Sunday 28 August 2011

A Middle Class White Boy on the State of Hip Hop

Nas said in 2006 that hip hop is dead. He's right, in many senses. You have people like Drake and Lil Wayne making masses of money when they can't even rap. Somewhere along the line people forgot that flow was pivotal to rapping and everyone believes Kanye West when he says he's 'the voice of a generation' because he's the best available. Soulja Boy is actually allowed to release music and be successful to the utter confusion and derision of the grounded souls amongst us. Eminem has spent the last 10 years being a parody of his early brilliant self and spends more of his time speaking in stupid voices than thinking about what he's actually writing down. That said in the few times he actually puts the effort in you can tell he's far and above the rest of the rappers out there at the moment, see his collaboration with Drake, Kanye and Lil Wayne for this juxtaposition (Em starts at 4.57)


He is the one redeeming feature of this song and it sums up what hip hop needs right now really. Kanye's been alright; The College Dropout is a great album but he's always been a better producer than rapper; the Dre of his generation, perhaps.

And talking about Dre, his latest album is a bit of an embarrassment to his earlier (also brilliant) self. The production as always is great, but 'I Need a Doctor' is basically 5 minutes of Eminem sucking Dre's dick and I'll be honest, the novelty's worn off that - he's been doing that since 'What's the Difference' in 2001. The way I see it we have another score of rappers coming out now and Odd Future seem to be leading the way with Tyler the Creator at the forefront. Again, the production's brilliant but his rapping lacks flow. Not as much as so many of the other half-arsed 90s imitations out there, but still enough for me to have not regained faith in 'the game' as of yet. Earl Sweatshirt, also of Odd Future, seems like some pretty good stuff but they're still all conforming to the mantra that flow is no longer important in hip hop, in rapping and that's just a stupid trend which needs to be countered.

Hopsin goes some of the way to doing this. I like Hopsin, his flow (as all of his Youtube videos will have comments suggesting) is exactly like a young Eminem. It's refreshing. Ill Mind of Hopsin 4 is great.


But he has way too many half-rhymes and the production is lacking on his released material still. I'd like to see him team up with some good production and see what he's capable of. He's definitely refreshing though, against the stream of shite which is being churned out through the rusty cogs of 'the game', once with people like Dre, Pac and Biggie at the helm and now with Kanye sitting in there staring in the mirror at himself while everything goes to shit around him. The better rappers out there are now sidelined and even brilliant rappers like Nas struggle to get the attention that Soulja Boy could get by recording a shitty song about a sex manoeuvre in his own bedroom.

The golden 90s are gone and there's a worrying mantra around hip hop at the moment. When Lil Wayne is allowed to make music you know that everything's messed up and inverted. The better are getting older and their apprentices are all twats. It probably started with 50 Cent. When such a great rapper as Eminem signs 50 Cent to be his apprentice you know that shit's messed up.

I'll end with my favourite hip hop put down of all time. As much as I love Tupac, what 'you claim to be a playa but I fucked your wife' from Hit 'Em Up has in magnitude is usurped by the sheer genuine comedic value and skill of Masta Ace in his rhymes to Boogieman.

'You that little fish that I catch and throw back
Oh, and by the way - give 50 Cent his flow back.'

Sunday 21 August 2011

Attempting to write a blog about my A Level results without sounding like an arrogant cunt

I'm off to do a law degree, it seems.

Yes, a law degree. I've been told many times it's not very 'me', and I totally empathise when people tell me that. I'm fairly sure I'll be the only socialist on the course, and I'm sceptical about the proportion of hip hop fans in law postgrads.

But fuck you, I'm doing it.

I considered that maybe I'm doing a law degree just because it was the most pretentious thing I could study. Not only that, but I'm planning to be involved in human rights, rather than just greasing the capitalist machine and picking up all the masses of money that falls off it in business law. Seriously - it's a very cuntishly self-righteous path I intend on taking, and it's a very capitalist degree for a massive socialist.

I also considered that maybe I'm doing it ironically. Pretty much everything I do is intended ironically, so it seemed a real possibility, even though I wasn't consciously aware of this in my decision making. I still persist in saying that I own a BlackBerry and wear Hollister ironically.

But the truth is I'm just interested in the degree. It's a pretty kick ass degree to have under your belt regardless of your intentions. I pretty much intend on picking up the law degree and then showing my middle finger to the establishment, but I'm sure I'll end up a capitalist swine in the end.

