Expert Whiteboy Analysis Monthly 25 January '08

INTRO TO THE JANUARY 2008 EXPERT WHITEBOY ANALYSIS TOP 25 OF HIP HOP RELATED GOODNESS OR WACKNESS OR WHATEVER WE DEEM APPROPRIATENESS (in no necessarily implied hierarchical order)!
[note: we just wrapped up this bullshit, and it's probably a fair chance this is the last monthly EWA bullshit we'll do, and I'm guessing Mike will slap it all together into a pdf again, but he also just got his lazy ass a job so he might not; basically, this is our year-end wrap-up for 2007, which gives you fucks excuse to be like, "Why the fuck they talking on old shit? We been in 2008 for ten days now."]

WHO WE ARE UPON THIS ROUNDTABLE OF SUPER SCIENTIFICAL BOOM BAPTISTICAL DORKERY:
RM: This is our sort-of year-end wrap-up bullshit that any self-pretentious type collection of oddball opinionated for you all collection of asswipes would try to put together, to show you how hip we are and to point out shit we were about before other people got on that shit, but also to mock stupid shit you shouldn't be liking as well. 2007 has been a wonderful year for me, and a shitty year for hip hop. I hit personal lows with drug experimentation (crack may not kill, but it definitely fucks with your funds, as well as motivation for non-cracky things), but also personal highs family-wise, which I somehow maintained throughout my turning power tools into riverside speedy highs period. As 2008 arrives, I find myself on a path of seeking self-awareness, and moving towards a higher purpose all while realizing we are all inherently full of shit, even me. In fact, especially me. Anyways, I feel like I'm a step ahead of the hip hop game, because it's still in it's high life stage, even though nobody I know has bought more than like two CDs in the past five years, and I doubt the dude who runs the airbrush shop is giving Papoose or Lil Wayne his proper percentage of that awesome mixtape I bought 3 for $10 from behind the glass case underneath the glass water pipes. Hip hop needs to hit its rock bottom and get away from this eurotrash pseudo-clever muzak vibe it's got on the Kanye-style tip, or this candy-painted Cadillac sipping cognac inside the club bass-heavy muzak vibe it's got on the Southern-style tip, and get to some real grit again. And I don't mean the wacky shit like 19 people on the internet circulate to act like it's the realest most intelligentist shit ever and we are all assholes for not automatically accepting how awesome Underground Flavor of the Month #3718 is. I want some real gritty and smart shit to get popular enough that like, people in real life know about. Like the chubby chick in bootleg Ecko hoodies working the shitty ass independent grocery store with her big ole tits about to pop out through the zipper once shitty the Sri Lankan child labor seams give out will be pumping that shit in her late model Escort with the spinner hubcap covers from Auto Zone. Shit that transcends the computer world into real life, although with the rise of mp3 players, I'm not sure we can go back to that. Fuck, I am old. I still have like 4000 slabs of vinyl, afraid of compact discs. I am afraid of something that is already obsolete. It is now old school to burn a mix CD for a party and write "PARTY MIXXX" on it with a silver Sharpie. Fuck fuck fuck.
MD: I'm Mike Dikk. You may not have heard, but I died a few weeks ago and I am now a ghost. John is trying to spread some propaganda that I died of AIDS, but that is simply not true. I went rather quietly in my sleep. The doctors say I was just too damn lazy to wake up to live another day. I won't lie though, being dead is okay. The high speed internet connection is faster than any in the mortal world, so now I get to listen to even more horrible music in purgatory.
Anyway, this is our stupid year end thing, but you already knew that. On a personal level, my year had it's share of ups and downs. Suddenly dying kind of sucked of course. Plus I added all of this top tier talent to Dumpin.net and we haven't gotten nearly as famous as I figured we would be by this point. It's been a serious kick to the dick of my ego, but I should stop being thickheaded and admit to myself that the only way tons of people give a shit about blogs is if you offer them a lot of downloadable music. Oh well, I'm a ghost now, so fuck it anyway.
KM: Hi, in between scouring Women's Protective services for a new motherboard and winding up in a treatment facility for my latest addiction to huffing paint thinner, I managed to forget 40% of the shit I'd thought up for this. And I have no MC of the year pick, because I don't remember going "holy shit" about anybody's lyrical beatdowns in the year 2007. So if it sounds brain-addled, keep in mind I am typing it out on a Speak & Spell that's spliced to a black & white television while trying to avoid some pushy Muslims. We don't have nice things in D-block at mulatto jail.
JD: We still do these things? I am getting the sinking suspicion that the EWA Top 25 list may be taking the route of the S.S. Minnow and sinking like a motherfucker. I guess it was a good run, if you can call it a run at all. Peace fags.
BWT: 2007 was a year that we will soon forget about but it had some cool stuff in it. We're like in mid Jan. now and probably the last people in the world to do a year in review type of thing so forgive us for the lateness. Plus it was a good idea in mid-December.
CH: Charlie Hyde is a guy that I, Raven Mack, made internet friends with through emails and invited to join our little clique of self-pretentious white fucks who listen to hip hop. This goes to show that, again, I am far too trusting and naive, and Charlie Hyde most likely doesn't actually exist, and is an elaborate trick to try and get me to catch feelings. Except I have learned with the robots (i.e. computers and bullshit) to not have any feelings, because they don't have feelings. Had Charlie Hyde not made the New Year's Resolution to smoke blunts all day every day, he might've came around the clubhouse to write his own blurb. But he's also Canadian, and I'm not sure it's the new year yet there, so he may be at his folks' house for Christmas.


#1: THE NOTORIOUS BIG DADDY RAKIMPAC (aka MC of the Year)
RM: You know, I feel like a complete sell-out chump-ass for even saying this, but the best MC of the year for me was Andre 3000. Now, I have always been of the belief in the basic reverse awesomeness theorem of Outkast greatness, in that each subsequent release they made was just a little bit shittier than the one ahead of it. And I hated The Love Below half of that dual CD gimmick because it was corny as fuck, and personifies great hip hop to hipster white dudes who play in instrumental retro-metal bands with ironic band names that don’t really mean anything other than they sound wacky. I automatically stand against those types in 99 out of 100 cases of popular culture. But dude, I can’t front, Andre came with some crazy ass shit on his plethora of remix guest appearances this year. And not only is he doing some crazy different-sounding flows, he’s got depth to his bullshit that’s a thousand years ahead of the retroactive mentality of most rappers who rhyme of shiny things and how much shinier their shiny things are than those other dudes less shiny things. From the “What a Job” verse he dropped that made that Devin the Dude track one of the best tracks of the year, to even the crazy double meanings in seemingly simple bullshit on “The Art of Storytelling Pt. 4” off the wack ass Drama mixtape CD illegal download, Dre has consistently stepped up with some next level shit, and seems to be fully recovered from the poisonous pollution of Erykah Badu’s twat juice. He has actually tricked me into thinking a new Outkast CD will be something other than an overhyped mass media piece of shit.
MD: I'm going with Ghostface on this one. Mostly because we didn't have a stupid year end awards thing last year, nor an Ultra Elite EWA Committee to create a year end awards thing, and Ghost really deserved to win last year. Plus R.A. The Rugged Man didn't really do enough this year to give him the nod.
I'm not trying to slight Ghost in any way. He still deserves to be called the MC of the year in '07 because he's one of the only dudes in that 3rd percentile of non-bullshit MCs out there. On top of that, he managed to dazzle outside of rhythmic vocal patterns set to music by telling Tony Yayo he could suck a dick and speaking the truth on the Wu Tang Clan's 8 Diagrams album. This guy is still as hot as he was when his first solo album dropped, or possibly even hotter. Longevity is basically a non-existent trait in rap music, so you have to give it up to the guy.
BWT: I feel that due to my selection of Lil Wayne for MC of the year I just might be thrown out of this esteemed group of expert whiteboyz that we claim to be. I'm in trouble since I was already the whitest of all the white boys since I was born and raised almost exclusively in the suburbs, which if you ask some people would make me an expert on today's rap scene since white people are the only ones who are dumb enough to buy today's rap music. So if that wasn't bad enough I then have to deal with my "too cool for school" partners in this homo expert whiteboy thing, who are probably not even white. I am pretty sure Raven Mack is at least 12.39% Powhatan or something, and Keenon seems too hip to be a white dude. Anyway, in this year of shitty rap he was the guy I enjoyed the most so I have to stick to my guns even if it does make me sound like some kinda whiteboy Rolling Stone homo queer editor who only listens to like three rap albums a year and decides to suck the cock of this Lil Wayne guy 'cause he heard that "We Takin' Ova" song numerous times on SIRIUS Hits 1. You guys can say what you want about him but the way he breaks down words to create other words is just insane. Lines like "I am barring a ton like levy" are why I bother to defend him. In the end, lines like that might not have any deep meaning but when Lil Wayne comes out with something new I download it. Plus it's 2007, there's only like seven real rappers left. Embrace the garbage.


#2: THE BULLET TRACHEOTOMY (aka the Shut-the-Fuck-Up-Already Award aka Why Couldn’t You Be The D.O.C.)
RM: You know, you would’ve been hard-pressed to convince me three months ago that I would find anybody more annoying than Lil Wayne (and his band of overhyping closeted hipster fuckface fans), but hearing him play a more appropriate role like he did on that Playaz Circle “Dufflebag Boy” song, which was etched into my sub-conscious until they were kind enough to make a really shitty remix of it to wash it from my brain, it made me not hate him so much. Well, I still hate him, but I have found that DJ Khaled yelling “WE THE BEST... NUGGA!” when he’s a fucking secret Al Qaeda fucker. Plus, he’s helped make some shitty ass music (Rick Ross should thank Plies for becoming popular enough to steal the title of Most Lethargically Boring Ass Rapper Who Raps About Seemingly Non-Boring Subject Matter). I don’t understand these DJ record releases on actual record labels where it’s all guest rappers and even the songs are produced by other people so basically the DJ just hangs out and yells something stupid like what Khaled does. I am glad to see some new ethnically diverse dude to have a - wink wink nudge nudge - platonic relationship with since Big Pun died.
JD: Like Raven stated, it is pretty easy to lay into Lil Wayne and his quantity-over-quality philosophy of putting out music, but I will leave that be. My shut-the-fuck-up award goes to every internet message board drone that hypes up every mixtape from the MCs that will never actually make a real record. Some examples of these type of MCs are Papoose, Saigon, and Joe Budden. Joe Budden just put out a mixtape that people were jocking as the second coming of the greatest shit ever, and I sought it out (meaning downloaded) to give it a listen. What I came out with after listening to the mixtape was no wonder no one will sign him to a record deal. His mediocre rhyming over either other people's beats or mediocre beats are not what makes a successful MC. What further makes Budden unlikeable is the wasting of time dissing people who he seems to diss just to get a rep. Budden wastes line after line dissing Jay-Z. Why? Who the fuck knows? What I do know is every nerd behind a keyboard hangs on those lines repeating them in their threads jocking Budden; with the same nerds drooling all over the next Papoose or Saigon mixtape.
As an aside, I really wanted to put Count Bass D in this spot, but I was a member of his online community for a long while and would feel like a betraying ass motherfucker if I spend a paragraph lamenting over how gay it is to beg for money because your Fatbeats deal can't feed your kids.
MD: I'm going to have to go with the obvious one here and pick Lil Wayne. I don't know what goes on in John's head to make Joe Budden the worst dude of the year to him. I understand his "Wah, my life sucks" act can get old, but there are so many people more deserving of the fictional bullet to the throat.
Back to Lil Wayne - I would only want him to get shot in the throat if there were no repercussions in the way of fans martyring him and making him the next Tupac. That would be so much worse than if he were to continue on his path of making 4000 horrible songs and 3 good ones per year. There are a lot of people putting Tha Drought III high on their year end lists and I just assumed this was a record I never heard since I only download one out of every seven of the Lil Wayne monthly mixtape series, but it turns out I do have Tha Drought III and that's where his reworking of Gnarls Barkley's "Crazy" is, amongst other horrible mistakes and beat jacks. It blows my mind that anyone would think highly of a record with that "Crazy" song on it. I seriously don't want to be friends with anyone like that. You're all assholes.
I'll openly admit to being caught in the Cam'ron Purple Haze internet dickhead wave, and perhaps Cam'ron didn't really deserve all of that internet dickhead praise that propelled him to rap music's King Retard Savant, but he actually, you know, wrote lyrics. Maybe Wayne writes this garbage down, but it doesn't sound like he's taken much time to do so.
That "Georgia Bush" song from Dedication 2 was pretty good, and I'm guessing that was the last time Wayne really gave a shit since shortly after he discovered his cookie cutter Mad Libs style rhymes would keep him financially comfortable for a while so he could lay back and hold parties in his mouth where every dude is invited. (It's okay though, because he's Prison Gay, not For Real Gay.)
CH: (wack music comes in)
(stupid gay voice) harder, faster, something, stronger
(more wack techno)
Kanye West can go join his mama. This is the single worst rap song ever. Am I missing something? Why is everyone so soft now? How could this song become popular? I already realize the illuminati control shit, so I guess I know the answer. I can deal with my slavery to the world but I wish they could have picked a better theme song for world domination. Shit, this is intro music to like 24 NBA teams. I hear this shit on the elevator. I haven't consciously listened to the radio in years, and I swear I still hear this shit like 14 times a day. Kanye West is undoubtedly some sort of puppet and I wish he would have some sort of standard celebrity epiphany where he should help kids in Africa and go the fuck away. Lil Wayne ain't got nothing on this homo.
BWT: Talib Kweli is a dude who needs to chill the fuck out since he sucks. I remember back when his album came out he sold like 42 copies beating out Swizz Beatz who sold like 40 for the #2 album of the week and he made such a big fucking deal out of it. ~WHAT A GREAT DAY FOR REAL HIP HOP~! What a hypocrite fraud fuck. For years, that dude's been all about "lyrical content", not sales and when he finally gets the sales (although not much at all) he makes a big deal about sales. So what are you trying to man make, an album that sells or an album that is chock full of the "lyrical content"? Not only did that album fucking blow but Swizz Beatz made a better record than you did. In fact, when has Talib ever made a better record than Swizz Beatz? I loved Black Star and that "Just To Get By" song but in 10 years will more people know that or the "Tambourine" song Swizzy did with Eve this year? Keep making so called "conscious rap'", Swizzy will stick to making songs that the few remaining African American baseball players will use for batting entrance music, a noble cause that even Jackie Robinson would be mighty proud of.
KM: 50 Cent and his froo-froo sycophant army. The fact is, G-Rule put out an underwhelming album that cemented his status as a guy who will ride goodwill from his first album until the day he dies. Lil Wayne at least knows how to sing a hook, even if I could live with a 90% reduction of Lil Wayne music. Akon and T-Pain are gimmicky and not that good, but they're pop and don't have any delusions of being the best MC on the planet. 50 actually goes to sleep at night believing that not only is he The God MC, but also that most of humanity concurs. The good news is, his album was pretty much forgotten about two weeks after it dropped. 2008 will probably see a new megabeef with someone, perhaps Tony Yayo will get beaten up by a crossing guard, and hopefully we're approaching the end of the days when G-Unit gets anything more than a passing mention in the world of hip hop.


#3: THE REALLY GOOD READILY AVAILABLE TO DOWNLOAD SOMEWHERE MIXTAPE OF THE YEAR
JD: This will really expose my homosexual music tendencies because everyone of my favorites were from dudes I hid behind, not letting my freak flag fly jocking them all over our seedy clubhouse.
#5. Hip Hop Dock-Trine Mixtape CD - This is a promo deal from the Boondocks TV show. Granted there is nothing more expert whiteboy than saying how much you love that show , but I do enjoy it. The mixtape is the Hall of Justus version, and no matter how much I hate Phonte's retarted comments 4 U, I still love me some Justus League music.
#4. Median's Relief in the Making Mixtape - Another dude from the JL camp (which will be a theme through my list), but Median's mixtape is what a mixtape should be: a few "mixtape" tracks, a couple of tracks he did verses on, with a couple of tracks from his album mixed in. Median's album is definitely an acquired taste, and that taste is Cosmo's and cucumber sandwiches, but I liked it, and this is my list.
#3. Oddisee 101 - Here was an album Oddisee gave away for free on his website just getting his name out there. He is a decent MC and even better producer which is a combo I can live with. I gave this mixtape to a lady who I work with who was shocked I love hip hop. She would always call me 50 Cent and shit thinking that is all "rap music" is and I wanted to change her mind. After a couple of hours I walked by her cubicle and she still had this playing.
#2. Kidz in the Hall Detention Mixtape - Mick Boogie is really genius to take a group I had hate for and make me love them. It was a good thing it was released after the album because they would have created high expectations going into their awful full-length after hearing this mixtape.
#1. Blacksun and J.Dilla Donut Holes Mixtape - Some instrumental albums make you wonder if an MC can even rhyme over the beats, and Donuts was no different. Then an unknown MC from the Pittsburgh area just ripped it to shreds. I love, love, love this album and it is my go-to CD when I am driving and don't know what to listen to. To me, there is no higher compliment than being that go-to CD.
RM: I didn't get 7000 mixtapes by every obscure artist ever like John, but I'm on internet welfare, so I have to pick and choose what's worthy and not just soak it all into my hard drive like most of you internet rap megaupload historians do. Plus, I'm a curmudgeonly old man, thinking most mixtapes aren't even technically mixtapes anymore, because you kids with your wacky definition of what constitutes a mixtape... Nonetheless, Cam'ron's Public Enemy #1 double mixtape did something I never thought would happen - it made me not hate Cam'ron. In fact, I enjoyed that shit immensely. And I've always hated me some Cam'ron. I mean, he's still not brilliant, but there's a retarded genius quality to it that I've never noticed before. Maybe he's always been like that and I'm a hater, or maybe I'm just a homophobe who refused to accept pink was the new black, which I think was just an underhanded trick to confuse white crime victims into describing their assailant as a "scary-looking pink guy" and mislead the idiot coppers.
If you forced me to pick an actual mixtape I bought at the ghetto clothing store in the local rundown mall, the one I bumped the most was the Joell Ortiz one I got that I don't remember the name of. Basically, I toss the slim cases and if the CD is worth keeping, I use a Sharpie to mark the mixtape man's unlabelled CD-R hook-up, and the Joell one I marked "JOELL ORTIZ" in my shitty off-brand graffiti writing, but it was whatever mixtape that I think we wrote about in the EWA one month, and I eventually bought a copy of it like two months later. It was as great as Mike DIKK led me to believe, maybe even more so. I really like that Joell Ortiz. It's too bad he's all hung up with that Shady Aftermatch crowd now, which means when his CD comes out, instead of it being just flat out great NYC rap, it'll be like "OVERPRODUCED SONG BY DRE WITH STRING SAMPLES" BY JOELL ORTIZ FEATURING 50 CENT, YOUNG BUCK, AND STAT QUO! Sigh.
KM: Trae's Streets Of The South mixtape is still available online for free. It's got a mix of NEW HOT SHIT, some of the best album cuts from Life Goes On, and then a smattering of random shit here and there that's like whoa. In particular, my brain melted a little when I heard "Rock & Roll" - it comes at the end of a stretch where Trae rips the Shop Boyz' club songs, and then busts a fast freestyle over Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit". One of my favorites is "Hood Made Me Like This" - the beat's smooth as shit and I wish I knew where this was from because it's not on the album. Trae also manages to pull the biggest beats out of Florida (think anything with Khaled, Plies and T-Pain) and make me not hate a song like "Shorty" for two minutes. That Bow Wow "Outta My System" shit sounds like a decent single here. The only gripe I have with this is there are too many 30 second I AM TRAE, MY ALBUM HITS IN SEPTEMBER, I AM THE TRUTH cuts, but this is a mixtape and that is what happens on mixtapes. Anyway, this is worth your time if you want to hear something good from Texas on the cheap.


