the Ripper? / I'ma rip the jacker."  Pretty straight-forward ("jacker" is slang for "stealer of things," usually things like swag, style, or jewelry).  The song is hot, so give it a listen:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfhYYDy4Cz0


Let's be clear: the general hip-hop public sentiment is that Canibus won the battle and "lost the war."  You'll see that phrase used a lot if you read articles, Youtube comments, or anything else related to this beef.  The idea is that, while Bis won the beef, he ended up tanking his career in the process.  It's hard to say exactly WHY; some argue that Bis' obsession with the beef distracted him from putting out quality records, some say that Bis was never going to make it in an album-format and the battle with LL created unfair expectations, some say that the beef revealed Bis' flaws too early and the public could never take him seriously.  Whatever the explanation, the fact is that LL continued to make money (even though most of his stuff sucked post-98) and Bis continued to put out crap records that no one bought.


So that's the whole beef.  I know we've sort of run this thing into the ground, but, just to be thorough, he's a little video from something or other about the feud that I found on Youtube.  It has KRS-One in it!


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmW447Lhvnk&feature=related

Rip The Jacker, the Norton Critical Edition

It didn't occur to me that maybe, just maybe, no one has any idea what I'm talking about.  This never occurs to me, which is one of the chief problems of my life.


When I say that the ultimate goal of this blog is to present a "Norton Critical Edition" of Canibus' Rip the Jacker, what exactly does that MEAN?  Some background, then.


This is the Norton Critical website.  Norton is the company that puts out the important literature anthologies and that pretty much owns English graduate students and their lives.  They also offer Norton Critical Editions of famous literary texts, which, in their own words, "combine the most authoritative text available with contextual and critical materials that bring the work to life for students. Careful editing, first-rate translation, thorough explanatory annotations, chronologies, and selected bibliographies make each text accessible to students while encouraging in-depth study." 


So, essentially NCEs provide original texts with all kinds of amazing annotations and then follow that up with contextual pieces, criticism, bibliographies, and all sorts of other goodies that English nerds like me go crazy for.  They're beast in every way a book can be beast.


A Norton Critical Edition of Rip the Jacker then is just a shorthand way of saying that I plan to explain what's going on in Canibus' allusion-rich musical text and also to provide important context, references, and criticism.  It's a project that I think is useful because the record is very complicated and requires explanation, but no one has really gotten out there and done the hard work of trying to piece together the puzzle Canibus has set out before us.  I'm taking this project on, mostly because *I* want to see what the whole puzzle looks like when it's put together myself.

Albums Other People Thought Were Crap: Friday Night at St. Andrews

Well, I haven't actually made an RTJ-related post yet, but I figured this would be the most interesting way to kick things off.  A lot of times you hear people talk about albums as classic or really terrible without ever hearing them go into why.  It can prejudice you against an album (or for an album) unfairly.  I'm going to take a look at some albums where the public opinion is decidedly one way or the other and see if people are being fair or blowing things out of proportion.


Bizarre seemed as good a place to start as any.  Known mostly as the fat guy from D12 who raps about raping his grandmother, Bizzy has, despite having the worst flow of the entire group, THREE full-length albums to his name, this being the latest.  To put that in perspective, Proof only has one.  And Kon Artis?  Well, I'm not even sure which one he is.  And I used to be so into D12 that I owned a D12 chain.


I became interested in Friday Night at St. Andrews when I read the following interview from Bizarre.  Start listening at 2:30.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cA8SbH4HTT0


This, by the way, is a spectacular video.  You should really watch the whole thing.  It's just Bizarre awkwardly answering questions in his apartment about Juggalos and producers.  At one point, his phone goes off and they have switch locations for some reason.  Bizzy is a terrible interview.