I've been told I should be doing English a lot. My English teacher looked at me in disgust and said he 'thought I'd be doing something useful' when he found out I was going to study law. Then there's philosophy, and politics, or PPE. I enjoy a lot of things really, but I was always most interested in the intellectual aspect of the law degree.

It doesn't mean I want to wear expensive suits and fresh-smelling cologne right from the oily depths of the evil capitalist drone, it just means it's something I'm interested in.

As Bill Hicks once said, it's just a ride. I don't have a lot invested in this ride; I'm not here for the money or the fame or the bitches, (OK, maybe the bitches) but I'm in it to enjoy myself and to do things I'm passionate about doing. By the end of the ride your money will be worth nothing and when you step off the only thing you have left will be the person you left the ride as. God, I love Bill Hicks. I'd feel like becoming a pointless rich lawyer would be sucking Satan's cock, as Bill Hicks again once talked about, although in a different sense. Look it up, it's the best Luciferean oral impression that you will ever experience. Unless of course you're Vanilla Ice and were there to experience it in person.

It's a bit paradoxical and pointless for me to have written an entire blog post with nothing but the worried assurance that I'm not nothing but a money-hungry dick, but fuck it - it wouldn't be one of my blog posts if you didn't leave with that familiar taste of regret that spawns from that final full stop like a woman giving birth and finding out that she's got a fucking ugly baby.

That was an awful analogy; I'm going to go make some food.

Thursday 11 August 2011

Why The Rioters Are Right

Now that I've caught your attention with that extreme blog title, I'm going to go ahead and clarify that I don't actually believe that the rioters are right at all - it was just a shameless ploy to grab your attention. Because the last thing you want to read is a self-righteous blog pointing out for everyone to see that the rioters are, in fact, wrong. Great job, voice of morality. Now go ahead and point out to us why rape is not actually the way to go, and racism is becoming that little bit too lame.

That's not how I roll.

But I do believe I am one of those lefties being pigeon-holed as 'defending the rioters'. I can't defend their actions; it should go without saying that they are doing entirely immoral things, creating havoc for not much reason at all.

But that doesn't mean the actions don't have a cause.

Here's where the determinist element of this blog is going to stick out. I don't believe in free will. I believe that all actions have a cause. Sure, the cause is probably too long-winded and complex for humans to ever understand to the extent that they can predict actions, but that doesn't make it not true.
When we make a decision, it is our character which makes it. Now our character is an abstract idea built from birth by external forces. Society, genetics, family. From the moment you're born society will impress ideas onto you. The things you experience; the situation you grow up in. The events you witness. These all build your character. Sometimes it's obvious how certain things have developed our character, and other times we won't see it at all. But the causes are there.

We're all in the giant conga line of Cause and Effect; it's just a question of whether we trudge along, or dance.

That's a quote. From me. Aren't I great? But that's how I feel. Human actions are subject to cause and effect just like everything else in the universe. Knowing this, you can be free. Other than that freedom is a fantasy idea. Freedom is accepting that you're not free. I really am master of the paradoxes today, aren't I?

How does this relate to the riots? Well naturally these actions had causes. There's no simple cause. Obviously the death of Duggan may have catalysed the fall of the dominoes, but elsewhere I think the main cause was poverty. It might not be, but regardless there is a cause. Calling these rioters 'scum' in an attempt to dehumanise them is just missing the point. They *are* human. Just like you. They weren't born 'scum'. Society has raised them scum. A lack of equality in society creates a disillusioned working class, some of these will end up less educated, less prone to bow to authority. Not all, of course not. But these people have causes for their actions, no matter how mindless they may seem.

I might not have pinpointed the causes for their actions exactly, but so what? That's not the point of me writing this. I'm not justifying their actions either; they are wrong, pure and simple. But what is without doubt is that they have a cause that is bigger than those who committed these crimes, bigger than your self-righteous 'rioting is wrong' preaching. Fuck it, a lot of these people are probably too stupid to understand the causes to their actions themselves. That doesn't make it not true, and let's face it - they're stupid for a reason.

So don't be self-righteous and expect the Morality Police to come along and give you a golden star for pointing out the painfully obvious 'rioting is wrong'; they're out of gold stars. They've already handed them all out.

So let's end with a recap.

There's no such thing as a stupid person; only stupid actions. When someone acts stupidly don't condemn them for condemnation's sake. Condemn them for justice, to reform but never for condemnation's sake alone. Morality is not self-serving. These riots are despicable, but the rioters are human and there but for the grace of Cause and Effect go you.