#4: SHIT I MOST MEANT TO ACTUALLY BUY AFTER ILLEGALLY DOWNLOADING (aka CD of the Year)
MD: I am a weird dude when it comes to talking about an album of the year. I pretend like my opinion matters and I devise this crazy set of qualifications in my head before I go around calling any album the album of the year.
Besides a record being good, the most important thing to me is that the record pushes some kind of boundaries or moves the genre forward in some way. I don't think it's healthy to orgasm over all of these throwback records just because it sounds like something that's sentimental to you. Given, some years music just sucks so much that you have to choose some things you're comfortable with, and I feared 2007 would be one of those years, but luckily something came along kind of late in the game that gave me that feeling of forward progress.
I usually do like to sit on records for a few months before I completely gush over them, so maybe it will come back to bite me in the ass, but I'm naming The Cool Kids' Totally Flossed Out EP my record of the year. They have a totally fresh sound as far as rap music goes, and they still manage to give a nod to the old school in the process. Beats-wise, they are what would have happened if The Neptunes somehow went unnoticed and they stuck to making gully shit for N.O.R.E. instead of doing love ballads with Gwen Stefani, but kept evolving at the same time. Lyrically, there's a lot of flossing, but it's done playfully enough with a Camp Lo/EPMD kind of vibe where you don't walk away thinking these dudes are douchebags. I fear that once they end up on a "big" label, they might fall victim to the singles-minded Hit Factory mentality, and there's no doubt in my mind Pharrell will take them under his wing at some point since they're obviously big fans, but for now I can enjoy this one EP for what it is.
My silver medal goes to Dizzee Rascal's Maths & English. It was Dizzee's third LP, and the first he's done that I felt had a really solid balance between rap and dance music. I know some people wouldn't even consider Dizzee rap music, but seriously, if you took a time machine back to 1988 and played someone "Crank Dat Superman", they wouldn't think that was rap music either. You have to evolve at some point, and Dizzee Rascal is a better evolution than where we're currently headed. Ironically, the official title of this award is "Shit That Was So Good I Almost Actually Bought A Copy At A Store", and this CD wasn't even available in American stores. The record label decided it would be best if this was released as a digital download only in the U.S. I'm not saying the record would have sold millions of copies if it was in stores, but it didn't even have a chance to from the jump. I have no idea how it sold in the U.K. though.
I'm giving the bronze to Devin The Dude's Waitin' To Inhale. Mainly because I DID almost actually buy it in a store but I missed that one week window Best Buy gives you to buy CDs for actual human prices, and not some overblown shit price that keeps everyone from buying CDs.
RM: I am going to just give up right here and say Kanye West's thing was the CD of the year, mostly because I have to give up. Good music is gone, done for. Albums were physically a continuous groove that spiralled towards a center hole, just like Indian frybread, and both sides had their own spiral, so the shit was connected and that would cause the mind to think in that way when dudes made music. Cassettes mimicked that, also spinning, also side-to-side, and compact discs sort of fucked up the yin/yang of two-sided affairs, but it was still basically a circular amount of encrypted information to be translated by a cybertronic laser. But now, shit is all fucked, with mp3s and downloads, motherfuckers don't even think about songs being connected into albums being connected into contributions to a regular motherfucker's life. So I chose Kanye's overhyped piece of fucking garbage because this is basically the future of music, sounding like European robots having rhythmic gay sex by splicing two male connectors together with some sort of fiber optic tape that they don't have at the Radio Shack in my little town yet. The new Lupe Fiasco continues this trend to a tee, sounding like something I'd hear through the cinderblock bathroom walls as I popped an amyl nitrate and stroked my lover's dick. And all the so-called independent shit lacks any grime as well, composed on laptops with software, making the music all shiny and disjointed. This might've been the best-selling "rap" CD of the year, which would be great, because I'd love for music to move in this direction harder, faster, stronger, all that, so that the record industry either will crumble completely, or maybe I overestimate humanity and all you secret cyber-faggots will buy into this crap and go shop at Target in your fucking Prius while pumping this type of stuff on your in-dash mp3 players. But that's great too. It drives me further away, deeper into the backwoods, where I probably ought to be anyways, far away from you fucks, sitting up on the hill, making my mountain goats listen to boom bap bullshit running through coathanger wires connecting dumpster found speakers from 1982. Keeping it real.
If I was forced to pick a record of the year by what I played the most in my ride, which is the true test I'd think, honestly, it'd be KRS One & Marley Marl's Hip Hop Lives. But as much as I enjoyed that, a year where some nostalgiac gimmick album like that is the best is a year where I'd just prefer to abstain from taking the idea of a record of the year seriously.
BWT: Enough of that "blahr blahr blahr hip hop is dead" and all that shit, 'cause this was a year with some pretty good stuff. Well pretty good for 2007 rap standards at least. I was a big mark for American Gangster, even though I am pretty sure I am the only one of us to download it, and or play it more than one time. I also really dug the new Ghostface album, especially that "White Linen Affair" track. "IT WAS AMAZING I SEEN ROBIN THICKE AN ROBIN LEECH, ROBIN WILLIAMS, ROBIN GIVENS AN MERYL STREEP". But my album of the year would have to be Spell My Name Right: The Album from Statik Selektah. Built in the style of those old Funkmaster Flex mixtapes, it's a great mix of dudes and the beats are sick. Also it gave me a little bit of hope that Cormega might one day put out an album that people give two fucks about.
KM: Fuck it, the fanboy honeymoon is over and I still think UGK's Underground Kingz is the best album I heard all year. For a double album, it does have a little fat to trim but I would say less than 25 percent really needed to go. To think that Pimp C died after having his biggest success to date, both with this album and with being a cantankerous loose cannon is both sad and kinda cool. Think about it, if you had the choice between dying in jail or in the middle of a fight to get your magnum opus released, or dying after you've put said work out and it was well-received, you had fun talking shit about whatever floated your boat, and you pretty much have your life straightened out after a hellish five years - wouldn't you rather go out on top? Underground Kingz has everything I was looking forward to hearing. Guest spots were on point, production was solid, and UGK brought it lyrically. To gripe about Pimp getting repetitive after a while is to ignore what he's good at: drawly hooks, smooth beats, and ridiculous inspirational odes to hoes on the grind.


#5: THE UNFOLDUPABLE (aka Hip Hop Living Legend Award)
MD: We originally did an early version of this award in one of our monthly 25s and it was one of the few things to ever get cut from our lists because we have absolutely no quality control. The Unfoldupable Award is for someone who deserves a Lifetime Achievement Award. Those things are hard to give out as far as rap goes because every rapper is bound to take a wrong turn at some point and become a big loser in the eye of the internet.
I am giving my UNFOLDUPABLE Award to Biz Markie. He's the only I guy I can think of in the rap world that I'll get emotional over if and when he dies. THe only kind of questionable thing he's done in his ENTIRE CAREER was appearing on that Celebrity Fit Club show on VH1, but it's The Biz and you have to expect him to do dumb shit like that.
Honestly, I don't see many people outside of The Juice Crew ever getting our coveted Unfoldupable award. Kool G Rap, Big Daddy Kane, and Masta Ace are the only other dudes who really deserve some type of Lifetime Achievement Award that haven't made some bitch moves in the past. Biz wins this year though, because he's often overlooked as far as stupid good legendary dudes go, because he never had the lyrics, but he'd always make you crack up, and that's a lot more important than being a gangstafied ladies man with a parking lot full of cars in my mind.
RM: I think anyone who does not like Biz Markie is an anyone who should catch the AIDS, and then when dying of the AIDS in some fruity clinic next to an effeminate Puerto Rican dude who refers to himself in the third person as La Fiera, the clinic is blown up by Fred Phelps and Osama bin Laden working together to clean up the earthball's surface. Biz Markie is a national hero, a big ugly beatboxing treasure for the ages. I have heard a story of a friend of a friend who tried to buy weed in the park in NYC getting busted and being part of the same chain of busted weedheads trying to cop in the park as the Biz, and both the cops and the other weedheads were asking for his autograph. Also, I met the Biz once myself while I was drunk, and Jay-Z was signing autographs for a bunch of homeschooled Mennonite chicks at the Marriott, and the Biz looked like he was pregnant with a watermelon. Oddly enough, nothing about that story is untrue, nor caused by drug-induced delusions.


#6: WE ARE SO DIVERSE AWARD (aka best non-hip hop CD)
RM: This is a category Mike created so we could show how hip and alternative we are and all the great wonderful things we know about. Like, this blog could just as easily have like an Expert Whiteboy Analysis 25 every month about the best any fucking thing on earth, because we keep ourselves minorly knowledgeable on just about anything. That’s why sometimes you get some sports shit, or celebrity gossip. We know everything.
So yeah, we all listen to other stupid shit than hip hop. In fact, doing this blog makes me listen to less hip hop probably, because having to force myself through some of the crap we review or mock condescendingly kinda ruins my hard dick for the rapping music. The jam I pumped the most this past year non-hip hop was Mavado’s Portrait of a Gangster. I am a sucker for stupid dancehall, and when you give it more of an old school reg-gay vibe, but keep it dancehall vocally, that shit will trick me into really liking it. Mavado’s got a nice voice, and if he’s not some sort of Jamaican felon, which I think most dancehall artists have to be, he should probably be flown into America to do all those stupid R&B hooks that stupid T-Pain is getting gigs for with his bionic microphone.
MD: I used to be a pretty eclectic dude when it came to music, but I've slowed my roll a lot in 2007, and I basically listen to rap music with the odd indie/metal/dance album thrown in there every once in a while. Metal and rap used to peacefully co-exist in my world, but as I get older, I find it harder to listen to a lot of purposely abrasive music. I don't know what it is. I mean, I'm generally an angry person, and I used to love angry music, but there's only so much you can take when you get to a certain age.
Regardless, my Diversity Award goes to M.I.A.'s Kala. It's not at all a far stretch from rap music, but I haven't really listened to enough other stuff this year to totally blow your mind with some obscure Hardcore 7" that was limited to 100 copies.
Kala is just as good, if not better than M.I.A.'s debut record, which I also cited as the best record of whatever year it came out (2005 I think) so this was a no-brainer for me. The rest of the EWA Clubhouse like to make fun of me about liking M.I.A. so much because they're all apparently dudes who dip Skoal and do manly things like put up dry wall and chop wood all day and wouldn't be caught dead listening to some fag shit like M.I.A. I am the type of guy who breaks out into a cold sweat just thinking about doing any form of manual labor, and I can maybe lift 20 pounds over my head on a good day, so world-minded dance music with female vocals is something I can enjoy while admiring my smooth hands and nicely manicured fingernails that haven't seen a day of real work, the kind that puts hair on your chest, in over eight years.
BWT: My pick for favorite non-rap album might even out gay Mikk Dikk's pick, and that's saying something. Living With The Living from Ted Leo and the Pharmacists is what I've played and enjoyed the most this year. Oh, that and the new Mark Ronson album. I played the shit out of his "Toxic" remix with O.D.B. on it. And I guess with this news you will be seeing a replacement EWB after I get whacked for being so gay.
KM: I didn't listen to a goddamn thing I enjoyed that wasn't rap this year that came out in 2007. I guess you could count the Mastodon that Mike hipped me to last month. However, I will take this opportunity to say the new Witchdoctor is something outside my normal sphere of listening that I did like a lot.


#7: JAM OF THE YEAR
JD: I am going to break this up into two jams because it is my opinion.
First Jam (AKA FIRST HALF OF THE YEAR JAM): "What a Job" by Devin the Dude with Snoop and Andre 3000. I really don't know where you can go wrong with this track. The laid-back beat meshes perfectly with Devin and Snoop's flow, and Andre 3000 just tears his verse up. I know Raven said Andre 3000 is his MC of the year, and I am not too sure about that, but I do know that his verse on this song might be the best verse of the year. The shit about coming to your job and taking your corn on the cob and the people telling him they got high to him in high school and made love to him in college was mind-blowing. Even Snoop decided to not mail in his verse as well which is a feat in itself.
Second Jam: "Alex (Stolen Script)" by Ghostface. This was a nerd orgasm for me; Ghost on Doom beats no matter what will always get my nerd radar bleeping like a mofo. The story in the rhyme is just insane as well. I know Ghost has said that it is a true story, but I don't even care. I don't there there is anyone who can touch Ghost in storytelling rhymes, and that shit is important to me. One of the reasons I am what I am today is how hip hop gives an MC the opportunity to paint a picture of a place where I never have been and never will be. That is what attracts me to an MC, and adding a dope beat behind it is icing on the proverbial cake. I think in the game now having that ability to paint with your lyrics is a thing that is becoming slowly endangered.
MD: There were probably a few jams I played more than the one I'm going to select (including Devin's "What A Job"), but I have to go with Aesop Rock's "None Shall Pass". I've never been much of a fan of Aesop, and outside of a few songs, I've hated all of his albums. There were always too many bleeps and bloops and a glazed topcoat of general sci-fi nerdery going on in his past releases to ever catch my attention. Then you throw on his overly wordy essay-like lyrics that were almost exclusively rapped off beat and you have a potent recipe for me not giving a shit.
With that said, there were a few songs where it all came together (mainly "Daylight" and "9 to 5'ers Anthem", both from Labor Days) and it was like the late '90s/early '00s underground rap movement was really justified in it's smarminess and Star Wars bravado. Aesop had the backpack game sewed up, but there was such a spectacular amount of worthless, overly perceptive shit in his catalog that I just wanted him to go away.
Then this "None Shall Pass" song came along. It originally appeared on the Adult Swim/Definitive Jux comp and I liked the beat, but kind of zoned out the lyrics on instinct. From then on, I'd hear the instrumental in odd places (Adult Swim, MTV, and I think it's even on the MF Doom DVD for some reason) and it made me want to listen to the song again. By the time Aesop's actual album came out, I was fist deep in "None Shall Pass". Aesop is still wordy of course, but he's really shaved down the unwanted bits and learned to control his flow with expert precision. The entire album is great, since it's almost 2010 now and every producer has chilled the fuck out with the abstract spaceman beats, so he's got a lot of honest head nodders backing him up this time, but "None Shall Pass" shines above the rest.
Honorable Jam Mentions go to: Devin The Dude et al "What a Job", UGK/Outkast/Three 6 "International Player's Anthem", Freestyle Professors "Hear What I Hear" and Dizzee Rascal "Sirens".
CH: Although I would attest 2007 was a solid enough year for rap, there wasn't one particular jam that smacked me in the face like it used to. I was feeling the fuck outta that "Nostalgia" jam for a while but just realize I forgot about it until trying now to think of one. I loved that SP/AZ, the hardest, but again wasn't listening to that shit a ton. That's kinda what I always try and compare stuff to -- shit like "Jazz (We Got)". I would listen to tracks like that over and over again. Am I different or is rap different? I'm older; however I'm still smoking the same amount of blunts and doing basically the same things, so I'm going to venture (yeah, welcome me to the party) that rap is just so different then before. I’m not even going to say worse – although it clearly is. It’s just completely different. It just seems like there's so much that keeps coming out that there's no time to sit and listen anymore, 'cause I'll miss those 18 mixtapes that came out that week and fall behind. Which isn't to say those mixtapes won't be solid but they're just that - solid. Nothing more, nothing less. I miss those tracks that were like crack. That said, my jam of the year goes to OutKast, "The Art of Storytellin' (Pt. 4)" which shocked me not because I thought Outkast would come wack but because both of their raps were fucking ridiculous. I thought Dre slayed Big Boi for the longest time (like two days) and then realized the Big Boi verse was just as dope. I can't call it now.
BWT: "International Player's Anthem" is so good that if rap magazines are still alive by 2010 and not just like doublexl.livejournal.com it will be the #3 on the best songs of the '00s. Even the video was amazing...
DJ Paul: "Why you dressed like Roddy Piper?"
Andre 3 Stacks: "I got Scottish in my blood!"
RM: I have this dork rule that started ever since we thunk up the EWA Hot Jamz 100 list for All-Time (which we never finished of course, because this is the internet, where everyone has ideas but no one has execution, which is why so many fags like us end up with "blogs" instead of "gigs") where I feel a Jam can't be a Jam unless it has a certain amount of pop appeal. Like, anyone can make a list of their favorite bullshit because they got a blowjob from a hot slut while listening to some random Mobb Deep song, but that doesn't make it a fucking jam for the world-at-large. Anyways, I started off the '07 painting the inside of this cavernous 3-story warehouse in downtown Richmond at night when the business wasn't operating, so I was there by myself, in a known crack locale, alarm system in effect but the reality of drug-addled fuckers jacking me for all my shit as I loaded up the truck at the end of the night (which was like 2 or 3 in the morning usually) being a reality. Not to mention it was a creepy dark warehouse in Richmond where fucking ghosts circulate like mad from Civil War and drug murders and all sorts of fucked up hopeless shit, and I had to ride a freight elevator up and down between floors with my ladders and shit, just a tiny little window peeking onto each floor, with a flashlight in my hand, fully expecting to see a face peering in at any second causing me to shit my fresh work khakis. Well, I tempered the fear by playing the shitty Power 92 rap station real fucking loud at night, which had the Bad Boys - DJ Foote and Big Nat, who are extended members of Kayslay's Streetsweeper crew, and their obnoxiousness and pop rap jam mixes would help me not freak out and run home like a scared bitch. So a lot of what effected me jam-wise came from that period, although not entirely. It also seems to me that every awesome song that I could think of has something sort of holding it back as well to keep it from being timeless. "What a Job" has that unnecessary ass Snoop Dogg outro. I dug the shit (from the warehouse times) out of that "Zoom" song by Lil Boosie, but Yung Joc drags anything down with his retarded mute rhyme style. "International Player's Anthem" was the closest thing to perfect, but then Mike DIKK had to nerdily ruin the perfection by pointing out to me how Project Pat had used the same beat, and how it was a very uncreative interpolation of an old Willie Hutch song. (That did, however, make me start keeping an eye out for Willie Hutch singles for my jukebox, which is kinda like my ipod, except it only holds 200 songs, and it's really giant and has wheels like a refrigerator.) What I ended up choosing, even though it has something holding it down as well, is Richboy's "Throw Some D's". I heard some Jim Crow shit in the past, so I already knew Polow da Don was stupid, so his dick poster thing was expected. But something about the way Richboy drawled through that song... and such a perfect song, about nothing more than buying rims for a Cadillac. What a great fucking song to keep me less afraid of ghosts and crackheads in a stupid Richmond warehouse that I ended up getting ripped off for $1500 for my work by the owners. Not crackheads or malevolent spirits, but the fat-faced white owners.
I think once I saw a picture of Richboy and how he looks like a Darfur refugee with Downs syndrome that an old Jew adopted and put some fresh clothes on to see if he could make a music star out of him, probably in a dollar bet with his brother.
Also, to be honest, if I was gonna decide jam of the year by what song I would actually press up a 45 to put inside my jukebox, I'd go with "Gonna Be a Good Day" by the Nappy Roots. But I'd put "Throw Some D's" on the b-side.
KM: UGK's "International Player's Anthem". I wanted so badly to include something off Scarface's new album, but truth is I still bump that UGK on a regular basis. It's just that good. The only thing that could make it better is mashing in the Three 6 verses into one gigantic megamix. I'm sure someone has already, it's just something that kicks around in my brain every time I hear it on the radio.


