When I Get Mad I Put It Down On A Pad

Let me take ya’ll back to 1999. I was 15, pubertal, and felt that if I tried hard enough—well, just bought enough shit—I could somehow be sublimated (or solidified?) into Blackness. A picture of my room dated from the period would reveal Garnetts (metallic blue high tops that won’t be worn ironically for at least 50 years) next to my bed, Wu-Wear hung from every conceivable door handle and chair back, and a stack of rap CDs ranging in quality from decent to aural rape on top of my stereo. The objective best of these CDs was probably Black Rob’s Life Story, which is by no stretch of the ear compelling hip-hop, and the one in most frequent rotation was Irv Gotti Presents: The Murderers, a “supergroup” whose best rapper was…Ja Rule.

I worshipped awful music. And so, with ten dollars of bar mitzvah money in my left sock and my jean shorts rolled up crisp, I thumbed through the rap section of Sam Goody less picky than a pedophile in an unsupervised IKEA ball room. I truly believe that I could have taken almost any CD home that day and loved it the same, whether it was Paid in Full or …And Then There Was X. Yet I settled on a CD called Tha Block is Hot by Lil’ Wayne—it had helicopters and fire on the front!—and on the interminable Windstar ride home, daydreamt about the ATV tricks I would employ to wow the Ruff Ryders into respect, and then friendship.

It was the first CD I ever hated. It had no positive qualities: Wayne had no flow, his tiny, raspy voice lacked any charisma or authority, he had no punchlines, his stories went nowhere, and the Mannie Fresh sound was so stale by that point that even my small brain knew it. Wayne sounded like he was drowning under the beat—couldn’t even tread in the 808 for a few bars—drowning in a rap kiddie pool. The CD went in the trash and I had finally developed a lower threshold for hip-hop shittiness which, it must be stated, is generous and has been met on more than one occasion by homeless MCs handing out free promo jams in greater Chicagoland.

So imagine my disbelief after eight years, a thorough education in terrific, vital hip-hop, a modicum of taste, a college education, and a final acceptance of my Jewishness, when tastemakers, hipsters, critics, and especially THE INTERNET jumped on Wayne’s dick faster than Superhead, who probably knows in her heart, or vagina, that the guy really has no talent. Was this some kind of cosmic joke? Did these people not remember Tha Block is Hot? The praise for the newly –eezeed ‘Weezy’ approached hyperbole and then spilled into unintentional parody:
“Open your ears. Wayne has become, before us, and on this very mix tape, an abstract expressionist, flinging the true genetics of poetry around like globs of primary color, turning gangster tropes and dissociative tendencies into rap Rothkos and Motherwells”

Really, Evan McGarvey of stylusmagazine.com? To extend your absurd and specious inter-media analogy a step further, did Mark Rothko break into the art world through fucking finger painting? Earlier in the review McGarvey tells us traditional rap fans to get off of our high horses: Wayne is “not cerebral” and never will be. Instead, you see, he raps from “the belly”. So, as Evan here would have us believe, rapping from the “belly” is avant-garde (remembering that Robert Motherwell, a one-time doctoral candidate in philosophy at Harvard, was definitely painting from the belly), elemental, no fancy-thinkin’ required. Meanwhile, all of the traditional, “cerebral” rappers are a relic (sorry guys) to be anthologized and featured on “I Love the 90s”. Remember Cop Rock, Mr. Ridenhour?

I downloaded Da Drought 3, because none of this near-propaganda is Wayne’s fault per se. Maybe there was something to the hype, and the bin-worthy “rapper” of 1999 had pupated through the years into competence; maybe even skill and relevance. I listened to the free download, a two-sider Tom Breihan of The Village Voice called “so fucking good I almost can't talk about it”, and came to the immediate conclusion that every single person who reviewed it had taken Wayne at his word, “I’m the best rapper alive”, and never actually played it. Its so fucking bad I almost can’t talk about it. Wait, no, I can. Wayne’s miniscule voice somehow, impossibly, comes through lower in the mix than ever before. Breihan lauds the rapper for “figuring out everything that can be done with a truly bizarre voice”, which is not unlike extolling a band who has figured out everything that can be done with a Fisher-Price guitar. Wayne’s [bad-connotation] destruction of some occasionally great beats negates the welcome absence of Mannie Fresh from the boards. You can’t ruin shit, but you can sure as shit ruin “Dead Presidents II” and “I Luv It”. And what about the amazing, stupendous free-association of Weezy’s that represents a quantum leap forward in rap, the bleeding edge that we ought worship lest we miss out on, in Breihan’s words “something we'll be talking about decades from now”? Well, there was a little trend in rap that some of us have noticed for the past few decades called freestyling that runs along the same lines. And if you want to hear a real rapper perform these same feats of avant-gardism, check out Ghostface’s entire back catalogue.

It appears that I’ll never be able to ignore the worst rapper alive—a claim no more outrageous than Wayne’s own—again. He has a new LP out in the fall/winter, Tha Carter III, and enough forthcoming mixtape projects to gift us all rap Hockneys and Hirsts before the end of the year. Philistine that I am, I’ll probably just dust off Venni Vetti Vicci; “Holla Holla” was always a banger.