Anyway, if you were listening you heard Bizarre say that he was going to focus less on his humor for this album and concentrate more on his lyricism.  Because, you know, "people got me misconstrued because of some of my lyrics and didn't consider me a dope MC."  Naturally, I was intrigued to hear what a Bizarre album with a lyrical focus would sound like.  I checked the reviews out first, which are not favorable.  The most useful was this one from Luke Gibson of hiphopdx.com.  Gibson writes

While an emcee like Eminem spits shock value one liners, he also tucks them away inside complex lyrical structures. His one-liners tend to sneak up on you out of nowhere. Bizarre doesn’t have that luxury. The predictability of upcoming lines hampers his appeal. With that said, it’s clear that his creativity has had an apparent influence on Slim Shady. While Bizarre is a grizzled veteran and strange has a market to sell, it has to be done in a convincing manner. Bizarre is unable to do this on Friday Night at St. Andrews, and even though the album is blessed with solid production, it is ultimately a failure.

So that's what I have in my head going into Friday Night at St. Andrews.  Let's see how it plays out.

I didn't really intend to go track by track by this.  But I think I'm going to end up doing that, so let's get something out of the way: Intro tracks are the second most worthless thing on a rap album.  They accomplish nothing because they are, like this one, just two minutes of rappers yelling "Yeaaaaah!  It's the album!  THIS album that I'm recording right now!  Representin' whatever geographical location I'm from and also my relevant label!  Yeeeeeeah!"  It's pointless, especially since they ALSO do those sort of intros at the beginnings of many of their songs.


The first track, "Here We Go (Off Da Chain)", is surprisingly not terrible.  As someone who has listened to approximately 50 Bizarre verses over the course of my life (oh my GOD), I can safely state that this is one of his top three efforts.  Now, that's a relative statement.  Bizarre's top 3 efforts are the equivalent of Jay-Z's bottom 3 efforts (aka any random 3 songs off Kingdom Come).  But still, you can hear what he was talking about in regards to a focus on lyricism.  I by "you can hear," I mean "you will hear when you listen to the song right now."


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1qvVqqSVRs


Remember when I said that silly intros are the second most worthless thing on any given rap album?  The MOST worthless thing is skits like "Fat Father", in which Bizarre's friends call him and we are treated to them telling each other jokes.  For a minute and a half.  :(


"Some Days" is the next track.  Bizzy starts with a solid couplet: "Hello, world, my name is Rufus / and most of my life, I've been useless."  I thought he was going to start rapping about how the rap community sees him as a joke and was all prepared to be feelin' him no homo.  But nope, he just starts meanderingly talking generic rap talk: I'm ill, I want money, I also paradoxically GET money, no one appreciates how hot I am, etc.  It's interesting to hear Bizarre run through these cliches because he rarely uses them, instead opting for "I have sex with transvestites and dogs" stuff.  But that doesn't mean it's interesting.  The hook is decent though.


Then we get to the incredibly usesless "Pu$$y".  Another rap convention I hate: meaningless spelling alterations.  There's nothing in this song that alludes to those dollar signs.  Anyway, this song is, of course, about having sex with women, a topic Bizarre is quite familiar rapping about.  It's one of those slow, "let me graphically describe having sex" songs that are always awkward and uncomfortable.  And never more uncomfortable than when Bizzy is rapping about making women "squirt" and eating his woman like a steak.  Ugh.  No-name rapper contribues no-purpose verse.  Yawn.


The laughably-named "Rap's Finest" is next and it's a posse cut.  I love love love posse cuts.  Even bad posse cuts are exciting to me.  There's something about the variety and the in-song competition that's thrilling; you're listening to a verse and then the hook comes and you're like "Holy crap, what's going to happen next?!  It's going to be a DIFFERENT rapper!".  This, of course, is a mediocre-at-best posse cut.  I'd talk about, but it has a MUSIC VIDEO (which is, like all posse cut music videos, 10 times more exciting than the actual song), so I won't bother to say anything except that Royce's verse is probably the best verse on the whole album.  It's not jaw-dropping, but this album kind of sucks, so it wins by default.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCz7y88AI3M


By the way, there are multiple instances of this album being referred to as Live at St. Andrews, some by Bizzy himself.  I have no idea why this happens, but it does.


"School Teacher" is about Bizarre having a crush on his elementary school teacher and farting in class.  I can't imagine you wanting to hear more about this song.  Let's proceed.


"Smoking Crack" is the song we're proceeding to.  In case you're curious, it took Bizarre about 4 songs to lapse back into make-jokes-about-gross-stuff-and-drugs mode.  So much for lyricism and not being a joke MC.  There is nothing about this track that I can recommend to anyone.  Also, Bizarre has sex with Cher in this one.  Sigh.