#8: HEAVEN NEEDED A...
MD: I've never been affected by rapper deaths too much. Too much hub bub and jibber jabber surrounds them if you ask me. The only real ones that stick out for me are Trouble T. Roy, Poetic of the Gravediggaz, and of course J Dilla.
Trouble T. Roy was mostly because I was young and it was a freak accident. It's not like I personally gave a shit about Heavy D's dancers, but it was the first time I really knew of a dude dying that I had seen in rap videos, so it was pretty real for me when I was 12 or whatever.
Poetic's passing was a little more fucked up, because he had been dying of cancer for two years and did not have the health insurance to help him along. I remember rappers briefly considered unionizing because of it, but the record label slavemasters were having none of that.
J Dilla's hit me hard. Well, as hard as a death can hit you when the deceased is someone you never met. It was just days after his Donuts album came out and no one (as in, rap nerds) knew he was dying and that he made Donuts while he was laying up in the hospital wasting away. I still think Donuts is his best work, even after the hordes of posthumous albums hit the streets, and it must have been some real serious shit for him to think he was most likely going to die soon, while constructing his seminal masterwork in a hospital bed with a rinky dink sampler and a fraction of his record collection.
You guys probably want jokes though, so I'll stop bumming myself out thinking about dudes I don't know who died and instead make light of some fresh passings. It's been kind of a slow year as far as top-tier rapper deaths go. Pimp C was the big one of course, but I was never the biggest UGK fan, and usually when a dude is real known for smoking mad PCP, his lifespan isn't that long. Big Moe from the S.U.C. died, and I'm sure at least one of my southern EWA brethren will mention him, so I'll skip over him. I guess I'll have to go with Stack Bundles, just because no one else is. Stack Bundles was so low on the Dipset totem pole, I'm not even sure I ever heard a song by him. He was mainly a guy who popped up on mixtapes here and there, and mortality finally failed him after some hood squabble over jewelry or something. Don't feel bad though, because Stack's murderer mysteriously got murdered himself a few days later.
Anyway, R.I.P. Stack Bundles. Heaven needed a guy to make uninteresting appearances on other people's mixtapes. I'm sure Jesus is rocking that collabo you did with St. Vincent right now.
BWT: They still don't have the cause of death back for Pimp C but I think we all know it's going to be some kinda super drug overdose that would have offed the dude in Motley Crue who claims he used to shoot Jack Daniels when he ran out of heroin. Awhile back I was at the bar with friends when "Big Pimpin" came on. I went off on some drunken rant about how much I hated Pimp C and I wished all sorts of horrible things on the man for dragging down Bun B with his shit. Looking back, I feel bad about that night even though Pimp C did suck. So just in case there's some higher power out there who listens to me, can you please take out Vladimir Putin, Skip Bayless, DJ Khaled, any past and or former frat boyz, and last but certainly not least all fans of the Boston Red Sawxx especially those who have no affiliation to that sorry excuse for a city.
RM: Every time somebody dies who I never knew and actually effects me, other people ruin it with their melodramatic nonsense. Like with Sean Taylor dying - as a lifeling Redskins fan, that shit bothered me. I mean dude had changed with the birth of his first kid, which as much as a corny ass story the media made it, that's some real shit. I'm not nearly the ridiculous-minded fool I was before I had some offspring; it grounds you because you know you're not just fucking yourself up, you're potentially fucking up someone else who doesn't even have a chance. But shit, it wasn't even a week later and motherfuckers had petitions to retire his number, even though no Redskin number has ever been retired ever. Not Sonny Jurgensen, nor John Riggins, both of whom were far bigger more imposing legends than Sean Taylor.
Still, the spiritual magic of the Redskins somehow making the playoffs with airbrushed undershirts of Sean Taylor on, and beating the Cowboys by 21 points, that shit got me fired the fuck up. It also makes me believe even lesser than I already did in Heaven and Hell. I mean what the fuck, does God have an american football team league with Buddha, Allah, Zarathustra, and the rest of the spiritual elite, and God needed a hard hitting safety with ballhawking abilities when he could refrain from senseless personal fouls? When people die, are they froze in eternity as whatever they died as, which would suck for vegetables that get life support pulled from them; or do you get to pick your pinnacle form, like going into the baseball hall of fame? Or do you get to pick your highest potential form, like if you're a five-year-old killed in a car crash or some shit? Because if you can take any form, you'd think they'd have mad good football players up there for God to choose from, or he'd take an old dude like Ronnie Lott. But if you get frozen at how you die, then you'd think more football players would be dying to make the team's better. (But also, you'd think most other deities would be more into soccer, so this american football shit seems kind of a stretch.) Also, with so many wrestlers dying young, I bet all the deities are just huge wrestling fans, and they keep picking all these awesome wrestlers for their individual fantasy promotions. And Eddie Guerrero and Chris Benoit might be able to do faggy super-fucktard shit off of the highest clouds in heaven, but whoever fantasy draft struck down Ernie Ladd got the real shit. And that's who I give fresh grave daps to. Ernie Ladd gave up his prominent role as a defensive lineman in the NFL to be a wrestler back in the '70s, and basically he was a bad guy because he was a black dude who talked with big words and confidence. He also was a for-real black Republican, not a pretend "haha isn't it funny we pretend to be Republican when Republicans hate black people but we're so rich now we can hate black people too even though we are black isn't that ironic that's just how rich we are" Nas/Jay-Z black Republican. Rest in peace Ernie Ladd. I can't remember if you technically died in 2007 or not, but who the fuck cares? Heaven needed a scary intelligent black guy to make people jeer in vaguely racist knee-jerk ways.
KM: Big Moe's still not going to ever sing a song for me again. This still bums me out. I mean there were bigger, more awful things going on in 2007 no doubt - Pimp C's death also sucks a whole fucking lot but at least he went out on top. Put down the drank, people. My only concept of promethazine is when they've given it to me in the hospital as an anti-nauseal and those are really small doses so I cannot imagine enjoying it in a recreational setting.


#9: LATE FOR DINNER (shit that was supposed to come out but didn't award)
CH: I remember buying Grand Pu's 2000 and Rae's Cuban Linx the same day. I flipped a coin back in the day when I couldn't make a choice and the dime said Rae was leading off. I don't think I even listened to Puba till a week later. Maybe it was my impressionable age, maybe it was the era itself, but that shit hit me harder than any other album up to that point. I had heard 36 and shit like that, but once I heard "Incarcerated Scarfaces", it was over. That fucking beat permanently scarred my brain till this day and I love it. Nowadays there's hardly anything that I get excited to hear, so, after seeing the cover art circle its way through the scores of blogs on the internet, I was officially on watch. I'm still on watch. I'm still waiting for a leaked copy. I'm watching Rae diss Rza and give a mail-in performance on the new Wu and then getting me open as fuck with his Big Doe verses. Big Doe proved to me that Rae can still kick it, so this album better come the fuck out.
MD: There were an incredible amount of records that were supposed to come out this year that didn't. It could just be a weird coincidence or it could be a serious sign that rap doesn't have a stronghold over the music industry like it did a few years ago. There were a lot of records that got pushed back into oblivion (Mike Jones, Three 6 Mafia) and then even more that are almost completely fictitious (just about everything else). I'm sure a more high profile fake record deserves this award, but I'm choosing the long-rumored, probably never going to come out Madvillain II Project just so I can bitch about it a little more.
For the past few years, Stones Throw has sent out a "Future Releases" newsletter for the coming year, and every year Madvillain II is on that list. The hype for Madvillain II calmed down pretty early in the year, but Madlib and Doom managed to throw out a couple songs keeping the dream alive. It was more activity from Madvillain than the two years prior, but the album never materialized. There's all these rumors floating around about Doom. Some say he's dying in a hospital somewhere but I find that doubtful. It is kind of weird that a guy who was previously putting out 500 records per year only popped up with a handful of verses and some producer credits. Madlib has been busy throughout the year working on a lot of projects I don't particularly care for. The Percee P record was pretty underwhelming. I never bothered listening to the last Yesterday's New Quintet record, and I have no interest in his Erykah Badu collabo. Hopefully 2008 will be the year Madvillain II sees the light of day, assuming Doom is not dead by then and Madlib doesn't fall victim to the Badu Curse.
RM: I am sad for the Mike Jones album never coming out. Shit, his "My 6-4" song I meant to mention as one of the great singles of the year. That weird way they scratch the hook was like the most weed-induced mind-blowing moment of the year for me personally. And for all the intelligentsia rhymebook academics blogospheric fuckfaces fellate, there's something to be said for straight goofy beautiful ignorance. I mean, music is sensual, and so is sex, and would you rather have sex with a dissertation on the linguistic fallacies inherent in Rap-a-Lot's early catalog of releases, or would you rather have sex with an ignorant slut with big titties who likes when you insert a dildo into her ass while you fuck her doggy style? Mike Jones' style is that ignorant big-tittied slut, and it can bounce up and down on my lap all day anyday, especially on Friday nights, but always with protection, because I ain't making no kids with that style.
KM: Ditto on Mike Jones. They got a banger for a lead single, his agent got him a guest spot on that show The Game, and then his album will probably see the light of day in 2010. Slim Thug used to be the one who got the shaft all the time, now it appears to be Mike's turn. If anyone had told me in 2005 that Paul Wall would get two whole albums of his bullshit out ahead of Mike Jones, I would have laughed in their face.


#10: RAP BEEF OF THE YEAR
JD: I was having trouble coming up with the right way to piece my thoughts together on the rap beef that I felt was most important in 2007. It isn't really a "beef" in the traditional sense, but more of a backlash against someone - the MF DOOM vs. the underground shit that is going on now is interesting, but I don't think it is that big of a deal. Why is there some sort of double standard with hip hop guys? I was listening to a radio show the other day where mothers would come down to a radio station and get naked for tickets to Hannah Montana. Do you think that show is 100% live? Do you think if Britney Spears did a comeback tour, she would do all of her vocals? Fuck no. So why must every hip hop rag get in a huff over Doom first sending an imposter to do a show and second allegedly lipsynching a 30 minute set?
I guess since I am not a hip hop artist, I don't understand. But I do think it is stupid for the promoter to give out Doom's phone number and refunds for the whole show based on a shitty 30 minutes. I also think the hip hop world is letting people not doing live vocals on a grander scale slide. Has anyone ever watched an MTV awards show when a hip hop dude performs? Eminem is more concerned with having his one pantleg pulled up than doing his own vocals.
This shit is all gay, but anyone using the term beef is gay as well.
RM: I couldn't agree more with John, not about the nonsense of the Doom shit, but with the term "beef" being gay. There's a lot of shit we're throwing together here for this year-end fagstravaganza that's gay, and some of these categories stretch more than yoga pants on 40-inch plus asses. I think we hit our peak around the middle of the year, because me and Mike neither one will ever stay focused on a project long enough to take it all the way. We are attention deficit fucks who will probably always waste whatever talent we may or may not have on stupid shit like a list of the greatest car chases in movie history or great hip hop sort of things monthly. John and Keenon, bless them both, were part of the 100 Jamz committee, and got dragged into this, and I don't think either of them were ever gay in the same way me or Mike would consider ourselves an "aspiring writer" (which is even gayer than "beef" to say), but they were game, and they've showed well. It became like group sex though and we lost our hard-on, so we started dragging in new people, hoping to excite things up, but then we start sounding like each other more, or we act like people give a fuck what we think, or I don't know. But this shit sucks compared to some months. And yet, motherfuckers will show up in the cbox and be like, "Awesome write up like always, you guys are the funniest, but you know that." I don't know that bitch. This shit is pathetic. If you sat around and got high a couple of nights a week in front of an open word file on your nutwarmer machine, I'd hope you could do better than this crap. Beef of the year? Great lines? What the fuck is this shit?
CH: There was no beef of the year. Shit, you want me to nominate some bitches like Joe Budden and Ransom for having a gay e-beef for four rounds. 50 and Kanye? Come fuckin' on now. I don't want fake contrived beef. I want fuckin' shit to go off in '08 boy. I predict 2008 to be the year I finally get to see the long awaited Wu Tang beef where they split into fractions - including all the b-listers. It seems like the only reason this hasn’t happened yet is because they need each other to make that dollar; but that breaking point seems to be coming where none of that shit matters. Nobody seems to have really liked each other for a long time, so what you have is a solid foundation of genuine indisputable hatred which can become manifested into a real fuckin' beef. And it finally seems to be getting closer to fruition now with various interview jabs and peeps actively going at each other. This is the only thing that can save the Wu, since their golden boy rap image has seemingly disappeared.
I kinda see Ghost and Rae being the first to drop out and join forces. Seems pretty obvious if you know their deals. Raekwon also changes his name to Raeza just to fuck with the Rza. Rza gets one of his 88-year-old Shaolin boys to resurrect Dirt and Gza also joins the fray. I see nobody wanting U-God’s bitch-ass and him going off to join Dipset; Meth doing his solo thing. Once these foundations are in place, I see the rest shaping up with INS and Masta Killa joining forces together and releasing a mixtape called Rebel Time, before deciding that they’d be better off with Raeza’s crew. Killah Priest and Cappadonna - who is asked back after serving his stint as a cab driver/homeless man - are the only B-listers who are asked to join up. Nobody seems to like Rza, so they both go with Raeza’s all star crew. Meanwhile, while all these groups are put into place, mixtapes are being furiously dropped with scathing disses such as, “Rza’s ass is meant to be fucked with”; “I’m the real Raeza”; “GZA's an old black fuck”; “Bobby Raezital”; “Rza is a bitch, I’m Ghost mothefuckin face” etc. Embrace the Wu beef.
KM: MF Doom vs. rap nerds is the carniest, most awesome thing I've read about in a very long time. To pull a Gallagher on people in 2007 takes a different type of balls, and gives me a newfound respect for a guy who didn't quite set my world on fire in the past couple years. I hope he puts out a whole album where his body double raps and they sell it as MF Doom. This is not a new schtick, but sometimes the best jokes are old ones.


#11: THE NEXT HOTTNESS 4 THA FUTURE (aka Hype for the Next Shit)
JD: Yo, that next shit will be the dopest shit ever, son - I am talking about Disney rhymes. Naw son, not just rhyming about the Magic Kingdom and shit, I am talking straight rap crews named after the Seven Dwarfs and shit. MC Sleepy is a name that is just begging for some Devin The Dude type southern MC with that slow drawl. Maybe once Jay-Z signs Superhead to a record deal she can be the Snow White of the crew?
Then what will dominate the rap game for the next dozen years will be who will take the title of MC Mickey Mouse. Imagine Ghost, Lil Wayne, Jay-Z, Nas, and every other MC in a giant battle on Space Mountain just straight rippin' shit to get the title of God MC, Mickey Mouse. I predict much murder, murder, murder, BANG, BANG, BANG, BANG in the next hot minute as the new hype shit.
Fuckfaces.
MD: You may be confused as to what this award is for since John went on some kind of temper tantrum because he had originally chosen Showbiz and A.G. for this honor until Raven reminded him that Showbiz and A.G. have been around since we were in grade school (well, maybe not Raven because he's old as fuck; though, I would bet a healthy sum of money that Raven had a rat tail in grade school), so he changed it some silly crap.
Anyway, this is kind of a combo award for the dudes on the come-up, and the dudes who have been around for a couple years that aren't getting the recognition we think they deserve. I mean, the whole purpose of blogging is to talk out of your ass about something you like in order to get other people to like it so you can in turn hate it because too many other people like it now. Ya smell me?
I'm giving my Next Hotness nod to Apathy. I'm not really sure why this dude hasn't caught on more by now. His debut LP was pretty good, and it was even on a major label. Then for reasons unknown, he bounced from Atlantic and released two pretty strong mixtapes (and a mediocre collabo LP with Celph Titled) in '07. Still, he seems to get lost in the deluge of anonymous white MCs whose downloadable mixtapes litter the blogosphere via the swift fingers of anonymous bloggers who don't even bother to put a goddamn album description with the download.
Either way, I feel he's the guy most deserving of the Joe Budden Great Rap Underdog hype, but he's obviously being overlooked by the mainstream, and somewhat ignored by the "underground" (i.e. dudes who read and write blogs.). Hopefully more people give a shit about Apathy in '08.
RM: Yeah, I'm not quite sure if John's new fake blurb was supposed to cut to my heart or not, but fuck man, Showbiz & A.G. are older than fuck. That being said, I think my pick for Next Hottness may already be jocked by the internet rap nerds, or may already be passe for them, but I don't pay attention to that shit. Because I know that regular dudes I work with who like rap music have never heard of Brother Ali in the regular world, but when I saw that motherfucker live this past year, it was the best performance I ever saw. Dude was so on fire it made his CD, that I illegally downloaded afterwards, seem tame in comparison to the live show. And with him having gone on tour at the end of the year with Rakim and Ghostface, I can only imagine his regular world street presence grew, as well as his own personal abilities. I mean, for me, Rakim is the all-time greatest, and Ghost is the current greatest, and to be this independent label MC on tour with those two for a couple of months... nothing bad can come from that. I'd like to see dude break away from the ultra-closeted indie rap world and make steps into the mainstream, so that more people can know about him and stupid sorority girls can talk about him loud enough that I overhear them, and then I can hate on Brother Ali for being a chump ass sell-out, with his stupid ass song with Akon on the hook and shit.


#12: DOO DOO BUTTER (aka Most Shit-tastic CD of the year)
JD: It is getting late in 2007, and the worst shit ever just vomited all over my ears. Lupe Fiasco's new album The Cool is some of the most godawful shit in the history of hip hop music. Lupe sounds like he made an album to be played over the loud speakers at Old Navy; it is so gay/weak/lame/spineless that those adjectives fail to properly describe how awful the music is. Also adding to the new trend of having some white singer doing the hook on your track, is his single... I honestly don't fucking know because when I see the video on MTV, I go into a seizure-like state where I turn the TV ASAP.
Lupe's new album really makes me angry that I defended his last album to Raven as hard as I did. I had the wool pulled over my eyes and that wool is Lupe's one, long pubic hair because he is not man enough to make any music with balls.
BWT: That Beanie album was easily the worst rap thing I've played all year. And man that hurts to say since I used to love that guy. His previous album was so good at one point I considered him to be my favorite current rapper. Now the dude is making songs with James Blunt and I feel betrayed. Please get back on the pancakes and syrup and find your edge again man. Write a song about your step-pop's getting burnt to death. Hell find religion or something. Anything would be better than The Solution.
MD: This is an award I take seriously, because I am not quite 30 yet, so I'm still expected to ironically like really bad things like Ed Wood movies and generic neon t-shirts that say FLORIDA on them with a flamingo drawing.
There's a good god damn chance that 2007 was the year I listened to the most current music (meaning from that specific year) in my lifetime due to the technological advancements and conveniences made in downloading and portable iPod machines. Unfortunately, I don't enjoy music as much as I did in my younger years, and now I resemble some kind of gluttonous music robot, gobbling up gigabytes of mp3s at will until I vomit and sift through the anonymous chunks and undigested carrots to find something worth keeping.
Because of this, it takes something really shitty to stick out. Without a doubt, the worst thing I've heard in years was that Ali & Gipp Kinfolk CD that we talked about several months back. Fortunately, I think the EWA braintrust were the only people to actually hear that CD. I wish I had more to say on the subject, but that would mean going back and listening to the CD again which is definitely not happening.
Another shitty CD that seemingly slipped under everyone's radar was that Raekwon Presents: Ice Water Inc. garbage. Their leadoff single was pretty good, but the rest of the CD was like some kind of thug rap parody album. I mean, I'm sure those dudes are hard and all, but they really sucked at rapping. I'm assuming their little foray into rap music didn't distract too much from their UPS jobs, which is good, because they probably have benefits and stuff.
KM: Motherfucking Graduation. Curtis was just as bad, but I didn't have to deal with it that much in my real world part-time DJ life. On the other hand, people were trying to hear Kanye's shit all the goddamn time. I liked "Flashing Lights" and could deal with "Can't Tell Me Nothin'", but that was about all I could stomach. One of the biggest things that stumped me about this album was how Kanye managed to put out a huge single ("Stronger") with that line about the gay shit and nobody blinked. Eminem had to hug a homosexual on national television for less. One would think in a year that saw people get extra-sensitive about every other politically incorrect message in hip hop, someone would have caught feelings about this. It is entirely possible that he's managed to slide under the radar by throwing it into a song with Daft Punk electronica and wearing those tight-ass pants. The homosexual community may have no qualms about one of their own talking shit.