Sunday 7 August 2011

Carolina Rain

 
Stopgap post until I write something about drug legalisation.

Saturday 6 August 2011

On Hipsters

I decided to write this before blogging about hipsters got all mainstream.

I never really considered myself a hipster until recently. I don't dress especially hipster, I only own one pair of chinos and while my band shirts are all fairly pretentious, they're pretentious in the sense that you know I only listen to the most critically acclaimed music of all time, rather than because I listen to bands you've never heard of.

That said, I did go to see a friend's band last night at a small, fairly hipster, bar venue in Bristol and hung around with members of the band afterwards.

But that's just how I roll, motherfuckers.

Anyway, hipsters. I'm beginning to think that I'm writing this blog post perhaps as an outlet for my subconscious to reassure myself that I'm not actually hipster, although it's becoming increasingly hard to fight off - one cannot battle against the metaphorical hipster virus as it was, naturally, there inside my body before it got mainstream and I joined it.

I think the thing most hipster about myself is my insufferable persistence in irony. It's got to the stage where I'm genuinely having a bit of an identity crisis as my entire life is lived ironically. It's all very well ironically (honestly) joking about how much 'gash' I am going to get because I'm such a 'lad', but those inverted commas are becoming increasingly less distinct in real life situations. It gets to the point when one jokes about how he loves nothing more than getting bitches to make sandwiches for him so often that he wonders if he really does want that.

Obviously in reality I'm the least laddish person in the world. Not only did I go round my friend's to help her with the washing up a few days ago but my ex-girlfriend also had the background picture on her phone as me making her a sandwich.

This is a bit of a gap-filling blog post because I realised nobody has blogged for nearly a week so I thought I'd step up to the plate (without sandwiches on it) and write this. My hipster friend assures me that hipster jokes are lame now, probably because they're so incredibly mainstream, so I will try my hardest not to leave a closing statement riddled with a hipster-joke essence.

Instead, here's a picture of me rocking up to the first showing of Harry Potter dressed as Darth Maul.

I was the only person in our screening dressed up last night. #HarryPotter

God, that's unbearably ironic. And Darth Maul sure looks fly in those chinos.

Monday 1 August 2011

A List Of People Who Could (almost) Legitimately Have Sued Noel Gallagher For "Whatever"

...and by extension "Don't Look Back In Anger" as the verse of the former shares the structure of the latter's chorus. Each provide the principal hook of the song.

You'd think Beatles copyists would stick together but no, it seems Rutles/Bonzo Dog Dooh Dah Band hero Neil Innes in 1994 was in no mood to sit down and shoot the shit with Noel Gallagher, Jeff Lynne and the surviving members of Badfinger, so he sued Noel for pinching a little bit of his track "How Sweet To Be An Idiot" for Oasis' wonderful christmas single. I mean MAN, the first line sounds the same then it's all just srs retro Oasis pwnage w/ added orchestra.

If anything, when Noel was writing the song he was probably more worried (and as if he'd give a shit) about the resolute familiarity that any music-listener could well have with the song's descending chord progression. The following songwriters could all have taken issue with the single;
  • Robbie Robertson The Band's best and most famous track "The Weight" provides a perfect midpoint to their enchantingly rootsy 1968 debut "Music From Big Pink". After each chorus there's that little instrumental break. Sure the tempo's different but slow it down and you're singing "Whatever"!
  • Jerry Garcia I love the Dead. "Friend Of The Devil" is a good bluegrassy yarn. Listen to those chords!
  • David Bowie Sure he throws a B in there, but that didn't stop Liam singing "All The Young Dudes" over the coda of numerous live performances of Whatever.
  • Ringo Starr I'd like to be under the sea, in an Octopus' Garden in the shade...

 G F#/Dsus4 Em7 Dsus4 Cadd9 Dsus4 G Dsus4
or, if we're talking root notes;
G F# E D C D G D

Which is so simple and regular in popular music that my point of this rather meandering post is that nobody should have been sued for this song.

Still, I doubt Mr Gallagher gives much of a shit about the settlement he made seventeen years ago. Like any sane being he loves The Rutles and hey, at least Neil Innes seems a decent guy and not a mean spirited prick like his erstwhile comedy partner Eric Idle. I mean, The Rutles 2? An opera version of the Life Of Brian? Get to fuck.