Talkin' Kanye

Here at White Guys, Square Glasses, we're talking rap music, damnit.

So, this is (irresponsibly) the first of possibly many (definitely more than is necessary) WGSG episodes regarding hip hop, so get used to it.

As to the genesis of the Watch The Throne conversation, it sort of went like this:
1) Joe and other buddies tweet about how great WTT is.
2) Matt tweets that he’s not looking forward to listening to it, because he’ll feel the need to talk about it (and probably say unpleasant things).
3) Matt’s excuse is rejected by Joe, who demands the listen.
4) Matt listens, self-fulfilling his own prophecy of disappointment.
5) Joe challenges Matt to a breakdance competition, which is later rescheduled as a podcast episode politely discussing WTT’s merits.

KANYE: A PORTRAIT
In case you hadn’t figured it out by my tone, this is Matt doing the blog post. As stated, I’ve been on the fence about Kanye for most of his career. His production abilities are some of the best in the business, but his rapping is usually just around par and his singing is… well its hard to call it singing. Anyway, back to some facts. Here’s Kanye’s discography timeline, which we had trouble with during recording.

The College Dropout, February 2004.
Late Registration, August 2005.
Graduation, September 2007.
808’s and Heartbreaks, November 2008.
My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, November 2010.

Joe makes reference to “All Falls Down,” which appeared on College Dropout and is mainly about financial irresponsibility and racial self-esteem and just, well, a whole lot of things. Here’s the video (featuring Stacey Dash’s conspicuous nipples):



INFORMATION GANGSTER
Matt makes reference to the American Gangster album, Jay-Z’s concept album, based off of the film, which is based off of the book, which is based off of real life, which is based off of a collective dream.

MAD RAPPERS
Also, hip hop beef is weird. Shortly before we recorded this episode there was word of a Lil’ Wayne diss against Jay-Z on his new album, Tha Carter IV. Your humble narrator believes that this wasn’t a very harsh diss (more just a 99 problems reference), which leads me to the conclusion that its “Diss” status didn’t originate with Weezy himself. Stop starting fights, Twitterverse.

Beef is a great marketing tool, though. 50 Cent made great career strides with his machine-gun spray disses in “How To Rob” (which is rumored to be what may have incited the attempt on his life). Less famous rappers have also tried to use this as a promotional tool by dissing more accomplished rappers in an attempt to anchor themselves to that rapper’s fame. Atmosphere wrote a song about this process called “That’s Not Beef That’s Pork.” Hear it here:



A BITTER SYL TO SWALLOW
In case you hadn’t heard the story, here’s the whole sampling kerfuffle. If the name seems familiar, you might back up to the “All Falls Down” video, which features Syleena Johnson, Syl’s daughter.

TRACK BY TRACK
Okay, I said I judge this album track by track. So here’s my entirely above-judgment judgments. But before that, I suggest you go listen to the AVClub’s review here.

The best part is hearing them try not to say bad things about Kanye, even though they clearly want to.

Anyway, here’s my estimation of WTT--

No Church In The Wild – Sample’s cool. Frank Ocean is confused. I’m confused by Kanye. What happened to the Kanye that needed Jesus like school needs teachers? Not much here to like or hate though. Very skippable, as Joe said.

Lift Off – Whose bright idea was it to have Kanye sing his autotuned verses in between Beyonce’s? Again, skippable. Beyonce sings like an angel, but she’s not given much room to express anything lyrically.

Niggas In Paris – That’s right I typed it out. I love a syncopated beat, and so does Jay. He totally works it to his advantage. Kanye does a good job too with his ironic drawl emphasis. I’m gonna give credit to Ye for putting that sample in- “No one knows what it means! It’s provocative!” This is how I think a lot of people digest Kanye’s weaker musical experiments. Good Call, Mr. West.

Otis – Never has a song fallen so far so fast. The first 30 seconds build it up, then 0:33 to 0:37 seems like it’s about to tear your face off, and then it just fizzles. The looping and looping and looping leaves this one with nowhere to go. It just limps along. Sure, it makes the lyrics seem more exciting to set them against such a lurching and awkward background, but it still hamstrings the whole affair. I bet there’ll be some absolutely showstopping “Otis” remixes though. With like, a backbeat. And some sense of build-up.

Gotta Have It – I wish the producer of “Otis” would’ve listened to “Gotta Have It,” because he would’ve learned a lot about songwriting. This is the first song that seems to have genuine interplay between Kanye and Jay-Z. The one negative? Jay-Z makes a planking reference.

New Day – Question: Was Jay-Z aware of Beyonce’s pregnancy when he wrote his verse? I hope so. Anyways, this is kind of a slow one. I like the vocoder. Its not a stand-out, but its decent.

That’s My Bitch – Nobody but Grandmaster Flash should be able to sample Incredible Bongo Band anymore. I’m a little bummed that Kanye doesn’t chill it on the borderline misogynistic characterization of ladies, but this is his strongest rapping on the album. I guess it makes sense. He’s clearly got lady problems on the brain since 808’s and Heartbreak. Jay’s verses are equally strong, but his lady issues are a little weirder. He refers to some hot ladies as “Beyonces” (plural). Wut.

Welcome To The Jungle – Morse code jam? No thanks. Harmonically questionable chorus synth? I’ll pass. This is a wide miss.

Who Gon Stop Me – Oooh, a little dubstep, eh? I can dig it. It doesn’t have the bro-step skrillex fart breakdowns, though it is a little flatulent. Kanye explains pig latin and references the Holocaust. I like this one for the most part, but again West makes me wince a few times.