#13: THE TROOP/STONEWASHED OVERALLS AWARD (aka Worst Style Trend)
RM: Although I think the whole "making it rain" is absolutely ridiculously retarded, to pretend you are so rich that you can throw $5000 for a stripper to pick up with her ample ass cheeks, it didn't win out for me. Because first off, everybody who does that shit is gonna one day be like, "Damn, I was throwing money away." Like, buying stupid shiny shit I understand, but just tossing money away, it's fucking retarded, although I wish the trend existed back when Richard Pryor made Brewster's Millions because then that would've been a much better flick to jack-off to when I was a teenager self-discovering myself. But the absolute stupidest shit to ever happen is these extra reflicted print hoodies that are like pseudo-holographs of Ben Franklin's giant face all over them, as if the wearer of said hoodie is so fucking rich he just emblazons all his clothes with Franklin faces. I mean, all over print hoodies were retarded enough when dudes thought they looked hard wearing jackets made from old Wonderbread bags and Pee Wee's Playhouse fabric samples. But the giant shiny money bullshit is just too ridiculous, especially since whoever wearing it is usually some broke ass wearing some barely matching Starburys shopping at the flea market. And don't get me wrong, I am not completely against stupid money clothes, because them old brown leather jackets with the embroiderings of dollar bills... that shit was tight. Being a white dude, I couldn't really rock that shit right, but I'm white, we carry our money on the inside not the outside. I do anxiously await the day I see some homeless crackhead-looking fucker pulling the ol' "my wife has cancer and our car ran out of gas can I borrow five dollars?" con with an empty gallon bleach bottle on Jeff Davis Highway in Richmond in one of those holographic $100 bill hoodies at some point in the future.
JD: I think this was one of the easier things to write and I am suprised that none of the other dudes on here jumped on this quick. But then I thought of who we are dealing with: Buttpirate Dikk - waiting for some fantasy job editing something to do with porn; Raven - paints houses; BWT - college kid; Charlie - some asshole's secret identity; Keenon - fishing through the dumpster at a woman's shelter to find a computer. So I knew no one would find this so easy, but here it is: the most annoying trend of '07 is the Soulja Boy dance becoming the Electric Slide of wedding, corporate events, and wherever else intoxicated white people gather with the potential to dance. None of these other dicks thought of it because none of the other dudes have office jobs like I do. To clarify the intro written by Mike last month on my behalf, I go to college full-time and work part-time at an insurance company, so I am lucky enough to have to attend an annual Xmas party. This year's party was highlighted by the IT dudes, who are all 21 to 24 year-olds, teaching the people I work with that lame fucking dance. I am proud enough to say I have not heard the whole song and do not know what the dance is like because even in person, I was smart enough to have walked away from the fucking white clusterfuck that was going on during the party. Now I am not the biggest fan of dancing in general. Once I dance, it is a sign to me that I am at least a half hour from either vomiting and/or passing out, and in that condition I sure don't want to do some choreographed dance to some awful song that is proving to be the 2007 Macarena.
BWT: While John is right about Soulja Boy and white people beating that horse well past death (it's a lock to become a future fixture at block parties while the little kids get pink eye in the ball pit), all the remixes of it keep it going for me. This year's worst trend is obviously the T-Pain voice. As if T-Pain wasn't bad enough we now have everyone doing it. Lil Wayne put out a whole mixtape using the T-Pain voice. Snoop Dogg's lead single off his new album was in the T-Pain voice. This is the AIDS of hip hop and I hope they find a cure in 08'.
CH: You know, I could probably stand to do without these fake publicity stunt shits that seem to be all the rage. Saigon had me. I was all on that kid for a good while after he released those dope ass mixtapes. I ain’t lying - my white skin was getting all rosey and crackerish and I was even vouching to people to check him out. It’s not that he suddenly turned wack, 'cause I’m sure he’s still got them good raps but shit, I just lost interest when he started acting a fool. From his stupid shit with Prodigy where they both end up looking like chumps, to the retirement talk – this guy just has to try his hardest to stop looking like such a bitch all the fucking time. He had that buzz because he could actually rap and then he started doing that stupid shit. Everyone is going to just download your album anyway, so it’s not like you’re going to get anymore dough acting like a fag for 15 months. Saigon could have just kept dropping the dopeness while his album was getting delayed. So yeah Saigon, you got me bitter boy. Fuck you.
KM: Andre 3000 summed it up best in the "Walk It Out" remix - those goddamn gigantor t-shirts that look like the shit teenage white girls wear at slumber parties have got to go. I have family that mocks me for wearing shirts that fit because they think I should walk around looking like I stole shit from my fat uncle. Maybe this is a sign that I'm getting old, but fuck it.


#14: BEAT-KING OF THE YEAR (aka The Super Producer Award)
JD: If we did this shit a year or so ago, there would have been at least a dozen people that would have easily popped up in my head who to give this award to, but in my mind, hip hop has been more about the MC in '07. Producing now seems to be more about doing the best cover of some other dude's sound, so I am going to go with the dude who is the best J. Dilla cover band out there now, Black Milk. Really, saying he is a Dilla cover band is discounting the guy because he can stray away from that, see the Caltroit mixtape where he made some obscure Cali MCs sound dope, but Popular Demand was his big release of the year and is full of the mix of Dilla and gritty hip hop shit.
Maybe the producer is going the route of the point guard in basketball? They don't necessarily have to be the star, but they make everyone around them better and they would only become big names if they are really good. Black Milk makes dudes like Guilty Simpson and Phat Kat sound good when on their own they suck ass the same way you would put Shawn Marion on the Bucks without a dope PG like Nash to set him up.
CH: John is kinda right on with that point guard analogy. There only seems to be a few out that consistantly make me go, "Shit, he right did it again boy." I'm clearly generalizing but most producers shit is so formulaic that even if it's dope as a motherfuck, it still sounds the same. Being some random faggot who's dabbling in the art of making beats over quite a few years, I can probably narrow down some of this beat monotony to those wack break compilations/discs culprits; you're ruining shit so let me sound off on that before I drop my pick. Nowadays you can go to ebay and just order up digitally some famous producer's drum sounds; you can then load them into your fancy computer and make beats. This kid the other week from around the way looked at me crazy when I asked where'd he find this certain record cause I recognized the snare. He said it was on this disc. That same break took me years to find. Call me an elitist fag but producers who don't dig for their own breaks are like girls who back in high school didn't give up that sweetness - good for nothing. I would punch my new kitten right in her nosebone before using something like that. Fuck, that shit is straight up violating. phatdrumloops.com can fuck themselves too. What happened to those unwritten rules where you don't jack shit and be a man? Fuck you if you're reading this and you don't dig for your drums. Also fuck you if you smoke blunts with a fake blunt wrap. Faggots.
That said, Alchemist is clearly the producer of the year. From those dope as fuck Return of the Mac beats, to those tracks he laced boring ass Evidence with, to those rapper's best friend beat CDs that even make me wanna catch wreck, he's straight killing shit.
RM: I say Static Selector, because he makes new shit that sounds new but has that old griminess that I have come to love about the commercial industry known as hip hop. Too much about the commercial industry known as hip hop is too poppy sounding and electronic. I prefer my shit to have some train tracks and abandoned warehouses type grime, even when it is commercial bullshit. Luckily, the hip hop industry is dying out, so people will stop caring, and hopefully I won't have to listen to so much Eurofag instrumental amyl nitrate sped-up vocal sample anal sex soundtrack shit no more.
KM: For the Year? Polow da Don, believe it or don't. He put out a bunch of hot club shit and truck bangers, so it may fly contrary to the internerd rap logic to pick him. For my money, the guy did "Get Buck" and "Boy Looka Here" with some sinister marching band shit; he made me like Eve & Kelly Rowland on "Like This"; he gave Ciara her first good song that wasn't done by Jazze Pha, and had Chamillionaire there to do his thing - nobody even knew his name two years ago.


#15: BENCHWARMER AWARD (aka Guy Who Should've Kept Carrying Another Man's Weed)
JD: The easy answer to this is anyone from Dipset outside of Cam, but I will take the whiteboy expert route in my answer. With the insurgence of J. Dilla mixtapes, tribute albums, and albums made of throwaway beats in order to make his moms some loot, I was exposed to one dude who really has NO RIGHT to make an album. That dude is Guilty Simpson. I heard probably more verses from him than many of the other "mainstream" acts this year, and over Dilla's beats, he sounded dope. Upon scouring the net for free music, I came across his mixtape and was hyped to hear it. It wasn't good at all. Well, let me change that - the tracks that weren't Dilla tracks were awful. Some dudes were meant to ride the jocks of others. Shit, P. Diddy had no right to release an album on his own when his only MCing skills were based on doing ad-libs on Biggie records, but he did it. If and when Guilty releases an album, it will more than likely get shit on by everyone, but unfortunately not have the legacy of Dilla to milk into a career like Diddy did with Biggie.
RM: This is one of the stupider categories we came up when brainstorming, because enough regular shit sucks to worry about digging into their crews to find who sucks even more. I could give a fuck if every shitty rapper ever had shit out tomorrow, because there's seven million rappers and producers who think they should be Jay-Z or Dre if only the right person would listen to their perfect bullshit, and almost all of it is redundant derivative bullshit. But that's music.
Instead of talking about what obscure MC has metaphorically taken off his glove and slapped me in the face General Beauregard style by trying to have his voice on a musical offering, I'd prefer to just talk shit about the EWA panel. We were real hot there for a while, but then I'm not sure what happened. I think me and Mike lost interest because there wasn't enough music we liked being forced into our ears to make it worth the trouble. I'm not sure what goes on with John. He gets all loud and defensive at times, like he thinks I'm this giant full-of-shit dick, but then he acts like he doesn't care about anything. I think basically there's conflict because John loves a lot of shitty obscure indy rap, but he feels like I or Mike judge him for that. But I think it's great. People should love things, and rap music needs more people to be honest about what they love in it than more internet fags full of bullshit opinions to complain about what they don't love. Furthermore, in the EWA group, Keenon disappears as often as he is around, and never writes shit when he's around. Maybe mulattos have worse internet than my rural dial-up, due to the racist infrastructure of America and older white men's fear of black mandingo penises, or maybe Keenon has never left the shitty girlfriend he always complains about, so he has no free time to work on trifling thankless shit like the monthly EWA list. I am still not convinced Charlie Hyde is an elaborate hoax someone is playing on me, to try to make me open up and admit something even more personally foul than my crack addiction was (which would be hard, to be honest). I think really, the future of the EWA lies in BWT, who seems to be excited for the idea of it more than the rest of us, but doesn't really deliver real heavy each month. I would hope if I do one of my trademark bi-monthly "the internets are evil fuck you all" trips and quit the EWA, like I always plan to do, he will take it over, add some of his stupid fag friends who are like 23 and think crap like Kanye West is great will run with it, and let this great 10-month long tradition continue to grow, or at least exist.


#16: BEST MIXTAPE RAPPER
BWT: So let's say you had a boss who wronged you and in your field when someone does that it's common for you to come at them, that's what Joe Budden dissing Jay-Z is like. I could understand if he spent all of Mood Muzik 3 crying over how Jay didn't give him the proper budget or whatever his gripe is (Budden really doesn't have a leg to stand on since he didn't even put out an album while he was on Def Jam unlike countless other dudes who bitched about Jay's management style), but he really only went at him on one track. And it's not like he's saying anything that any number of people aren't saying about Jay. Anyway, Budden is the best dude out there who will never make it big but does that even matter? I think he's the most personal rapper out there and that has to count for something. He's also the best at rhyming the same word again and having it mean something totally different. Download Mood Muzik 3 right now and judge for yourself.
RM: I say Lil Wayne, because I am forcing myself to write second blurbs for all the crap nobody else wrote for, and Lil Wayne epitomizes the mixtape rapper to me - throwaway bullshit that everybody has but says is an exclusive. I don't trust mixtapes anymore as being mixtapes though because I never hear anyone juggling back to the dope ass start of a song, nor even people having an actual cut on a mixtape. I do hear a lot of stupid assholes yelling a bunch of shit like second-generation DJ Clues though. That's always fresh. Other things I find fresh: bootleg football jerseys bought at the flea market, camouflage shorts, and when you get a girl on all fours for the doggie style giving her ass a quick ten-second lick before you stick your dick in her cooch just to coax her into liking how her ass nerves feel when stimulated. Pirate swords are pretty fucking fresh too, as are brushed chrome pistols that match your toaster oven when you leave it in the kitchen.


#17: THE GNARLS BARKLEY AWARD (aka Most Annoying Single of the Year)
BWT: That piece of shit "Smack That" turd of a song. It might have even come out in '06, but I've heard it about 9,286 times this year, which is 9,286 more times than anyone needs to hear a single Akon or present-day Eminem song. I hope Akon gets locked up for throwing that poor kid off the stage and right before some huge motherfucker is about to lay his pipe to Akon's tender fake ass African buttocks, he breaks out with
"Smack that, all on the floor/Smack that, give me some more/Smack that, 'till you get sore/Smack that, oooh."
RM: I go with the fag French vocoder dance troupe sampled for hook Kanye song that was everywhere, mostly because not only was it annoying as fuck, but it's the one song most geared to be annoying me for the next 20 years at minor league hockey games, NFL pre-game player feature intros, and playing really loud on those carnival rides that delinquent kids ride, like the spinning wheel that turns sideways and shit. Kanye, who never gets enough credit, now gets credit from me for making the one rap song most closely in spirit to Kenny Loggins' "Danger Zone" than will probably ever be made. Congrats homeboy. (Haha, typing "homeboy" made me think of "Lounge homeboy, you're in the Danger Zone". People used to think Erick Sermon was the gay rapper, but the green-eyed bandit is like Ron Jeremy with three penises compared to Kanye West. Ahh... I am old, because I always think everything is so gay. Yet all these gay things will not be gay and they will in turn procreate newer things that seem even gayer to me, thus confusing me and making me more full of hate.)
KM: "Crank Dat (Soulja Boy)". I hate it every time I have to play it, the edited version manages to make it sound even more retarded with the OHHHHHHH jumps, and every white person wants to show off how they learned the dance. The comp Cocaine Blunts had was comical, there was that one funny Barney youtube video, and that's about all the nice things I can say about Soulja Boy. He provided two other singles that each have callbacks to the previous singles - they're both awful as well. The only song I hated worse than this was the one where Jermaine Dupree pretends to be T-Pain, but nobody's in shock when JD puts out a shitty song.


#18: THE HESTER (aka Newer Rap Dude Who Came Out Of Nowhere)
BWT: These Playaz Circle fellas are probably never going to be able to top the success of "Duffle Bag Boy", but in the year 2014 at some Disturbing tha Peace after-Oscars party to celebrate Ludacris's best supporting actor Oscar victory in some shitty movie based soley upon the white guilt of the Jews who run Hollywood, Tity Boi will chat up some studio groupie with a huge ass telling her about how in the year 2007 he had the #15 single in all of America and it will all be worthwhile.
MD: He technically didn't come out of nowhere, but I doubt many people outside of incredibly ferocious rap nerds were checking on Marco Polo before '07. Right before his debut LP, he released one of those obligatory Mick Boogie mixtapes, which I guess are almost mandatory at this point, and it showcased his past work while previewing some shit that would end up on Port Authority. Outside of a Masta Ace song, Marco almost exclusively worked with washed-up rappers (Grand Daddy I.U., and one half of Das EFX) or total no names. He somehow managed to get Rawkus' promotional dollars behind him, so his name was on the tip of every blog nerd's fingertips by the time his album was available for download, and now he's virtually a household name (as long as your household consists of at least one mildly out of shape pasty white dude furiously downloading indie rap CDs).
It's a good thing too, because Marco Polo is the real deal. Port Authority came out at the beginning of the year, and I'm pretty shocked that he hasn't been tapped for more projects by now. I just saw he did the production on the new Granddaddy I.U. record, but who the fuck is going to listen to that? Hopefully the dude lands on something I'd be into hearing before I completely forget about him.


#19: SOME SHAKESPEARE/SKAT KAT SHIT (aka Best/Worst Lines of the Year)
BWT: Best line - "I'm in my Lambo maggot, my 44 faggot" - 50 Cent on "Straight To the Bank".
Worst line - "Damn right I kissed my daddy" - Lil Wayne on "We Takin' Over (remix)".
RM: I don't think anything is more retardedly great than that Cam'ron shit about not wanting to work, saying "I'm like Biggie - I lazy." You see, the "I" doubles as "eye", which is what Biggie had, especially when he looks like a beached reverse bleached whale snorting his last breaths into his fat belly talking about money problems in that one song on Bad Boy about money and problems. That's great. As for worst line, who knows? I prefer not to highlight the negative and keep it positive, knowwhatumsayin?
KM: Worst - Kanye West - "Flashing Lights": "I'm just saying, Hey Mona Lisa/come home you know you can't Rome without Caesar."
Best - Lil Wayne - "Duffle Bag Boy": "I ain't never ran from a nigga and I damn sure ain't bout to pick today to start runnin'." That was easily the best shit to come out of Wayne's mouth in 2007, and one of the dumbest lines Kanye had on that whole album.


#20: THE OLD SHIT THAT FEELS FRESH AWARD (aka It's New To Me)
RM: I know on the internets, we're all supposed to pretend we know everything about all shit and nothing has been lost on us so that when some dude is like, "Whoa, this Linc Continental & the Suede Fresh Crew's 'Fresh Waxed Cadillac' song is the greatest most undiscovered gem ever?" we can be all like, "Fucking jackass, everybody was rocking that shit back in the day, so much so, we stopped rocking it on purpose because we knew in the future herbs like you would be all about it. Faggot." But in the reverse spirit of discovering some shit newly that always existed without us knowing about it, we have this bullshit category.
You know, considering how much I've enjoyed Rap-a-Lot Records over the years, and how much I love happy-but-poor self-deprecating rappers, it's amazing that I had never even listened to Devin the Dude before John flipped me onto him early this past year. I mean, I had rocked The Odd Squad back in the day, but I mostly just remembered them having a blind DJ (second greatest gimmick dude on Rap-a-Lot, only topped by Bar Nunn the midget white rapper dude in Too Much Trouble when they were "the Baby Geto Boys"). But having gone immediately through the entire Devin catalogue (thank you internet bunny! BOCK BOCK!), including his new release featuring the dreaded Vaporizer pictures, I am left instilled with great hope that Devin the Dude is the one person who has the potential to make the Greatest Rapping CD That Raven Mack Has Ever Heard & That Speaks To Raven Mack In Ways No Rapping Music Ever Has Before. He's scratched at that potential here and there, but needs to get in that zone where it's awesome as fuck, with no corny shit like "Broccoli & Cheese". Also, thanks to you Devin the Dude, for filling the hopeful spot for the future or rapping music that used to be occupied by David Banner due to the bizarre perfection of "Cadillac on 22s", but that Banner sort of put the final nails into this past year with his generic ass singles from his latest jam, plus too many pics of him with that ugly ass white t-shirt bitch who runs Ozone.
MD: Last year around this time, we started our top 100 hip hop jamz list that never got done (but it will someday, when you least expect it). If you paid attention to the list, you might remember that Goodie Mobb's "Cell Therapy" placed pretty high on it. I had to admit to the other folks that I wasn't really familiar with the entire Goodie Mobb Soul Food album, and really only knew that one song. I was urged by the rest of these turds (actually EWA Commitee 1.0 that only slightly resembles EWA 2.0, or I guess it's more like 2.5 by now) to download it and listen.
It was one of the few records I kind of slept on that I felt like a moron for doing so. usually I'm too full of myself to admit my mistakes when it comes to ignoring certain music groups, but I had to bow down to this record. Coincidentally, around the same time I discovered the album, a bunch of "best slept on" or "best underrated" lists popped up on the internets and magazine and Soul Food was on all of them, so I guess everyone discovered Soul Food in 2007. Probably because of Gnarls Barkley or something. Who knows, with the kids and their internetting these days.
KM: Reh Dogg. Motherfuck that AIDS patient for telling me I was behind the times, but he must have brought that to the EWA table during one of my stints in solitary. It was presented to me recently, and there was no end to laughter for a long, long time. See, he's got to be shoot retarded and he sings about this scandalous bitch named Tammie Starr who had twins by him (but needs a paternity test). His two videos are revolutionary - Reh Dogg busts verses while showering, driving his Tempo, pointing an air pistol at his head, and running around in the woods in scenes reminiscent of Johnny Depp in the movie Dead Man. Plus, you get footage of what I assume is his son and then a bunch of other kids from Tammie's cursed cracker womb. I dunno, just go look up Reh Dogg on Youtube if you haven't already.
I will take this opportunity to mention I told my peers about Coolio's run performing concerts during porn shoots, but it fell on deaf ears.


