For the last few months, the soundtrack for my 2.5 mile drive to work has been sponsored by the good people at XM Satellite Radio. This gives me about 10 minutes to enjoy three songs. In what promises to be an inconsistent and irregular regular feature here on MGF, I thought I’d offer up what I thought about what I heard”¦
XM Channel: 66-Raw (Uncensored, Uncut Hip Hop)
Outkast feat. Snoop Dogg & Lil’ Wayne – “Hollywood Divorce”: And, here’s why I hate Outkast, Reason #12: It’s not because Public Enemy did this song more than 15 years ago and called it “Burn Hollywood Burn”. It’s because Outkast has bent over backwards (or, more accurately, forwards) to turn themselves into an accessible vanilla act who’ve sold out their own unique, quirky eccentricity into a homogenized marketing gimmick. Sorry, guys, but you can’t turn heel on Hollywood just because your sh*tty Idlewild movie did Kazaam kind of dollars at the box office. And, for such a self-professed counter-cultural act, the appearances of Snoop and Lil’ Weezie speak volumes for what Outkast is all about these days.
The Game – “360 Bars”: With all the name-dropping that Game does on this one, it’s ironic that biggest name associated with his upcoming Doctor’s Advocate album is nowhere to be found. Game says all the right things about him and Dr. Dre in public and on wax, but there are rumors that the business relationship between the two has been irrevocably broken. Game’s mixtapes don’t get much love outside of Cali, but level of pure Goodness rivals just about anything from the other side of the country.
Trina – “Beef”: M’man Mike Eagle wrote an excellent and entirely accurate piece that shot holes (sorry) through the glorification of the Notorious B.I.G. Still, I’m not entirely without a heart when it comes to the catalog of Christopher Wallace. To that end, I’m not sure what more nauseating: an absolutely terrible tits-n-ass act like Trina “rapping” over Biggie’s classic “What’s Beef” track or the fact that Trina is going after Khia on it. Both Trina and Khia should just go back to appearing on the end of DMX’s duel pit bull leashes in one of his incomprehensible videos.
