The Gangsta Shizzle

Music, just like excrement, is shit.

The reason for this somewhat sweeping, and, admittedly, fundamentally incorrect, generalisation is all because of the invasion of American ‘gangstaz’ who rap about ‘getting down wit dair hos, fo sho’.

I don’t envisage this being a particularly long entry; my opinions on hip-hop, rap, and whatever other pathetic excuses for genres that consist of either some burly black guy shouting about ‘his niggas and bitches, muthafucka’ while telling me to ‘shake dat ass’, or electronically-engineered ten-minute long headache-inducing ‘songs’ whose constituent parts are a “duhh duhh duhh” sound in the background, and a voiceover orchestrated by Pinky and Perky, are forever set in stone.

As you can probably guess, I don’t take too kindly to this sort of ‘music’; the main perpetrators are people like 50 Cent and Peepee Diddly (or whatever he’s called this week).

The former of the two was apparently shot nine times. Unfortunately, he lived to tell the tale, and make a video game whose main theme is, yep, shooting people.

Moving on…

It really is incredibly just how alike all these acts sound. There are, in my humble (but inevitably correct) opinion, two types of rap-hop (or whatever) – these are explained below.

The first is the “I’m going to shoot you and proceed to engage in sexual intercourse with prostitutes (pop a cap in yo’ ass den fuck ma ho’s)”. The videos for these particular types will obviously contain three main things (aside from the pimpin’ frontman himself, who will be clad in a white fur coat, have a cornrow hair-do, wear shades, fondle his cock all the time, and randomly shout “word” whilst making strange symbols with his fingers), which you should look out for if ever you’re unlucky enough to see one.

These are: 1) Semi-naked women waggling their arses, 2) “Brothas” in the background, usually saying, “Uh, yeah”, “Fo sho”, or “Shizzle ma bizzle, biatch”. And, 3) Of course, lots of gold chains, a white limousine, possibly a Jacuzzi, and various other materials with which the pimp goes about his business.

Getting back to my original point, the second type of video is traditionally performed by 19-year old ‘brothaz from da hood’ who consider themselves philosophers. This type will almost always contain the words “I’m sorry”, or “I want you back” or “I didn’t mean to sleep with her, my cock just fell out of my pants and then I fucked her”, in the title. They tend to document some poor hoodie-clad chap who’s lost his girlfriend because he slept with another woman. Or, as is more than likely the case, a whore.

Alternatively, he could have moved away from the area and be trying to use the song to express his undying love.

Wow, you’re really quite good at detecting bullshit.

Back to the subject at hand – this second type of song is usually accompanied by a video that, while substantially different from the other type, still follows a formula. This time, however, it’ll be something like the following:

Boy is seen leaving bar. Boy walks home through rain, hood-up and will be either a) making strange signs with his hands, b) keeping his hands in his pockets, or c) a bit of both.

He then goes home, and sits on his bed. Cut to girlfriend/ ex-girlfriend, who will probably look at a picture of the two of them together and start crying. The boy will then pick up a random object and throw it against a wall, clearly thinking that this will, in some way, aid his situation.

It’ll carry on in much this way, with the boy occasionally meeting up with ‘his brothas (from da hood, of course)’.

All in all, it’s a bag of shite. The videos for dance/ trance/ whatever, while I’ve never actually seen one, (probably because they don’t exist, as the songs are intended to be listened to by e’d up clubbers on a Friday night in Liverpool), will by definition be equally as bad. If the adverts for “God’s Bathroom Classics” are anything to go by, then they’ll simply consist of a few bikini-clad women dancing in front of an epileptic-fit inducing background.

Before I leave the topic, I’d like to go back to an aforementioned point – cock-fondling. Maybe this could help.

And one final point. I mentioned at the start that my 'sweeping generalisation' was 'fundamentally incorrect'. Indeed it is, there's a world of good music out there. People just need to wake up to it.

White Kids Acting They’re Black

If you listen to the Libertines, you’ll know where I drew the inspiration for that sub-title from. (And even if you don’t, you do now because I just told you).

Anyway. Tim Westwood. What. The. Fuck. Never in my life have I encountered (albeit on a TV) a more arrogant, cringe-worthy human being. Seriously, who does he think he’s kidding? Not I, my friend; for all his “bling bling”, “you da man” and episodes of Pimp My Ride UK, it really is quite easy to see through the homie-veneer to the small, spoilt mummy’s boy who goes round to his granny’s every Sunday for a roast dinner and a chocolate biscuit. “Big dawg” my arse.

Well, somewhere up the page I said I couldn’t see this becoming a long entry, but evidently I was talking rubbish because I’m writing this in Word (fitting, no?) and I’m almost on three pages at size ten Verdana.

So, I shall leave you with this humorous factoid:

“50 cent used to be known as Dollar. Then he met Mr. T”.

P.S. Yes, I really did listen to the Manics 289 times in the last week. So there.