#21: CRUMBLED UP CORN FLAKES AS BREADING FOR FRIED FISH FOODS
RM: I never could make this work to my liking with chicken, but I had some flounder fillets the other day, and hooked that shit with bread, cornmeal, spices, and crumbled up corn flakes, and the shit was gooder than fuck. I am always disappointed whenever I see some homo-ass gentrified neighborhood "soul food" restaurant open up somewhere along my travels, because invariably it sucks, has tofu entrees, and nary a fucking fried battered fish or poultry product to be eaten. Soul food restaurants are not soul food unless they are within three blocks of a Salvation Army or a check cashing place. Soul food restaurants in pastel painted 'hoods with wine shops across the street, that's soul food for whitey. And I should know, because I'm white. Except I grew up poor and white, luckily, which can be confusing because I was raised to say "homestyle" instead of "soul food". But using corn flakes as breading has been good because my children refuse to accept cereal as a for-real breakfast. They pretty much expect a warm breakfast of homemade pancakes or egg sandwiches on bagels or some shit like that, and if we give them cereal, they consider that shit a snack until either me or the wife actually makes the real breakfast. Back in my day, cereal would be lunch sometimes. My kids don't know how good they got it. Luckily, I haven't worked in like a month, so they'll get a taste of how bad it can get. I'll bet they'll like a bowl of cereal after three weeks of white rice and dry beans flash boiled after work while I'm drinking my nightly quart of Natural Ice. Haha, just kidding. I quit drinking for the most part, although I did buy a case of Miller High Life cans because I was dazzled by the blaze orange cans with black print that they were in. That shit was dope, and were this three months ago, I would've drank three hundred of them by now.
KM: What the fuck kind of soul food place doesn't have fried food? That's like a Chinese joint without egg rolls. There's not a place here where I can go, but whenever I manage to get out and visit my kinfolks they feed me. A real soul food place should at least offer some variety of dead pig, fried fish and/or chicken and/or okra, some vegetables that have been prepared with dead pig (preferably greens), and sweet potato pie. Otherwise, you are eating some white people shit. I've had cornflake-breaded porkchops but they were baked. It was a lot better than I expected. My breakfast food of choice is scrambled eggs plus something, whether it's bacon, sausage or potatoes. The weirdest thing I ever did was make breakfast spaghetti with scrambled eggs, bacon and then noodles and hot sauce. It sounds absolutely stupid, but it was most awesome.


#22: GUILTY PLEASURE
KM: I had a couple of these this year. Boyz N Da Hood's "Everybody Know Me" ranks, as I know nobody who enjoyed that song, much less played it in public. Maybe it's because I've had less exposure to my hood folks in 2k7, maybe it's because at the one time I performed in front of real live black folks was a Too Short show where he was running late and the fucking idiotic show MC wanted me to play nothing but "Wipe Me Down" and "Crank Dat (Soulja Boy)" over and over. It's a throwback to No Limit posse cuts with drill sergeant yelling. Some would classify Snoop's "Sexual Eruption" as a guilty pleasure, but they're wrong - it's just fucking awesome. Everything about it rules, the throwback Roger Troutman impression in the song AND the video, the shitty VHS effects, all of it. This is the only vocoder bullshit that makes sense and doesn't suck because it actually gets the point. Yung Joc is another dude I probably shouldn't enjoy as much as I do, he's really good at those 70 bpm snap joints though. Probably the most embarassing time, where I'm like "What are you, 12?" was when I heard Lil Mama's "G-Slide" song - I can rationalize it because girls in the club love that shit, but at the end of the day I'm okay with playing a song that uses "The Wheels On The Bus Go Round And Round". It was a huge hit at the shelter, by the way. I crashed one of their computers looking for the video on youtube.
RM: I had suggested this as a category, with some bullshit in mind, but I forgot. Mostly I just wanted to have Mike start talking more of his fag shit about how awesome MIA is, but since this all started going down, some terrible homefront developments have happened. I play all sorts of music for my kids, to see what they like and encourage them. And it seems that my almost 9-year-old daughter is into weird dance-ish music, thus "Bird Flu" has gone HEAVY rotation around the crib. Like, that shit knocked one of the lesser known Gnarls Barkley songs off my daughter's Best Shit Ever perch. Also, when playing the "Irreplaceable" remix (which was probably the most played song in my house this past year, for better or worse) with Ghostface, my kid talked about how she thought Ghost wasn't a good rapper. Of course, I went into defense mode, explaining how rappers don't really get to shine on R&B songs, how Ghost is the best going, all that. She was unswayed until she found out Ghost used to be tight with "the Shimmy Shimmy Ya" guy. It's probably quite disturbing a reality that my other kid - a 4-year-old girl - pretty much knows the whole lyrics to "Shimmy Shimmy Ya". Although, as an expert whiteboy who loves the rappitty musics, when some little half-you comes strolling into the living room with a box of raisins, going "GIVE ME THE MIC SO I CAN BUST A WHOLE LOT!" loud and like Mary Poppins, you know you're doing some good shit as a parent. I get to unleash them on the world at some point.


#23: MOST INTERESTING ARREST
KM: You may think this was tailor-made for Lil Wayne or T.I., but the most interesting arrest of the year for me was Yung Joc. At no point in the last 20 or 30 years was it a good idea to try this, but post-9/11 America is a bad time to walk into an international airport carrying a semiautomatic weapon in your bag. Seriously, how fucking stupid do you have to be? I used to make jokes about them asking if anyone's handled my luggage without my knowledge, but I damn sure keep my hands on it after that last go-through at home. "Whoops, I don't know how that got there," does not seem like an excuse that works with gats. If this is a fix, if someone in TSA or maybe Joc's entourage or the dude who took luggage from the car is trying to bring him down, whoever it is has found a fairly airtight way to do so.
RM: I still am very amused by the whole Michael Vick saga. My favorite is when people basically go through the following rants: "Fuck Michael Vick for what he did to those animals. No punishment is too harsh for him. They should lock him up and beat him like an animal." All without even noting their own hypocrisy. Again, I am not for the Dog-Hitler's of the World, but fuck, I also am not gonna take sides with dogs - especially stupid fucking pit bulls - over men. Also, dog fights are great fun. Not nearly as dynamic and wonderful as the cockfights, but still, it's not bad. Kind of like minor league cockfights, and with black people instead of Mexicans.


#24: WILL SMITH AWARD (rapper who should give up and stick to acting)
KM: I am so torn here. Ice Cube has a new joint out, and while the content and video are interesting - Cube as a cranky old gangsta has as much intrinsic appeal as Andre 3000 as MC Bill Cosby - his actual rhyming is not so hot. Furthermore, he's acting in more shitty-ass movies like First Sunday. My gut instinct is that he should lock himself in a room somewhere with a copy of AmeriKKKa's Most Wanted and work on his shit until what he spits matches what he's spitting about. So I will give Cube a pass and hand this award to an actor who should never pick up a microphone again: Stringer Bell. In case you missed the bus on this, Idris Elba (of HBO's The Wire) has decided that what the game really needs is a shitty cockney Dizzee Rascall one-off. That, and he has extreme alter-egos: DJ Driis (Stringer Bell in a vest, I guess) and the animated Mr. Me Innit. No, I am not making this shit up, you can find it on Myspace.
RM: RZA. He should just do soundtracks and be the hip hop generation's John Williams. Fuck him doing real music anymore. He's become an industry hack, celebrity society hobnobber anyways. Is there another Spears girl he can knock up or some shit? Or maybe he can allow Quentin Tarantino to be the cuckold he is and plant seeds inside Mrs. Tarantino so that fucking Quentin Tarantino can have a little half-negro baby like he really really wants deep down inside, and he can make Samuel L. Jackson the godfather and have some hokey overdone ceremony to do so (hopefully Pam Grier will be the godmother though), and his kid can grow up being a spoiled piece of shit Hollywood brat. Congratulations RZA. Welcome to success. Stop trying to pretend you're still hungry and have even a sliver of grime to your mindframe.


#25: MARK RONSON & RHYMEFEST'S MAN IN THE MIRROR MIXTAPE (aka wasting the last space in "25" subject matter)
JD: I am not sure who Mark Ronson is, but I have heard his name thrown around hip hop circles as a producer or some shit like that. He just put out a mixtape with Rhymefest that is a tribute album to Michael Jackson where he mixes Rhymefest's vocals into Mike Jackson songs and does tracks with MJ samples. It is really an awful piece of shit because no matter what, I still think PEDO as soon as I hear Michael Jackson. Ronson does his best to get you off that scent by doing an interlude with Rhymefest and Mike talking about getting pussy. If pussy means little boy cock, than I can buy it, but Rhymefest throwing in Brooke Shields name in there led me to believe that pussy did not equal boy cock. I have grown to loathe "mixed" hip hop albums after the Grey Album, which I believe only got press because they went right after the pinnacle of white man music. Using Jackson 5 beats ain't that shocking and mindblowing enough to make it worth a damn.
RM: I always meant to steal that Mark Ronson CD off the internets, but then he's also a fucking British dude, so I never really tried that hard. As an expert whiteboy into rap music, we are always apt to point out in a derogatory manner how "white" someone else is, meaning they don't get it as much as we think we get it. British people are like ultra-white in that sense, so I have trouble thinking what this dude has done is worth a shit. Then again, none of us have done anything worth a shit either, other than forcing out another month's worth of crap like this. If you made it to the end, congratulations, you've probably done even less worth a shit than us in life.

NFL WK 19: Divisional Playoffs teams

I am a big fan of reworking the normal lyrics of popular culture songs into things that reflect what's going on in my life. I have been trying, unsuccessfully, the past week or so to make Kurtis Blow's "Basketball" fit football, but I just can't come up with anything smooth off the top of my head. It has annoyed my daughters to no end, because I usually like to do this as loud as I possibly can. But fuck them. I used to be able to play music loud every fucking night of my life until they were born. They're lucky I at least have the tact to cut shit down like when I'm playing The Geto Boys We Can't Be Stopped. Of course, there are alterior motives, because I don't really want to have to explain tha otha level of the game to my 8-year-old, much less my 4-year-old. I am about to have another kid, and I hope it's a boy, because all girls will be crazy since none of them will believe the sexual predator thought patterns of males if it's just me describing it, and they'll think I'm exaggerating shit, or my wife will be like, "You're just a pervert," thinking in her naive mind that it's not natural for all men to think completely sexually about any living human with lumpy flesh in their chest region and strange curves but with relatively hairless skin. I mean fuck, men love the idea of fucking everything, and it's silly when women are like, "Yeah, well I'm like a guy because I like sex, too." There has never been a single bitch in the history of humans who thinks like a man does. Like, a woman can't even rape a guy, because a man actually physically sticks part of his body into the bitch, whereas a bitch just climbs aboard the dude. We are trained to think fucking everybody is bad, but straight up, if we were straight animals, I'd have attempted to sexually assault like a third of the women I've ever known in life. Just saying.
Anyways, I can't seem to re-work the lyrics to "Basketball" to cover football, and now that the Redskins are out, I don't feel compelled to. I can now be one of those casual fan assholes for the next couple weeks, and then there won't be shit to do sports-wise until the NCAA conference tourneys start up towards the end of February. But I guess I've gone this far with these pretentious indulgences of sports faggotry, and it'll be some sort of accomplishment to make it all the way through the NFL season, so I'll finish this out, even if I mail it in like I'm about to this week...

#1: NEW ENGLAND PATRIOTS (16-0, #1 overall) - The Patriots perfect regular season was historic on a personal level as well, because with that win, they became a team I no longer care for. Up to this point, when they had that first Super Bowl run or two, I actually rooted for them, perhaps because of the out-of-nowhere nature of Tom Brady, or perhaps it was subliminal patriotism. And even the third one didn't bother me, and I would root for them against most other NFL teams. But with this last win, they went over the top, and now I hate them. Tom Brady has moved from the loveable underdog 6th round draft pick to shithead fuckface ala Joe Montana, who is too much of a media darling for me to wish anything except ill will upon his Disneybook life. I came to realize, in thinking about it this week, that I will probably even root for the fucking Colts and the most loathesome man in the pro footballs - Peyton Manning - when they go up against the Patriots. Previously, this never would have occurred, and in fact, wasn't the case when they met earlier this year. Now, whether I'm - as fags would say - a "player hater" or I'm just sick of the fucking Patriots like Jan Brady was sick of Marcia's primadonna ass, I'm over it. I hope they fucking lose. Luckily, they will before this season ends, and most likely in two weeks. Not this one though. The Jags are clawing their way to a respectable top-tier franchise, but they ain't gonna get through this weekend like they did last.

#2: INDIANAPOLIS COLTS (13-3, #2 overall) - Fuck. Not only will I root for the Colts against the Patriots, but I'm inclined to root for them over the Chargers, because of the indiscriminant scorched earth hatred I have for one Norvell Turner. This means, technically, and completely by default, I am pulling for the Colts to actually go to the Super Bowl. That sucks. I guess I don't hate the Colts so much as am completely unimpressed and disinterested in them. Except Bob Sanders. That dude's a hoss, and it's a shame he has to waste away his career, being such a pimp ass player, in those plain white uniforms that were wack by 1965 standards. The fucking Colts... how can I be rooting for those assholes? But they really have been under the radar for the most part, which is why I think they'll be able to man up and beat out the Pats in Foxboro in the AFC championship. I do an email football pool that's in its eighth year, and the first bonus question during the first week of the season is to pick a preseason Super Bowl champion. Out of like fiftysome people in the pool, nobody - not even one - picked the Colts at the beginning of the year to win the Super Bowl. That's ridiculous considering they won that shit last year, and really until proven otherwise, you have to think they have a good shot again this year, regardless of whether they have to go to New England or not.

#3: JACKSONVILLE JAGUARS (12-5, #3 overall) - Fred Taylor made the Pro Bowl, hurray for justice. It's funny how the Jags are all like, "Nobody respects us! This is mad fucked up!" They need to realize that first off, they are based in the smallest metropolitan area in the NFL (I think they're smaller than Buffalo, but I might be wrong, and don't feel like looking in my almanac), and secondly, all their star players have very un-star names like Fred Taylor or John Henderson or David Garrard. I mean fuck, they sound like Desi Arnaz big band members, not NFL studs. Still, this is a franchise on the rise, building momentum towards a move to Los Angeles, which I assume will happen since it always does in franchise mode of every Madden game I've played for the last three years. They will be the Los Angeles Bulls and play at L.A. Coliseum, which I'm assuming will upgrade by then to have all those fancy ass homo corporate glass boxes for dudes who love to go to NFL football games without all the nastiness of going to an NFL football game. Hopefully, rather than fuck around, the NFL will immediately re-align the AFC at that point, send the Jags to the west, and move Kansas City to the south. While they're at it, they could move the Dolphins to the south, move the Colts to the north, and send Baltimore to the east division. Miami/Tennessee/Kansas City/Houston - that's a motherfucking division right there.

#4: DALLAS COWBOYS (13-3, #4 overall) - OMG TONICA SEEN IN CANCUN WHAT WOULD JESUS JONES DO? Man, the Cowboys are lucky there is so much retarded hype behind the Giants right now as a resurgent Lombardi contender, because when they eke out a win against a lackluster New York team this weekend, it will falsely make the Cowboys seem like they are a juggernaut of sorts to compete with the top teams the NFL has to offer. But they are not. Wade Phillips should enjoy this ride for the rest of the season, because he's basically running with what Parcells put together. And with Jason Garrett being a top candidate at other head coaching gigs, T.O. having a built-in blow-up excuse with Jessica Simpson prancing around with her silicone good looks in pink Cowboys gear, and Jerry Jones just being Jerry Jones, the wheels could come off this supposedly well-oiled machine sooner rather than later. Still, the fucking Giants... the Cowboys own the Giants. Even Roy Williams looks good against the Giants. Speaking of which, how the fuck did he make the Pro Bowl, even as like 9th alternate? They actually played him less this year because of him being such a liability on-field, and he makes the Pro Bowl? What the fuck?

#5: GREEN BAY PACKERS (13-3, #5 overall) - BRETT FAVRE FROZEN TUNDRA THIS IS FOOTBALL LIKE GRANDPA KNEW WHEN HE HATED BLACK PEOPLE AND BEAT GRANDMA FOR INTERRUPTING THE RADIO FEED OF THE GAME BY BIDDING HER CANASTA MELD TOO LOUDLY WITH HER FRIENDS FROM THE MOOSE CLUB! Also, there's LINEBACKER MENTALITY SIDE ARM PASS YOUNGEST DEFENSE IN NFL LED BY FIELD GENERAL CORNERBACKS FUTURE SO BRIGHT GOTTA WEAR SHADE CHEESEHEAD! Plus, you can't forget FAT PIGFACED FANS NO LUXURY BOXES TOWN OWNS TEAM KIELBASAS COOKOUT GOD BLESS AMERICA JOHN COUGAR MELLENCAMP THIS IS FOOTBALL!

#6: NEW YORK GIANTS (11-6, #6 overall) - Congratulations Tom Coughlin, for buying yourself another year in NYC (by way of New Jeru), and enough credit to not be questioned about what a fucking hardheaded retard you are at least until halfway through next season. Congratulations Eli Manning, for tricking people into thinking you are actually a great young quarterback with your performance the past two weeks where you have miraculously forgotten how to ignore defensive reads and throw interceptions to safeties as if they were a 12th man on your offense. And congratulations Giants fans, for convincing yourself this past week that you actually have a shot at beating the Cowboys. That shit is funny. Luckily, you guys rule sports talk media, so I'll get to hear you assholes have a thousand complaints next Monday.

#7: SAN DIEGO CHARGERS (12-5, #7 overall) - Let's say I rubbed a magic crack pipe and a retarded genie popped out and was like, "Yo, you get three things, but they go like so... First, you can have one pussy in the freezer for the rest of your life for an on-hold skeezer. Secondly, you get to skim 5% off the top of any one corporation for the rest of your life. And thirdly, you can kill one NFL dude however you want to." I'd keep Tyra Banks pussy in the freezer, this of course assuming that the vagina slab includes the hips and ass shape, although without her mesmerizing eyes, it may not mean as much. Also, I am not sure on how long you have to thaw out an on-hold skeezer. Plus, I'd have to put it in like meat market wrapping paper and mark it some sort of pork product since my wife doesn't eat hog. I'd hate for her to take something out the freezer for dinner tomorrow and it thaws out and it's a strange cum-stained pussy. But I digress... I'd skim off Wal-Mart, because them motherfuckers will own certain countries at some point. They have banks in Wal-Mart now, and you go in and it's the same blank-eyed retards in matching shirts working there as there are in the 21 items or less Supercenter express lane. And for the NFL dude to kill, without a doubt I'd pick Deion Sanders, but I'd want him to be doing a sit-down interview with Norv Turner, so that hopefully Norv Turner would be incapacitated eternally by shrapnel blood diamonds. Also, for further information about on-hold skeezers, consult your local library for Eazy-E's first solo album, Eazy Duz It.