"Down This Road" features Yelawolf (who?) and we're now officially at the point in a terrible MC's album where you check each song in advance to see if there's a guest verse and pray that it's someone not-terrible.  Yelawolf is pretty boring, but he's not-terrible and that makes his verse better than Bizarre's, which is better than most of his verses on this record but still bad.  Also, in the hook Yelawolf goes "Take a left, motherfUCKA."  Something about how he says it is fun for me.  I'm grasping at straws, folks.


I checked and Tech N9ne is on this next joint, "Believer"!  I'm not really into Tech N9ne at all, but he's a professional, dedicated MC (unlike these no-names and suckrappers), so come on in Tech N9ne!  Stay for a few songs!  Would you like something to drink?  Bizarre's verses (he rhymes "ocean" and "emotion" and it's WORSE THAN IT SOUNDS) blow, but Tech N9ne is a professional, dedicated MC and he lays a decent verse.  Maybe I should check him out sometime.  Maybe Bizarre is skewing my understanding of what a good verse sounds like.


Wait, that song has a video too?  Who's paying for this crap?


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-f40Rc3qRrs


Things that video taught me: Bizzy's haircut is as bad as I thought, Tech N9ne is weird looking, and children shouldn't be allowed to fake-rob in music videos.


The next track, "Whatcha Smoking On?" ALSO has a video, but this one was clearly produced by Bizarre himself because it sucks.  I mean, all these songs suck.  But the video sucks too.  It's actually a good representation of the quality of the song (because the both suck, got it?), so why not link to that too?


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FI2-hMi75Zc&feature=related


King Gordy (aka Stupid Rap Name Champion, 2010) comes back to do just as much nothing as he did in "Whatcha Smoking On?" on Wild Like Us".  Bizarre compares himself to Violent J, brags that his "baby dick" was still fertile enough to produce triplets, and threatens to beat up your uncle.  And he rhymes "life" with "life."  It's really a classic.


Most of the reviews of the album talk about one track specifically: "I Love the Babies".  It's not surprising because it's a song about having sex with babies.  Like, there are lines like "Bizarre's about to potty train your daughter" and "There's something about a newborn that turns me ooooon."  So, most of the reviewers talk about how this is in poor taste and evil and not funny.  Blah blah.  All of which is true.  But the real problem is not that the song is about having sex with babies, it's that...wait, no.  The real problem is that the song is about HAVING SEX WITH BABIES.  The fact that it's a badly-rapped song is secondary.


A skit follows.  It's about a Bizarre fan coming up to him and talking to him, which is, in its own way, the funniest joke on the CD.


King Gordy returns (I have no idea what his contributions to these songs is supposed to be, but whatever he's doing, it's better than what Bizarre is doing) on "Rock It Out", a song dedicated to fans of D12.  As a fan of D12 (well, a reformed fan of D12), I am particularly upset at how useless this song is.  It ended without me evening noticing I hadn't heard the last verse.  Bizarre rapping about rap-things instead of about sex with his grandma is even worse because it's so boring.


Sigh.  I can't even find things to say about these songs.  That's how boring they are.  "Warning" does nothing, says nothing, is nothing.  It's like a sonic black hole.  Time stopped while I had it playing.  Then the guest verses came on, and they were mediocre, but at least I wasn't SUSPENDED IN TIME BY BIZARRE'S SUCK.


Whoa.  Bizarre, on "Emotions", made a semi-clever Tears For Fears pun that momentarily woke me out of my suck-rap stupor.  But then he rhymed "poem" with "gone" with "gone" with "song." 


I slept through "Can't Get Enough" and "You Gotta Believe".  I mean, I listened to them and gave them a fair chance and all.  But I'm just so bored.  I have nothing to say because I'm so busy yawning.


So what's the verdict?  Anyone who said this album is crap doesn't know the half of it.  I may be the first human being who has never met Bizarre personally to listen to it all the way through.  And I will surely be the last.


I'm giving this album 1.5 stars because sometimes the production was good, Royce laid down a decent verse, and there was a brief moment at the beginning there were I wasn't sure if the CD would suck.  It did suck though.  A buuuuunch.