Back by Popular Demand

Here it is folks. It's been forever and a day since I last ranted and raved (about a month and a half) so I figured I'd step back in the ring like Floyd Mayweather and go a couple of more rounds on some jab-jab-uppercut style blogging.

If you're gonna start jabbing people why not start with this ever impressive (cut the sarcasm with a fork) crop of presidential candidates. First off, Mike Huckabee?. This man cannot be president for a Nile river's worth of reasons but I'll just fill your time with two of them: A) George W. Bush is already in office and screwed us all royally so why would we elect his clone and B) you can't be president with a name like Huckabee...I don't make these rules up.

In all seriousness when I look beyond Huckabee it's not like I see a bunch of people I want to recognize as the Commander-in-chief. Barack Obama approaches politics like I did when I was 14 before I learned that politics isn't a game played on a court by nicely dressed upper-crust gentlemen; it is a game played in a muddy snake pit by crooks and convicts. Hilary Clinton would probably get my vote, but I'm not one to vote for someone who voted for the Iraq war when it was a popular decision and dogged it when it was proven (did it really need much proving?) to be a bad idea yet still votes to fund it. John Edwards? No way. Mitt Romney? Garbage. Rudy Giuliani? Hell, I'm from the South...I know not to trust a man who marries his cousin. Besides the fact that this guy has taken so much credit for how NYC pulled together after 9/11 you kinda suspect he planned it just to make himself look good (that was a joke people!) I could talk about the lackluster merits of this gang of wannabes all day, but let's not get ourselves depressed until after President -elect Buffoon X fails us.

Jab #2. If ESPN could have got their employees Tom Brady dildos for Christmas, I think they would have. Now granted being a big sports fan, I've seen Excellence in SPorts News jock a great number of "legendary" athletes in my day, but none on the level of Brady. Tom Brady and the New England Patriots became the 4th team in NFL history to complete the regular season undefeated, much respect for that it's an amazing feat. NOW CAN I SEE SOME SPORTS HIGHLIGHTS????!!!! I can't even watch Sportscenter anymore. Some team could beat it's opponent 675-0 and ESPN would talk about it after spending the first 45 minutes of Sportscenter putting a spit shine on Tom Brady's manhood. This isn't an attempt to diminish Tom Brady as a player or to downplay the phenomenal accomplishment that the Patriots as a whole have attained...it is just a plea to the "World Wide Leader in Sports" to stop following in the tradition it has already set with the Yankees, Red Sox, and every college basketball program located in the Northeast and stop showing so much blatant favoritism.

Uppercut. From time to time I blog about music and mostly it's to point out the way music execs and propaganda sell as many records as actual music. Well today it is a celebration. I'm celebrating something that I always thought I would mourn, but as it turns out has made me a very happy man and that is the decline of hip-hop music. I'm celebrating this decline not out of spite for rap and hip-hop, but because I love it so much.

The early years of my life were in a soul and R&B only household. My first tastes of hip-hop were not that inspiring, as a matter of fact I found it kind of lame. Then one day I heard something that I'll never forget. I walked into my parents room one morning (probably to snoop for stuff I shouldn't be snooping for) and was drawn over to my mom's then turned off cassette deck. For some reason I opened the deck and looked at the tape, the name on the front didn't seem to be anything I'd heard of so I put it back in the deck and pressed play to examine it. What came out of those speakers was NWA's Straight Outta Compton and from that moment on I was hooked like crack. The pain, the anger, the emotion, and the rawness were something I could relate to being a child in a rough housing project. I was amazed to hear their stories about events I'd seen with my own 11 year old eyes in my own neighborhood and the way these men I'd never met told a story I'd seen too often made me crave for more.

My life as a hip-hop fan has been a search for that same feeling over and over again. I've never been a fan of party rap or songs about women with big asses, but I've always craved that raw truth over and over again. It led me to Big Daddy Kane, Kool Moe Dee, Ice Cube,Getto Boys, UGK, OutKast, and the Wu-Tang Clan to name a few.

I don't have that feeling for hip-hop anymore. "Rap nowadays is by a bunch of ignorant cats. No young, gifted, and black; just guns, bitches, and crack" © Blueprint. When I listen to what has evolved into "Gangsta Rap" I hear a bunch of people who went to school. I hear a bunch of people who studied all the right words to say, but forgot to put the heart into it. A ton of fake gangsters, wannabe thugs, broke ass pimps, and playas without game. No rawness, no emotion, no truth. I hear suburban youth selling urban tales to kids who don't know any better and adults who don't give a damn. I hear white boys calling each other niggas and black folks getting upset because it's only racist when "they" say it when we were the ones who sold them our slang and our hustle and our struggle.

So today I celebrate the decline of hip hop in the hopes that when Clive Davis and Lyor Cohen and every other record exec has written my beloved former art form off as a no longer commercially viable waste of time that I can hear some music with a purpose and not another rap-by-numbers sucka MC.