#8: SEATTLE SEAHAWKS (11-6, #11 overall) - The most boringest team in all of footballs gets another week to dull us to death. Watching them beat my Skins last week, I thought about that Simpsons Halloween special where Bart had the evil brother who looked kind of mongoloidish and ate raw fishheads out of a bucket, because basically Shaun Alexander looks like the mongoloid retard brother of Tiki Barber who eats raw fishheads. I would do a side-by-side picture comparison to prove this to you right here, but that would involved finding pictures of them both, and fucking giving enough of a shit to try and prove something to your faggot ass. I'm too busy mailing this week's NFL bullshit in. You should just take my word for now that Alexander looks like that, and then next week, when watching the game, you'll see what the fuck I'm talking about.

I'm Still Alive

Hey guys. I noticed I haven't posted in a month or so. I've been holed up in a secret location hiding from society, so sorry about that. I'll be back to normal life sometime soon hopefully. Until then, here's some updates and links:

The Mixtape finals will hopefully wrap up sometime soon. I'm all set to do my part. Just waiting for my comrades.

This months 25 is still in progress. It's a year end awards type thing.

Some links:

This dude I know named Beardo has started a food blog. I am a big fan of food. The blog is called Always Hungry Never Full. You can find it right here.

My friend Sawyer is involved in this group blog called Panel of Experts. I'm technically also involved with it too but I haven't written anything for it yet, because I haven't even written anything for my own blog in forever. Basically, these dudes search out pics on the internet, then cleverly poke fun at them. You can check it out right here

Lastly is a blogsite called Shabooty. I have a feeling it's one of those blogs that a shit ton of people already know about, but I was just late to the party. They cover hip hop, Howard Stern and a bunch of other whacked out shit. I actually meant to link this site up when I first saw it, but I got lazy, then the dude who runs it coincidentally e-mailed me, which in turn reminded me to put it up. Check it out right here.

I'll be back with some actual content one of these days.

Twista's "If Only For One Night": Meh.

Check it out here:
http://www.zshare.net/audio/6130421c56a928/

I first saw mention of this song on another hip hop nerd dorkery website, and the review on it was succinct and articulate. Reviews written with those two qualities always seem to make more of an impact on me for some reason. I think its because before I was a Communication Studies major, I was an English major, and it was pounded into my skull that the best expository writing should always be concise and well articulated. Anyway, I digress.

The review, as I mentioned, was well written enough to make the song itself sound really amazing. So I DL'ed it. I got all hyped up waiting for my little status bar to say "completed", just imagining that the musical marriage of Twista and Luther Vandross was going to approach multiple-orgasm inducing levels. And why not? Long before his death I was a fan of Luther's, his vocal stylings being so reminiscent of older r&b that I really enjoy from the 70's. Plus his lyrical content always seemed to be about mature love and pain and loss, not the emo teenybopper superficial bullshit that's dominated the airwaves for some time now. The review of this song mentioned the sample of Luther's as being sped up. I figured whoever produced this song probably went the right direction with that considering Twista's machine gun "brat-tat-tat-tat" style delivery.

And as far as Twista goes, I was a fan of his long before his elevation by Guinness to "World's Fastest Rapper" status. Actually I remember the first time I heard him was on "No Way Out" so I can't say I've been a fan of his since day one, but still. In any case, although I didn't care at all for his last album, I still consider myself a fan. This track, however, didn't make the album, and I thought, especially based on the review, that perhaps this was one of those amazing B-side type songs a la the "One More Chance" remix. I didn't really think that I wouldn't like the song. Even though the last song I liked of his was "Overnight Celebrity".

In any case, earlier I mentioned that this song was expected to be a multiple orgasmic wedding of hip hop and r&b. Instead it was a completely non-memorable, "two-virgins-fucking-in-the-back-of-dude's-dad's-car" pairing. I won't say I have a perfect ear, but it is pretty close. The song, from beginning to end, seemed awkward, the sample was hardly sped up, and the combination of Twista and the slow Luther sample was so incongruous as to seem purposely made to be asynchronous. Also it seemed as if most people commenting on said review liked the song, too, but I can't for the life of me understand why. I had a pained grimace on my face the whole time because it just seemed to hit me the wrong way the entire time. I don't even know why. It's not so much that I didn't like it other than the whole song just didn't seem to work, exactly.

What made me saddest about this song was the concept. Although done numerous times, Twista seemed to have a semi-original take on the metaphor "inanimate object as woman" and being the "English geek" that I am, I can't help but be compelled to like a well executed metaphor. But the song just didn't even allow me time to appreciate the metaphor. I listened to it once and can't even remember one line of the song. So now I have a genuine curiosity to find out if any of the expert whiteboyz or dumpin readers have heard the song, or like it, or don't. And if you do, why? And if you don't, why not?

I guess the moral of this story kids, is: Don't trust everything you read on the intarwebz.

NFL WK 18: Wild Card teams

Right here is where I would normally do some sort of introductory nonsense, to set up the team blurbs for the week, but I can't think of anything. I tried a couple of angles and they all sucked, so I just scrapped it altogether and decided to do this instead. I hope you liked it enough to read down to where I started talking about the teams actually playing this weekend. Note the overall rankings according to my completely flawed mathematical system, as they are kinda hilarious at times. Especially in the case of the Giants and Titans...

#1: JACKSONVILLE JAGUARS (11-5, #4 overall) - Vanessa Del Rio's eldest boy Jackson has certainly built an old school on-the-ground mean machine down there in Jacksonville. Led by Fred Taylor, who was shot and killed by his wife when he played for the Carolina Panthers, they have been born into that Next Year's Upper Echelon category of football team like the Colts always were in until last year and the Chargers always seem to think they're part of. This means that the Jags will be good for the foreseeable future, and always fall short in the playoffs, until they can get some sort of ballhawking defender or playmaker offender to put them over the top (meaning Colts and Pats). Jackson Del Rio's black quarterback smorgasbord in the preseason seemed controversial when he was all like, "Yo, my man Byron Leftwich, I like how them dudes carried you literally in college as you QBed and showed crazy heart, but shit man, we need dudes who don't fuck up. Peace out. I'm doing this early enough so people can confuse you with the new Michael Vick." But David Garrard has shown and proved enough that foolish Jags fans are, "He should've been in the Pro Bowl! We was dissed!" He'll get his chance for showing up when he faces Big Ben Roethlisberger - the third AFC Pro Bowl QB behind the two-headed Position Status Symbol of Brady Manning - this weekend on the same rugby field they beat the Steelers upon a couple weeks ago. This should be your one road team winner this week, and I would not be surprised to see them upset a certain unblemished dynastic team next week as well. Then they can lose to the Colts like the Colts used to always lose to the Patriots.

#2: NEW YORK GIANTS (10-6, #6 overall) - Last week was one of Eli's "On" weeks, so now all of a sudden all the talking heads are like, "Whoa nelly! If the Giants play like they did last week, then they'll certainly destroy the Buccaneers!" Except the Giants have always been inconsistent this season. Also, the Patriots have been less than dominant the past few weeks of their 16-0 run. So most likely, the Giants are still just the Giants - a team led by a shitty quarterback who, even though he'll never be his older brother, seems unable to do some of the simpler things like reading defenses to not throw like four interceptions all of a sudden that you'd expect from a #1 overall pick. He seems to be as much Ryan Leaf as he is Peyton Manning. The Giants complement this offensive stalwart with maybe the shittiest secondary in the NFL. Which means if the Buccaneers offensive stars can remember their pass routes after their month-long vacation on the sidelines, they should be able to light up the Giants enough to spread them out and let some dude named Earnest run roughshod upon that bloated defensive line. Which also sucks, because it means stupid fucking black hobo Michael Strahan will be on the playoff pre-game shows next week. It's also too bad Jeremy Shockey is gone for the year, because some Shockey/Derrick Brooks confrontations would be quality wild card weekend viewing in my opinion.

#3: SAN DIEGO CHARGERS (11-5, #7 overall) - The Chargers re-signed their stupid GM to a long-term extension this week, I guess to reward him running off Schottenheimer after a 14-2 season, and getting the worst NFL head coach since 1991 in Norv Turner to basically hobble an 11-5 season out of a team that should've coasted to 12-4. L.T. is one of the best, but you can sense some frustration in him this year, and I don't think that's gone away so much as you stifle that type of expression of hatred for things when it's going good. But once they blow it, I would expect all sorts of finger-pointing and complaining about the wasted potential of this 2007 Chargers team. But what do you do? You can't fire Turner or else you have the same problem next year; and if you stay with Turner, you're wasting another year of L.T.'s limited prime with the ol' monkeypox-faced coach still at the helm. That being said, they should be able to sleep their way through beating the Titans, so enjoy this weekend in the sun Chargers fans. Unless of course, they somehow wrestle failure away from inevitable victory like last year's playoff team did. And we don't know if Norv Turner is cursed like Marty Schottenheimer was in the playoffs, mostly because Norv Turner usually doesn't make the playoffs.

#4: TENNESSEE TITANS (10-6, #9 overall) - I don't remember people sitting so many bigger players at the end of the regular season back in the days like they do now, and that's basically the only reason the Titans made it into the playoffs - thanks to the Colts turning last week's regular season finale into a glorified preseason game. The Titans defense is fucking solid, and it should be fun to watch them against the Chargers. Actually, this game is going to boil down to who is the bigger fuck-up - Philip Rivers or Vince Young, because the Titans d-line seems like they are kept in cages and fed gunpowder during the week. I could see them putting some shoulder into both L.T. and P.R. rather heavily during this game, and probably causing Rivers to loft a couple into the secondary's hands (which is why the Titans were fucked by Pacman Jones, because they could've used a ballhawk showboat like that this year to feed off the softballs that the defensive line caused quarterbacks to toss). But come on, Vince Young is basically a halfwit with Jed Clampett leg maneuvers. He's liable to make more completions to Antonio Cromartie than his own receivers. The Titans defense is a punisher that should keep the Chargers offense in check, but the Chargers defense might score more than the Titans offense in this one.

#5: WASHINGTON REDSKINS (9-7, #10 overall) - I wrote a long-winded ass thing about the Redskins, but I also started a new group football blog called Armchair Linebacker that may or may not survive through April, as stupid ideas for blogs are wont to do, so I put my long-winded bullshit about the Redskins there. You should check it out. And my apologies for dumpin.net being nothing but my fucking football bullshit the past few weeks. I think Keenon is the only other guy trying right now, and he's back in mulatto prison again for the holidays.

#6: SEATTLE SEAHAWKS (10-6, #11 overall) - The Seahawks are the most fucking boring piece of shit team there is right now. And Pacific Northwest fucks have this chip on their shoulder all the time like the rest of the country is prejudiced against their stupid shit. So it makes them get all indignant about obviously weak ass crap like the Seahawks, thinking they're an actual Super Bowl contender that should be given attention. The rest of the country is not as liberal and not as open-minded and doesn't want to recognize not only the inherent greatness of Mike Holmgren and Matt Hasselbeck, but also gay marriage and frappucinos and Microsoft Vista. Guess what though? Fuck you. Once they finish chopping down all the trees in the Pacific Northwest, there'll really be no reason to still have it around, except for maybe like a grungy goth kid rainy day homeland. And how the fuck did a guy like Sir Mix-a-Lot end up being from Seattle? I never figured that one out. Shaun Alexander has finally been exposed as a pussy this year, but let's not forget this is a team full of pussies. I mean, even Lofa Tatupu, who was a punishing little heatseeker midget Samoan warrior when he came out of college, has become hit-or-miss this season. It's basically the NBA mentality applied to a football team. And I'm sad my favorite team has to play it this weekend because I hate the fact I'm gonna be bored watching my lifelong favorites in only their third playoff appearance in like fifteen years because they're playing the stupid boring piece of shit fuckface uniformed walrus coached faggot Seahawks. (Although, I have to admit, my wife always calls them the Seahoohas, and that makes me laugh. My kids do it now too. They call the Seahawks "Seahoohas", and also when I'm all drunked up in football anger mode, yelling "HOLD 'EM!" at the Redskins defense, my kids will respond, because my wife taught them this, "CUDDLE 'EM! MAKE THEM FEEL LOVED!")

#7: PITTSBURGH STEELERS (10-6, #12 overall) - The Steelers have looked less than intimidating the past few weeks, and against a scrub wild card team like the Titans or Browns had they made it, that might've been okay. But the Jaguars have crazy cocksure swagger, and you don't want to be stumbling along against crazy cocksure swagger. Willie Parker is out, which means the Steelers ground game will not be as menacing, but that also means their fumble game won't be as devastating, so it's hard to say how much that'll effect them. The real problem is their defense looks like shit lately. Fuck man, I think ever since I was like seven, the Steelers have ALWAYS had some sort of punishing negroid monster super destroying oppositional backfields, but they seem to be a little impotent here recently. Even Polamalumalu the Polynesian Heartthrob has been gimptastic. But this is the playoffs, so if they can patchwork their mangled ass roster together for four quality hours this weekend, they can live their dreams! Well, not really their dreams because a lot of these dudes already won a Super Bowl, but maybe they can make Mike Tomlin smile one more time this season. He has such a charming smile. And twinkly eyes too.

#8: TAMPA BAY BUCCANEERS (9-7, #14 overall) - Usually the type of teams that rest their skill position superstars are teams that are like 13-3 and have actual, you know, superstars. The Bucs have done so to the tune of 9-7, and are led by journeyman Jeff Garcia and a running back nobody even heard of before like week six of this year. I guess Joey Galloway too, but that dude's hardly a star. 9-7, with an aging defense making one last run like a wild west flick, and an overhyped ass coach, and this is supposed to be a threat in the playoffs? Seriously, this Giants/Bucs game is lucky they even put it on TV at 1 in the afternoon. They could've just did this one overnight and told us about it in the morning. I actually can't see either of these teams being able to put up a good showing in either Dallas or Green Bay, so this is basically the season for both teams.

NFL WK 17: South division teams

The football regular season is almost done for us, and this last week looks less than exciting as 10 of 12 playoff spots are locked up, and the other two pretty basically explained without seventeen different what if scenarios. The stupid Patriots/Giants game got put on two regular people networks so that it can be America's TV night... they should just do a game a week like that anyways, on multiple networks, so that you could get different announcers and shit. I mean fuck it, that's what people want to watch. I mean, I'd understand Fox not wanting to show a Saturday night game because Cops is fucking awesome, and the re-enactments on America's Most Wanted is some great shit to watch as well while high (usually, I roll with the sound off and the stereo on, but with the volume set high on the TV and a second fancy-assed half-mute setting on the stereo remote, so when the re-enactments come on, volume up on the TV, and half-down on the stereo, which makes for good crime scene shenanigans with like Willie Nelson & Calexico in the background), but the rest of them channels ain't got shit going otherwise. Might as well just have football night in America on multiple channels, going head-to-head, and then all these high-priced overrated expert analysts would have actual primetime ratings against each other to see who was worth a shit. And can Cris Collinsworth get fucking throat cancer soon, please? If I did a Top 100 Annoying Ass NFL-related Dudes of Current Activity list, he'd be 8 of the top 10 spots, with Deion Sanders and Shannon Sharpe taking the other two. Anyways, this last week's swing through things goes back to the South divisions for the last time, with none of these teams truly epitomizing the spirit of the South. The Panthers did, but then Julius Peppers had to get off steroids and Vinny Soprano became their stupid elder statesmen at QB. But for my three loyal readers, don't fret, I'll keep pretending like I know what the fuck I'm talking about and that my opinion actually matters to someone during the playoffs. But nonetheless, here's your faggot-ass yankee shit South division teams dork discussionism, with futuristic prognosis to boot...

#1: INDIANAPOLIS COLTS (13-2, #2 overall) - It has sorta seemed like the Colts have been playing in preseason mode for most of the season, almost like the Lakers used to do when Shaq and Kobe were their two-headed monster winning rings at will. While the Patriots have been in Madden '08 mode, running up records and stats like that shit's on rookie mode, the Colts have just been kinda plugging along without real note, winning motherfucking games even though half the team in injured. Marvin Harrison is finally about to fire it up in real-time, and the Colts might just be ready to peak the same time as the Patriots have been struggling to maintain their high level of dominance. Even though I don't think Tony Dungy has anymore songs to sacrifice to the Molochian Gods of Football Success, I can still see them beating the Patriots to be the AFC's Super Bowl representative. In fact, I'd say that shit is almost a guarantee, as the Pats have become the fair weather juggernaut the Colts used to be accused of, and Belichick is mad conceited, which is how Bill Parcels got after he won two Super Bowls, and he never won another. Which leaves the silent mulatto scrunchface of Tony Dungy to unleash his mastermind-by-default gameplans in whatever commercial extravaganza homeland the Super Bowl is at this year. And THE FUTURE for the Colts is a Super Bowl appearance, and probably a loss. NFC4Life motherfuckers.

#2: JACKSONVILLE JAGUARS (11-4, #4 overall) - The Jaguars have quietly became the Reverse Chargers this year, in that they are the much-hyped #3 team of contention, but they do it with pure old school smashmouth mentality (you are required, when talking about football, to say "smashmouth" when talking about real ugly-assed teams coached by former linebackers; it's like Football Dipshittery 101 rule #27). They got no Pro Bowlers, which of course will be used for some nonsense "Nobody on Earth respects us like we deserve to be respected" motivational fodder, yet eventually half the starters in the NFL make the Pro Bowl once everybody starts pulling out. Jack Del Rio is a great goofy-assed dude to lead a football team, and it'd be perfect if the Jaguars moved to L.A. and changed their name to something ominous with black jerseys to sell in a second Raiders gangbanger renaissance. Man, I remember my boy McCarthy got the full length stuffed down Raiders jacket that went like down past your knees and shit, and that was the pimpest shit ever. Well, it was the first two weeks or so, and then it was just the same jacket that used to be the new hotness that he always wore. That's the thing with fresh ass ghetto fashions... you either have to move between localities to always seem fresh, or you have to hustle a ton of money to keep the freshest shit available. We used to know these two brothers (literal brothers, as well as semi-racist stereotypical "brothers") that dealt most of the crack in my hometown, and Timmy - the older one - he lived in the hotel and would wear shit like two or three times and then never again. Like he never washed clothes, because once the shit was dirty enough to wash, he'd never wear it again anyways. I remember we went by there one night to take him to get some whiteboy weed from some other dudes we knew, and there was a fucking sheepskin jacket in the trash. I asked him what was wrong with it and he said, "Nothing, I just done had it for the last month." He told me I could have it, but I was a goofy assed ponytail whiteboy, and there's no way wearing a fucking sheepskin jacket would've looked anything but ridiculously stupid on me. Plus, all my racist family members would've said shit like "you been hanging out with them niggers too much" like they did when I used to wear a pair of bright yellow parachute pants in 7th grade. Man, I wonder what those racist family members think of the day-glo anime print hoodies motherfuckers wear nowadays? I bet that's like space age hyperspeed negro ridiculousness to them. But THE FUTURE of the Jaguars is playoffs, first round road win, then ridiculous frustration in Indianapolis again.

#3: TAMPA BAY BUCCANEERS (9-6, #10 overall) - Jon Gruden is again a genius, because his second string nobodies turned out to be better-than-expected once the higher profile starters got injured, and Jeff Garcia continued to show he's probably the best quarterback nobody cares to keep around. He and Brad Johnson should start a quarterback school together, and get their Tom Emansky hustle going. Seems to me Jon Gruden is destined to be the NFC's Brian Billick for the next ten years - a guy with overrated mental acumen who lives off a Super Bowl ring far past his usefulness to the franchise he won it with. THE FUTURE for the Buccaneers is co-starring in a wild card weekend game against the Giants in one of those games that's entertaining because it's the first week of the playoffs, but like two weeks later when the conference championships are being hyped, nobody remembers nor gives a fuck about it at all.

#4: TENNESSEE TITANS (9-6, #11 overall) - Win on Sunday night against the Colts' B-teamers and the Titans get to go to the playoffs. Not only do I think this is a ridiculous notion, as the Titans are bound to lose, but let's not forget Vince Young is the coverboy of Madden '08 and has yet to feel the curse. He's probably gonna get his inferior crucible ligament all sorts of fucked up. Right now, Young is the Tennessee media darling, but let's not forget that dude scored like the lowest score ever for a QB on the jock nerd test they give potential NFLees in pre-draft poking and prodding. If Michael Vick ended up being stupid enough to handle gambling money himself in a multi-state dogfighting ring, I can only imagine Vince Young will end up being involved in either child slavery ring or he'll be addicted to hydrocodone by the time he's 27. It is also interesting to me how Albert Haynesworth, who used to be to football analysts the scummy dude who stomped at that fat Cowboys dude's bare forehead with his cleats, is now the dominant honorable awesome interior lineman of unbeatitude on defense. It sucks seeing that dude in interview clips, because I just expect a guy named Albert Haynesworth to talk like Lennox Lewis, but he doesn't at all. THE FUTURE for the Titans is the reality that a predominantly running quarterback will never win shit. I love how this is somehow considered racist old line thinking by some people, as if you are underestimating the intelligence of black people by suggesting having a third running back under center is not a recipe for pro football success. My man Mavpa Van Cleef, who used to fuck around online but has disappeared, has had this two-quarterback offense bullshit he designed that he actually convinced his semi-pro football team to run some last year, and I've been thinking about it lately, as it concerns Michael Vick coming back in a few years. I think the two-quarterback thing could work if you had like a primary QB and secondary QB, so that a younger, less experienced guy like Young could take the secondary spot, maybe taking a quarter of the snaps during a game, but always on hand to run, and a more experienced guy like Vick could be the primary guy who takes more snaps and runs less, as ideally he would have figured out how to read defenses better by that stage of his career. And the younger guy gets all that time right back there to read the defense as well even when he's not taking the physical snap. With college football pumping up dudes like Dennis Dixon and Tim Tebow, this could be an easy reality, but just the same, the NFL has bullshit rules protecting the QB too much, which inevitably hurts the possibility of a two-quarterback system, because it creates the crazy grey area in what a QB is supposed to do, whereas the whole in-the-grasp, roughing-the-passer, NFL rulebook bullshit is geared towards thinking of the QB as a pocket presence to not be damaged so that the game can be intelligently executed on the field. To be honest, I'd prefer a more intuitive running QB offense, so long as it didn't just revert to bullshit wishbone offenses that didn't do shit but run the ball like it was still the days of Red Grange and Jim Thorpe.

#5: HOUSTON TEXANS (7-8, #18 overall) - Have the Texans turned a corner this year, or are they just doomed to eternal mediocrity? It is hard to say. Seems like they can't all be healthy all the time, as just as Andre Johnson is good to go, Matt Schaub is all fucked up. Mario Winans seems like a better #1 choice this year than he did last, but shit, with as much as number one picks get paid today, I don't think you can be economically successful with anyone unless they like Jim Brown everybody from their position for seven straight years. It sucks even more for the Texans because regardless of who they draft or how much of a cult of personality they have, they ain't gonna move shit in merchandise with those ugly assed uniforms. Even their alternate red jerseys are like something an NFL Europe team exec wiped his ass with during meetings with the ad agency coming up with logos and colors packages. THE FUTURE for the Texans is they will be the least prominent team in their own division forever, and the only people in their home state that will care for them over the Cowboys are ultra-disagreeable types who probably are from out-of-state anyways, thus not helping grow a solid fanbase. It's weird because whereas a team like Jacksonville or Seattle is mired in a low-level pro sports town that just won't possibly ever care enough to make a sizeable rabid fanbase, the Texans are in a great market but have the stupidest fucking team name and the stupidest fucking colors the NFL has ever doled out.

#6: NEW ORLEANS SAINTS (7-8, #20 overall) - The post-Katrina dream looks to be dead after last week's loss to the Eagles. Reggie Bush has been exposed as essentially a third down back, and Sean Payton exposed as just as much lucky as brilliant with his trick play-happy ass. Certainly starting 0-4, and having lost Deuce McAllister for most of the season, they showed well in the long run, but still coming into 2007, the one-two punch of a Saints Super Bowl run and multi-platinum success of Tha Carter 3 was going to resurrect New Orleans from its murky ashes. Instead, the former flamed out as even a wild card contender, and the latter ended up being a mixtape that pop cultural jackasses had a secret meeting somewhere I didn't know about to pretend like it was the best shit since Elvis Presley put on leather pants. Thus, outside of the drunk slut street level tit show in February, New Orleans is doomed. THE FUTURE of the Saints, if my franchise mode game I'm currently embroiled in on my late model Madden '07 set-up, is to trade away Eli Manning, who would always either throw an interception or just stand around and wait to get sacked 17 times a game, for the Browns #1 draft pick, where they get a promising young scrambling Big Ten quarterback with a big arm, who automatically leads them to four Super Bowls in a row, and counting. Also, Mike Singletary will become their coach, and he will create a new hyper-speed turnover-happy defense that basically starts only ends, linebackers, and cornerbacks, plus one hard hitting headhunter strong safety. Once I finish designing my own half-assed two-quarterback playbook, to be coached by Brett Favre once he moves into coordinator mode, to complement Singletary's imaginary defense, I figure the Saints will win every Super Bowl ever until real life's computer runs out of memory for more success.

#7: CAROLINA PANTHERS (6-9, #24 overall) - The Panthers have mostly been my number two favorite team ever since they started because, honestly, growing up in southside Virginia - which is basically the unwiped ass of Virginia - I identified far more with North Carolina than D.C. I'd go to the drag races in Roxboro with my uncle Ricky to run his Vega, and we'd go camping at Buggs Island along the Virginia/Carolina border. Meanwhile, D.C. was either sketchy and drug-ridden, or evil and authoritarian. And as I grew older, northern Virginia grew more cluttered and became the epitome of suburban sludgish stalling sprawl that stifles a country boy's soul like my own. Shit, I'd rather live amongst crackheads in the city than try to weasel my way through that eternal cul-de-sac purgatory. So if they had existed back in the day, I probably would've been down with them instead of the Skins. (You know, back in the early days of the NFL, the Redskins radio network covered most of the south as well as West Virginia, as there were no other teams until you got to Miami, which is why the Redskins have so many fans amongst old asses in that part of the country.) But even as a casual fan of Carolina, I can see that beyond the obvious injuries, they've been stuck in the same mode the past few seasons, with no real building of the next shit, which sucks, because Steve Smith is about as loveable an NFL player as you're gonna find. I don't know what the fuck happened to Julius Peppers, and their most recent Kevin Greene-style retarded whiteboy linebacker has been lost too concussions most of the time the past couple seasons, and fucking Jake Delhomme has profited long enough off that one good run he had to the Super Bowl a few years back. But fucking Vinny Testaverde? Come on man, I'm not gonna be the same dumb shit NFL dork dude who's like, "That spunky guy just won't quit, and his field generalmanship will only blah blah blah..." Fuck John Fox. Give him another year to fuck things up, and then the Panthers ought to be throwing money and private jets Bill Cowher's way, since he wants to stay settled in Carolina anyways, but you know them football coaching fuckers who retire of their own accord never actually retired and have to be run off by stun gun-wielding security guards after being fired by an irate owner to actually leave football behind. THE FUTURE of the Panthers is to waste a couple more years of Steve Smith's career.

#8: ATLANTA FALCONS (3-12, #27 overall) - I would feel bad for Arthur Blank for this past year, with Michael Vick lying to him then getting sent to federal prison, and with Bobby Petrino lying to him then quitting to go to fucking Arkansas, and with Bill Parcels lying to him and then basically taking the exact same gig with the Dolphins, except for the fact my stupid Home Depot credit card just kicked in ultra-interest right before Christmas on the riding mower I bought last year, so my fake non-money wasn't straight enough to get my kids more useless shit they didn't really need but coveted because they had seen it in glossy catalogs in celebration of the birth of a jew magician. So fuck Arthur Blank. THE FUTURE for the Falcons is fucking terrible. I mean, I don't know if any one team has become so fucked up in one year's time in any major sport ever. If the NFL had soccerfag style relegation, the Falcons would be a leading candidate to get pre-eminently dropped to the second-tier.

HO HO MOTHERFUCKIN' HO

Today, I am a tireless attention whore.

On the way home, I heard this new Ludacris song from the Fred Claus soundtrack. I dig it, and so after about 20 minutes of internet I obtained it for nefarious slowed down purposes. This is the first take, warts and all.

PLAY ME

And just so it doesn't look like I caught the holiday bug in the interest of self-promotion, here's a happy super merry Christmas thing for you and yours.

NFL WK 16: North division teams

So I’ve had Madden ‘07 for a few months when it got dropped to $10 once the newer shinier more important for you to consume right now Madden ‘08 dropped for $40, but never really got into it, as nothing compares to Madden ‘03 for the modern era (meaning on computers) for me football game dorking. However, I came to the conclusion after reading John and Mike talk up wrestling game dorking that I was stifled not by the new game but by my allegiance to the Redskins. In Madden ‘03, you had Steve Spurrier before everyone realized he sucked, and I could just run hurry-up offense and score 70 points on everybody. Today’s Redskins are punishers, but shitty at it, so the game is boring. Madden games, if you run a running offense, take far too long to play. I’d rather just run a high-speed offense and get the best secondary ever and just throw longballs all day long and complement that with interception returns galore. Straight up, that’s my recipe for success. So I decided to bust out the stupid Madden ‘07 and give it another franchise mode go, but I went with the Saints and a fantasy draft, creating a thuggish ruggish team full of young knuckleheads. Eli Manning, Steve Smith, Ben Watson, Steven Jackson, offensive line of fu manchu white dudes and negroes with names like D’Brickashaw and Pork Chop. It’s been great - I won a Super Bowl the first year, but am struggling with mediocrity the second year due to faggot Madden artificial intelligence injuring all my dudes like an asshole. But the bigger issue is how it has confused me with my for-real NFL watching. You see, mostly I draft regular players (meaning non-skill positions) that look awesome but I’m not too aware of, even though you try to get guys that are young that Madden game brain is gonna eventually pretend are awesome even if they suck in real life (like Eli Manning), but now I’m starting to see these players in games and it’s bothering me. Mostly because I don’t want to give a fuck about Omar Gaithers or Rocky Boiman. Madden football franchise mode super-dorkery, for me, is much more fun once you’re like 10 years down the road and it’s all imaginery fuckers and like maybe Devin Hester and Vernon Davis. I also feel conflicted about giving so much psychic energy to the Saints, who are ahead of the Redskins in the NFC wild card hunt. Me rooting for them, even in a fake game, but being a Redskin fan, could accidentally trigger Saints success, much like how the Monday night game I never gave up on the Redskins even though I logically should have, they scored two late Santana Moss touchdowns to beat the Cowboys. We all possess amazing powers, especially when you suspend science and bullshit that needs proof to be validated. Anyways, this is just a forewarning that I’m deeply immersed mentally in fake world where I go to bed at night imagining highlight reels of my interception squad or A.J. Hawk crippling Rex Grossman (who plays for the Falcons - hahaha, they’re having a shitty couple of weeks in even fake Raven plays Madden football world), so if I accidentally say some shit that doesn’t make sense, it’s partially because I’ve been rotting my mind with electronic stimuli, and partially because you’re a stupid fucker, most likely, just speaking on law of averages and shit, so don’t take it all personal...

#1: GREEN BAY PACKERS (12-2, #5 overall) - Reason #3000 I've realized I'm getting old is I don't hate Brett Favre. It is standard fare for young hipster fags to be contrarian by nature and hate popular stuff and like irrelevant things to show how we understand the misunderstood and are ahead of the curve and secret geniuses, not hipster fags. However, I'm about to turn 35, and whereas I easily hated every great quarterback during my life like Joe Montana (softcore Joe Namath with frilly mullet) or Dan Marino (white man jheri curl throw for 3 million yards to Mark Duper and Mark Clayton but never amount to shit worth nothing outside of Christmas time Isotoner glove commercials) or Phil Simms (when a pussy puts his penis inside another pussy and makes a kid what does it end up being? Chris Simms, poor kid) or John Elway (horsefaced conman) whoever. But for some reason, I just can't hate on Brett Favre. I'd like to think I'm not just another chump ass brainwashed by the "linebacker mentality" "plays the game like a kid" surly '70s/'80s coaching kook talking point, but maybe I am. Favre was drafted into the pros by the Falcons around the same time I graduated high school, and now that there's only like 19 NFL players older than me, him being one of them, maybe rooting for a fucker like Favre allows me to hold onto my fleeing youth. I've got a couple white hairs sticking straight out my scraggleweed beard, and my days where being drunk and going "Haha, watch me roll down this flight of stairs and not hurt myself at all, ain't it funny as shit" have compounded into some achy ass bone connections, even a couple of outright misconnections that cause me to walk like a cross between Fred Sanford and Weird Harold from the Fat Albert Gang. But I am hoping for Favre this year, hoping these young offensive dudes who came from nowhere can help him and his homeboy Donnie Driver ride with a competently rising defense into the Super Bowl. Of course, being an NFL conspiracist at heart, it makes perfect sense, with the obvious themes of REMEMBER THE ICE BOWL with Cowboys vs. Packers, and New Hotness Super QB Tom Brady vs. Crafty Veteran Last Generation's Last Star Standing QB Favre in the Super Bowl. I guess you could plug Peyton Manning into that last one as well, but somehow I'm able to maintain my hipster fag contrarian at-all-costs attitude towards that fuckface. It is fun to do imitations of him talking like a cartoon hillbilly though. THE FUTURE for the Packers involves one last hurrah for old Favre, then they spend twenty years trying to get back to that.

#2: MINNESOTA VIKINGS (8-6, #10 overall) - Charles Bronson was always playing an outsider because of his very defined non-accentual accent. If it was a western, he was the lone settled Indian, or if it was the South, he was from the long guy from out west, or if it was the modern west, he was the lone person in town who trusted spics. He'd say calm things with his weird ass accent, then bash motherfuckers with bottles or trucks and duck down in the blind spot to pop out and shoot you. And that made his wide face and long flat mustache a noble ass-kicking face, one that could rile you up to think some serious shit was gonna go down, even if all he was doing was a public service announcement about littering. The Vikings are on a roll lately, and things seem to be going their way, but I just have no faith in it continuing into the playoffs, because Minnesota is a natural long-time second fiddle in the NFL, and Brad Childress's face is the opposite of Charles Bronson. A face like that could never fire up a team to kick ass. Shit, he looks like someone on a sexual offender registry website. And because Childress looks like a sexual offender, whenever I hear the name Chester Taylor, it makes me think of the Chester the Molester cartoons in old Hustlers. That, in turn, makes me think of old Hustlers, which causes me to want to masturbate 95% of the time. The other 5% it makes me think of a picture they had of two Orientals laying in a bed, and there's talk bubbles above their head and the girl's says "I wanna 69" and the guy's says "Why you wanna broccoli with chicken right now?" THE FUTURE of the Vikings is a soul-crushing loss to the Redskins that ruins their playoff hopes, and a like a billion yards rushing next year for Adrian Peterson once he learns wily veteran ways of the NFL to aid his speedy talent behind that punishing offensive line they've got right now in Minnesota. I guess they should probably try to find a better quarterback than Tavaris Jackson, aka Quincy Carter the 2nd.

#3: PITTSBURGH STEELERS (9-5, #13 overall) - The black and yellow have not been playing as superbly as of late, perhaps because Big Ben has been ailing, and also perhaps because they've been playing home games in a fucking Vietnamese rice farm (perhaps in honor of half of Hines Ward's heritage). But overall, I think Mike Tomlin's done well to hold things traditional. I mean fuck, Bill Cowher coached for like 20 years and only won one Super Bowl, but people act like he's coaching Jesus waiting to save another franchise from eternal failure whenever the money's right. But Cowher basically just did the same shit Chuck Knoll did, and he was the one who coached them to four Super Bowls in the '70s, which I guess is why Cowher seems so great because it was the same shit that won five Lombardi trophies. Tomlin carries that same stoic emotionless face, just instead of a jutting jaw of anger, he has the burning white eyeballs of black fury. THE FUTURE for the Steelers is hard to say, because when they go 13-3, they fuck up in the playoffs. But if they go like 9-7, they win the Super Bowl. I would expect them to be able to upset either the Colts or Patriots if they get it together and Herr Roethlisberger isn't all gimped out. But they could also just easily lose to either the Jaguars or Browns in the wild card round. But I will guarantee that Troy Polamalu will continue to be awesome the whole way either way. My man Black Conner of the stoner rock ensemble RPG told me some wacky pro wrestler sounding bullshit about what a kook Polamalu is, but I can't remember all the specific details, just that it made him awesome. Knowing or remembering things is for faggots anyways; real dudes just do shit. And Troy Polamalu is a real dude, but most of those Coconut Island players are.

#4: CLEVELAND BROWNS (9-5, #14 overall) - The Browns are America's favorite underdogs right now, slushing through the snow and using their mad science field goal sensei to win eggball games. Now this fool team, led by a quarterback nobody ever heard of before, might even win their divisional title and get a home playoff game, with the snow blowing in off Lake Erie, and drunk ass hog jowled working class stiff dicks whooping it up... that's motherfucking football. Fuck a dome and fast teams and spread offenses. Kellen Winslow the Soldier has made it almost through his first whole season, and Jamal Lewis is playing again like he's about to get to sentenced to jail for letting friends broker coke deals on his cell phone. Remember when Charlie Weiss was the Belichick offspring genius and Romeo Crennel was the fat loser fuck who was overrated? Also, remember Charlie Frye? I don't even remember where they traded that guy (was it an NFL Europa team?), but he was their opening day quarterback. I bet his professional football ego needs assuaging like a motherfucker right about now. THE FUTURE of the Browns is to be an enjoyable collection of cast-offs and never-wases, that capture the hearts of all us freedom-loving, beer-drinking, football fan fuckheads until they lose and we're just left with the last four asshole super teams we're inevitably gonna be left with.

#5: DETROIT LIONS (6-8, #17 overall) - I think Matt Millen makes most of his general managerial decisions based on run-throughs on Madden, which is why he always drafts wide receivers. He probably won the Super Bowl three years in a row with Jon Kitna and Mike Martz three years in a row, so thought that shit would translate to real life. Seriously, how the fuck does Matt Millen still have a job? I mean, this year they start strong but then crumble to another nothing of a year, so I guess he can blame the coach and get him fired to actually make Mike Martz the bonafide head coach. But how many coaches can Millen throw under the bus before the Ford family finally gets it together? Also, does the Chevrolet family own any sports teams? And how come I can't get a vinyl sticker for the back window of my truck of Sorta Calvin pissing on a Cowboys star? THE FUTURE of the Lions is eventually fielding an offense of five wide receivers every play, in a super Martz genius offense run by Tim Tebow at quarterback. They will score 40 points a game, but give up 43 points a game, never win a playoff game, but inflate fantasy football stats everywhere.

#6: CHICAGO BEARS (5-9, #20 overall) - If I had a dollar for every white dude between the ages of 25 and 35 who is a lifelong Bears fan because when they were a kid at an impressionable age and rap music was first making the young dicks of white ears all hard with jungle sexuality, they were still kids who loved the football because it is what boys do that aren't Dominicans or rural dipshits (both of those play baseball), they were mesmerized by "The Super Bowl Shuffle" and it made them be Bears fans. Ever since, the Bears have sucked, except they might win like 14 games in the regular season and then suck, but it still ends up in sucking. But if I had a dollar for every dude like that I know, I'd have enough money to buy one of those authentic stitched number jerseys, and I'd get an authentic ass Walter Payton jersey, like in whatever color is most awesome to those lifelong Bears fans who were little white kids who thought "The Super Bowl Shuffle" was the greatest shit ever, which I guess is the regular black Bears jersey, which I don't think is actual black but some weird ultra-dark blue that's almost black, or maybe too black like how really dark-skinned Africans look almost blue-faced, and I'd use this really nice expensive authentic Walter Payton jersey to... I don't know... I was gonna say wipe myself after masturbating, but that's not practical because I usually use bath towels for that, ones that have been in the hamper so they're already damp so it's like having a baby wipe for my masturbation, but not really a baby wipe because wiping off from jacking it with a baby wipe is too close to child sexual abuse for my tastes. I don't want to use something advertising a baby's fresh ass to wipe the saliva and cum off my dick. So I'd probably use the Walter Payton jersey... well, nothing funny I can think of makes sense, because most likely I'd just sell it on ebay. THE FUTURE for the Bears involves shitty quarterbacks, lots of shitty quarterbacks.

#7: CINCINNATI BENGALS (5-9, #24 overall) - You know, this is stupid that I make myself do this bullshit. Like, "Oh fuck, the Steelers already played and the next game is tomorrow night, I better hurry up and meet my completely fantasy deadline so that four fucking anonymous internet jackasses who don't even like football will read my stupid bullshit and maybe post a comment like 'Haha Raven Mack, you so funny, also here's my witty comment blah blah blah.'" And that's what I think. And see, I was even gonna relate that to Bobby Petrino and be like "Fuck dumb shit, quit when you hate it," but in the process of doing that, I would've actually done what I was acting like I wasn't doing. Which is exactly what I ended up doing here, but made myself feel better about being a fucking cocksucking blogospheric faggot by condescending towards you, as if we're all stuck in a giant fagland and you are lesser than me because you are reading what I wrote, as if the action of creating the fagland is better and less gay than just hanging out in fagland. So yeah. Who gives a fuck about THE FUTURE of the Bengals?

#8: BALTIMORE RAVENS (4-10, #25 overall) - It looks like the Brian Billick era is finally coming to an end. Ray Lewis is an old man doing his goofy pre-game dance still, looking like the drunk uncle at the family reunion busting an old school move when the DJ put on an old Ill & Al Skratch record. In fact, it's hard to think of even one hopeful aspect of their team. I mean, they have some punishers on defense still, but fuck, shouldn't they have actually had a halfway decent offense somewhere along the way by now? It also bothers me that a team that has the same nickname as my birth-given middle name would have such hideous uniforms. Couldn't they have rocked some lavendar ass alternate jerseys or something? THE FUTURE of the Ravens is rebuilding, rebuilding, rebuilding, which means sucking sucking sucking.

UNDERAPPRECIATED GENIUS FILEZ

Idunno how frequent this will be, but today I will bring you two reasons why hip-hop will never die. Not ever. Not while the works of "Prime Time" Deion Sanders still exist, it won't.

Most of you only know him as the showboating jerk who played football for the Cowboys. What you probably forgot is his first album (Prime Time, natch) and its only single. Sanders's sheer arrogance exemplifies the rap hustle, the hood rich mentality that we applaud in our duffle bag boys now. Everything Diddy did in 1997, he learned it from watching Prime Time. It's possible Tony Yayo learned the dumb-out from this video. He has an En Vogue knockoff singing back-up, dancing and blowing bubbles over his bubble bath in matching outfits. "My libary card gon change into credit cards..." It's okay to hate, you know you want to. (Must be the money.) Make it rain Deion!




Up next, a rare classic. The Street Fighter soundtrack appears to be a convergence of awesome, however I have yet to hear it myself. If any of you readers of this pimptacular blog know where I can get my hands on it on the DL, hook a halfie up. Anyway, I digress - this soundtrack gave us a rare classic collaboration between Prime Time and Bay Area legend, HAMMER. The list of excellent things in this video includes (but is not limited to) the following:

*Jean-Claude Van Damme kicking it real big with the boys in a strip club populated by sumo wrestlers, UN soldiers, snake charmers and random biker white guys
*A jobber r&b group who don't even get namechecked in-song
*Deion's gold-plated throne, and what may be the En Vogue knockoffs from the first video
*The confrontation between Hammer/Deion/Van Damme and the movie's thugs, most importantly Miguel A Nuñez.
*Jean-Claude Van Damme: Dancing like a motherfucker





I'm filling this funk like 4 flat tires.

NFL WK 15: East division teams

(Yeah, I got this shit up a little late this week, but that's because Mike's a dick and whenever he finally puts up the EWA 25, he gets all pissy if someone posts something else and bumps it from the top of the page. Also, I never finished writing this shit till just now. But I pretended like it was still yesterday when I finished it, doing some shut eye meditations, to find my motivation, and truly get into the character that is Raven from yesterday before he knew about football shit from today.)
Down to the final three weeks, and mostly we know what we need to know about all teams, so it's just time to gorge ourselves on material gluttony while the regular season wraps up, and get down to the quality one-and-done goodness of the playoffs come January. I have hit a second wind and am stoked for the football again. It's helped that the local shitty classic rock station has run one of this pick-every-game-and-win-shit contests on their website, and I'm currently in first for the season to win some fucked up flat screen home entertainment theater set-up bullshit, and even if it's generic ass cheap shit where the LCD stands for lead cancer disease, it's gonna be an upgrade from my old ass 32-inch that is not digitally equipped (I have one of those romulators or whatever hooked up to my DVD machine to make that shit work) and I actually go outside the house in my old man sandals to twist the metal pole running up the side of the house to aim the antenna-ish contraption on top towards whatever direction makes it snow less and the sound come out clear enough to understand. Actually, I'm a second place, but first place is one of their DJs and I'm assuming that fucker can't actually win the prize, so I'd win by default being in second. Either way, I'll pass that fucker, although I think I karmically jeopardize it by mentioning it on the internet. Oh well, I've never been a smart man, and have a hard time keeping all my superstitions straight, which is why I've always been cursed in life. Nonetheless, here's our last swing through the East division teams for the year, with futuristic prognostication included, because it's obvious I know what I'm talking about since I'm some faggot on the internet...

#1: NEW ENGLAND PATRIOTS (13-0, #1 overall) - A lot is being made of this Jets/Patriots blood feud showdown where the Pats are expected to score 137 points to rub the Mangenius's face in his own cowardly complaints to the NFL about how the Patriots cheated like every motherfucker has always cheated in the NFL, making all the mark ass fans be all like, "Ooh, they cheated, Spygate, I'm a huge fucking twat sitting here watching 17 hours of football-related programming every Sunday and I'll just regurgitate everything they fucking tell me, stupid Belichick." A lot of football talking head chatter a month or so back revolved around whether the Patriots were running the score up on people, and the consensus talking head meme opinion seemed to be, "Hey man, this is the NFL, so if you don't want them to run the score up, stop them, play some defense and don't get completely fucked up." Now I love football as much as anybody else, but ever since the year the Ravens won the Super Bowl, it was pretty obvious to me that the NFL was a more updated and less reactionary sports entertainment form along the lines of wrestling, but more geared towards engineering public consciousness as opposed to mirroring it with demon voodoo dudes or evil rich guys. And the Patriots rise to dominance in a post-9/11 world has seemed to not be any accident to me, what with Tom Brady being a previously unheralded 6th round draft pick from Michigan (which has a large CIA program on-campus, according to this old John Birch Society fucker who used to run a bookstore near me), and Bill Belichick being a Navy man from his youth when his dad coached there. Brady sitting beside the first lady during Bush's State of the Unions that time or two is no coincidence either. These motherfuckers are two key ingredients in a football-style Manchurian Candidate MK:Ultra master-plan meant to get us Americans - the only ones to watch the footballs we watch - to feel better than the rest of the World, when they watch our Super Bowl in massive numbers to see the commercials and shit. But I've probably ranted about all that before. How does this relate to the Patriots running up the score, you may ask? Well, it is the nuclear option. We have refrained as a country from dropping tactical nuclear weapons ever since Hiroshima and Nagasaki got knocked the fuck out in the '40s. But don't think them motherfuckers doing the cash grab right now before American prominence drops aren't toying with the idea of busting that bold move out their bag of tricks. And it is pretty obvious the Patriots have run the score up on people, and that - up to this point in NFL history - has always been a shitty thing to do. Yet this year, suddenly, the talking head consensus is "fuck it, they're good enough to do that shit." It is conditioning to instill in us, as fat useless Americans who watch the aforementioned 17 hours of football-related programming on Sundays, to not be shocked or awed when they drop a nuke on Iran or Pakistan or wherever. The thing that fucked this up for the Patriots is Iran not having nuclear weapons anymore, according to the newspaper article I didn't bother to really read beyond the headline the other day. (It should be noted first Patriots Lombardi trophy was the year war in Afghanistan started, second was the year the war in Iraq started, and the third was probably thrown in to keep us gung ho.) Without any need to drop a nuclear weapon or twenty on Iran since American troops (aka broke ass fuckers born into locales with no hope signing up to try and catch a carrot in they mouth) spread thin, the need for the Patriots to beat people by 40 points every week is not there. THE FUTURE for the Patriots is very simple, and I'll throw out my "this shit is fixed" attitude for a minute. They are going to lose one game this year, guaranteed. Longshot chance the Jets could do it, just to throw us all a curve, or maybe the Giants win that last week in a second-string showdown where neither team really gives half a fuck since their spot in the playoffs is secure. But if the Patriots run the regular season table, I would fully expect them to either lose in the AFC Championship to the Colts or in the Super Bowl after feeling they had it locked up from superior AFC, getting shocked by the Packers so Favre can retire in style and be given a token Arena League team as well to further the NFL's ultimate desires to make that a NFL minor league spring organization for player development.

#2: DALLAS COWBOYS (12-1, #3 overall) - You would think as a Redskins fan, I’d be hating on this year’s incarnation of the Cowboys, but oddly enough I’m not. I guess it’s because Tony Homo so royally fucked up last year’s playoff appearance that I’m not convinced he won’t be convinced he’s doomed to do it again. Also, with T.O., it’s like the team could blow up in full terminal franchise cancer within weeks, although I think they’ve done good enough this year, it’ll be next year. This is kinda like the year the Eagles made it to the Super Bowl and lost, and T.O. was on the sidelines waving his towel around with his broken ankle and all was good, until the next year when shit went buckwild. THE FUTURE for the Cowboys is just that, probably next year, when shit goes buckwild. I mean, you’ve got T.O., who has never been happy ever since he denies himself the satisfaction of his true inner-sexuality; and then you’ve got Romo who is all twinkly-eyed and hot bitch-associated just like Jeff Garcia was; all led by an interim coach at best in Wade Phillips. It is a recipe for eventual hilarity, and I am anxious to make fun of it.

#3: NEW YORK GIANTS (9-4, #6 overall) - Internet porn has ruined everything to where we are all inundated with several hundred thousand naked bitches images to the point we are desensitized like you used to have really dedicate yourself to being, and even then it would take a long lifetime's of drunken Bukowski-isms to really attain such a point in life. Fucking 14-year-olds are like that now though. This has created in me a strange fetish lately where I get really excited - not just like, "Ooh, she's hot," but straight up hard dick excited - when I see a cute girl with nice normal-sized non-enhanced breasts, all perky and shit in a regular shirt, with like some normal jeans on, maybe hanging low enough to show a nice contour of ass flesh but nothing crazy low or no scrawny hungry ass starving white bitch sexy physique like the glossy magazines try to push on us. And I've been looking for websites than have like sexy women in clothes, or chicks in one piece bathing suits or shit like that, but to no luck. It's all naked sluts sucking 19 dicks in a row. The Giants red alternate red jerseys are kinda nice, except I've never seen any red in their uniforms my whole life, except I think that red stripe on the helmet, but I'm not sure that's always been there or not. They act like the red jerseys aren't weird for the Giants though, like it's a Sunday night specialty that's always been that way. New York City, as awesome as it is to most of you fuckers probably, represents to me part of my two-fold godless fuckthisitude (along with Berlin, Germany) in that people are all like, "Everything is going on there," but I just to think to myself whatever fucked warped shit you could think of, like gay sexual kiddie scat clubs for example, probably exist in both NYC and Berlin, and there's probably down-low alleys with like four clubs for gay sex kiddie scat fetish exploration within like two blocks somewhere in those cities. I'm not down with that shit, regardless of how much awesome shit it has to go with it. This is also why the internet creeps me out at times, because I have children and I feel like the internet is a cybertronic porthole into NYC and Berlin's godless fuckthisitude, right in the comfort of my kitchen, so one second my kid is looking up Christmas wish list stuff at americangirl.com, and the next thing you know, some 300 lb. S&M freak named Heinrich is IMing my kids pictures of oblong penises. THE FUTURE for the Giants is oblong penises in back alleys in some dark corner of Brooklyn, all the young players turned onto fetishized non-female sex by Michael Strahan.

#4: BUFFALO BILLS (7-6, #13 overall) - Yesterday as I was riding home, some dude was in front of me at one of those left turn yields on green stoplights, and I was sitting there looking at his truck window and he had a bumper sticker, along with a couple of Marine ones, that said "HAVE YOU EVER HAD A LOADED WEAPON POINTED IN YOUR FACE? KEEP HONKING". Of course, this made me honk my horn impatiently on purpose, even though I wasn't impatient (and it also made me glad I never hooked up my Dukes of Hazzard horn, because you can never take that horn for anything other than a sign of "What's going on y'all?"). Dude driving looked to be one of those young pseudo-Italian American mutt Toby Keith with shorthair type redneck yankees you see all around these parts. I honked a couple more times, and he responded by waving an emphatic middle finger out his window (it was a nice ass day yesterday), and since my window was down to, I just laughed loudly and kept honking. Dude looked back and then screeched his tires into a left turn on red, peeling the fuck out and almost getting hit by a car running the red light in the opposite direction. It was hilarious. But if you're gonna be running around with a bumper sticker like that, you mights care old ladies and shit, or make your goomba closet fag friends laugh when they're following you to the sports bar to watch a bowl game over some overpriced chicken wings, but I'm gonna call you on that shit. And guess what? You ain't gonna do shit. And if you did, whatever, I don't give a fuck. I wish I'd die a lot of days because I get bored with this bullshit, but I don't really want to die, so I do ridiculous reckless things, which never kill me but give me crazy lulz to share with others at later times. The Buffalo Bills, right now, are this hearty team performing well beyond their expectations of late. But like that pussy marine dude in front of me yesterday, once they are actually called on this by a true NFL team, they will crumble. That may happen this weekend against the Browns, or they may continue to work their trickery, but if they were to play a real team at some point were they to make the playoffs, they'd be peeling out of the stadium looking like faggot chumps just like Mr. Semper Fi did. THE FUTURE for the Bills is not so good. I mean, their two-headed quarterback is two guys who aren't really that great, and one of them looks like a stoner. Really the only notable player of any awesomeness they have is Marshawn Lynch, and I somehow don't foresee a gold-toothed hyphy-dreaded slang-slurring bad ass going over too well in the long-term in a place that usually has two feet of snow and only 37 black guys in the whole city who aren't current or former members of the football team. I see Marshawn Lynch being a free agent superstar in a couple years, or dumped off at the end of his contract like Willis McGahee was this past year.

#5: PHILADELPHIA EAGLES (5-8, #14 overall) - One of my favorite kids is this 10-year-old son of this lady I've been working a barter deal with. She teaches my wife plant voodoo and I do fancy-assed interior design seven colors in one room painting of her house in exchange. Her son is a funny ass kid though, and he's a big Eagles fan, so I always pick at his little wise ass about it. He talked his mom into getting me to paint his bedroom the Eagles colors, green with a silver strip around the top. I keep telling her we have to do it before the end of the season, because he used to be a 76ers fan too, but when A.I. went west, he started being a Nuggets fan, and I told her (and mocked him) that the Eagles will get rid of Donovan McNabb and then he won't like the Eagles anymore. It has her scared it's true, and he's all non-chalant, "Y'all are retarded" rolling his eyes about it because he's ten. So she calls me and leaves messages on my voice mail to try and set up me coming over to do that shit, but I haven't returned the call. I'm a busy man. I'm painting some shit before Christmas for a dude who I'm fairly certain used to be C.I.A. I've worked for former C.I.A. dudes before, including an old guy who lived in a house that James Madison's brother built or some shit and had wacky framed medals with pictures of him meeting Saudi looking sheiks or some such nonsense. Usually when I work for dudes like that, I get myself through the mindless boring nature of housepainting by imagining at any second ninjas on dirtbikes will pop out over the hill, coming to raid the house, but someone will have set up a razor wire between two trees to decapitate them. THE FUTURE for the Eagles does not involve three things, in domino effect: no more playoffs, no more McNabb, and no more Andy Reid. It might take another year or two for that last one to fall, but it's gonna fall.

#6: WASHINGTON REDSKINS (6-7, #21 overall) - It almost pains me that the Redskins still have a shot to sneak into the playoffs, because they don't deserve it to be honest, and if they did make it, it's not really an honor because then they'd just get punished by someone who actually is good. I have come to a point where, after he did that double time out shit against Buffalo at the end of the game, I don't think I want Joe Gibbs as my coach anymore. But he's definitely done good to accumulate perhaps the strangest collection of football players that an NFL team has collected in probably the last five or six years and maybe more. They have a team full of wacky ass motherfuckers. It's like North Dallas Forty, but for the free agency era, and free of whatever drugs they can actually test for according to collective bargaining bullshit. The problem is, if Gibbs goes, stupid Dan Snyder will not be smart enough to just promote Gregg Williams, who I think has earned that chance even if he did suck as a head coach in Buffalo, but Snyder will put out an all-points search for whatever overrated fuckface he can throw $7 million a year at, like Bill Cowher. How many decades did Cowher coach before he won a Super Bowl? Fuck that shit. Stay the course, but get a dude who's young enough to remember you can't call two fucking time outs in a row at the end of a game. THE FUTURE for the Redskins is to cause my ulcer to grow, so cheap macrobrewery beer leaks its poison interntally, creating early death for me.

#7: NEW YORK JETS (3-10, #30 overall) - Poor Chad Pennington's starting quarterback luster looks to be over, so I guess it's not too much longer before he's back off to Lord Pennington's summer estate to rape the Spanish housekeeper while her familia is mulching the fruit orchard, the symphony of sounds from their gas-powered garden tools drowing out her muffled cries of "Ayudarme... por favor," from inside the guest bedroom. Their new starting QB, Kellen Clemens, sounds like one of those dudes that the Madden game makes up for you to draft in the third round out of Hofstra or Utah State or some shit that has like one NFL player in the last 30 years but that's enough for Madden to have like four fake guys from there in every fake year's draft. My favorite is when you get black quarterbacks from Ivy League schools, like that shit's ever gonna happen in real life. Or white wide receivers from SEC schools. Or white guys named Jabbar. THE FUTURE of the Jets involves tons of shut-in losers who talk funny booing a bunch of stupid shit and getting all pissed off about the Jets sucking as if they haven't always sucked for most of these people's lifetimes.

#8: MIAMI DOLPHINS (0-13, #32 overall) - This game against the crumbling Ravens will probably be the Dolphins last chance to not go O-for-the-season, and it leaves me in a tough position. On one hand, I'd love to see a team go winless, especially a team I have as much love for as tha Dogg Pound does for hoes, but it'd be just as great to see Brian Billick's eternally bloodsucking shitty ass get the wooden stake to his career hammered in a little bit deeper by losing to the Dolphins. THE FUTURE of the Dolphins is a #1 draft pick that I bet they draft an overhyped quarterback who performs mediocrely at best, and perhaps leading to a couple of wild card berths five years from now if Ronnie Brown is not broken in half by then.