Murder To Excellence – WHY. Why wouldn’t you just let Frank Ocean sing this one? This would’ve been absolutely amazing if it didn’t have Kanye’s umpteenth attempt to start his doomed singing career with unsubtle autotune. Someone re-record that part for me, because I really like this song but I can’t stand to hear Kanye’s flailing vocals.

Made In America – Sweet Queen Coretta, this song is weak. Especially stacked next to the song before it. They make very antagonistic points. Great use of the CASIO keyboard demo button though. Joe likes that Jay has to defend his own indefensible actions, but it just sounds weird over the Playskool beat.

Why I Love You – Again, the beat is good and the song is good. It seems to me like the experimental shit is just getting in the guys’ way. Thankfully this one has a solid beat and Jay drops verses that seem frantic and earnest, like an athlete turning in a championship time around the track.

Illest Motherfucker Alive – This is a joke track, right? So I should ignore it? Good. “Zero Zero Zero Zero, a whole lot of O’s.” Kanye is doing a Kanye parody. It’s like when Andrew WK made that song “Party Party Party.” But hey, solid beat.

H-A-M – This song makes me chuckle. The beat is totally biting Waka Flocka’s “Hard In Da Paint,” but that’s not the funny part. Trying to make the word “Ham” slang for cool is hilarious. Not noticing the literal interpretation of “Hard as a mother-fucker” is hilarious. Declaring yourself to be “Ham” is hilarious.

Primetime – Good song. Nothing amazing, but good. The beat works well, and Kanye isn’t saying anything too ridiculous. Top 5 for sure.

The Joy – Wasn’t this released for free like years ago? Oh well. This is the song that has the stolen Syl Johnson sample. Curtis got a shout-out though. I like it though. It’s a good slow one, and this album’s slow ones haven’t been great. I wouldn’t kick it out of bed.

Obviously, this is just my opinion, but I’m totally right. Feel free to disagree, just know that you’re going up against a motherfucking mental giant. Suck on that, haters. More on that laters.

IT TAKES TWO TO MAKE A THING GO RI-IGHT.
I mentioned that I had been listening to hip hop duo albums. Here are some great recent ones:

Ferrari Boyz – Waka Flocka Flame & Gucci Mane
Both of these dudes are great rappers, and they both love drum machines and synth hooks. Pairing the two was obvious, and their stylistic overlapping gives them a great sense of cohesion.

Bad Meets Evil – Eminem & Royce Da 5’9”
I love Royce. I’ll admit it. I totally messed up the song that he declares his inferiority complex, but he’s got a lot of inner demons that he drops all over this record. And Eminem? Well, he’s pretty good too.

Black Star
Black Star isn’t recent, but it’s fucking great. Go get it.

BLACK/GAY NEWS
Peter O’Toole is neither black nor gay.
Huell Howser is neither black nor gay.
James Baldwin was both black and gay.
Langston Hughes was black and rumored to be gay.
Johnny Mathis is half-black and openly gay.
Will Smith is black (possibly birthmark) and not gay.
Jada Pinkett Smith is black and not gay.
Jackie Chan is immortal.
Deal with it.

I was going to post a picture of a giant birthmark, but the ones I found are too horrible to inflict on another human.

[Editor's Note: I'll give Matt Peter O'Toole, but Huell Hauser is so massively gay that he bends light for miles around. Just ask Black Dad luminary Dr. Neil Degrasse-Tyson.]

FROM JOE’S CRAIGSLIST AD

White rap upstart requires black baby for cred. Only needed for photo shoot. Please don’t tell my wife.

YOUNG JUNG
Animus, Anima, Self, Shadow, and Persona are all archetypes. That word has three syllables--say it with me-- “Ark-uh-types.”

DEL’S DISS
From “Disastrous” on Both Sides Of The Brain
“Why you keep acting up? And when the shots fired you’re the last to duck. You’re only worth half a buck, it could be disastrous.”



JAMES AND THE GIANT DOUCHE
“There’s not even leaves!”

STAY TUNED FOR THE NEXT FLOUNDERCAST//

CUE OUTRO
Play my mothafuckin’ theme song--

There Was Some Thing in the Air That Night, It Killed Us All

Episode 25: "Werner Herzog Presents Rob Zombie's Port of Call: The Thing: The Final Nightmare"


And here comes the liner notes (or here comes half of them):

First and foremost, apologies to Mr. Sef Joosten. We (I) mispronounced his name. It should be pronounced, in proper Germanic fashion, as "Yo-Sten." As a former scholar of German, Joe should have picked it up. Me, I studied French and Spanish, so I'm fucking blameless. Don't you even look at me.

Also, sorry, Keith Moon is in The Who, not in The Rolling Stones, which brings up a second point: I can't name a single person in The Who- oh wait, Roger Daltrey, right?-- other than the guy who looks like Derek Smalls as seen in The Simpsons.

Now there's a byzantine reference. You sort that out, 'cause I'm not going to.



The first thing we started talking about was how I got my swag (my steez, even) janked by some mother fucker. Not cool, at all. We also mentioned the Honda Accord. A fine car and not a coincidence that I mentioned it. I mention it because the 1987 Honda Accord was my first car and a fine car it was. Her she is, just look at her--


(By the way, this is the same lot where Joe saw that confidence artist/deadbeat that tried to hit up Joe successfully hit up that other guy. Also, this photo was taken by my friend Sam, who I think we mentioned in another episode. Maybe?)


Tangent:

That car went through two people before it ended up in my hands and other than the leaking sun roof (who was the asshole that decided to put sun roofs on cars?) and the lack of air conditioning and the lack of a CD player or working cassette player and that time the battery mysteriously started crapping out on me, it was a fine care. It had over half of a million miles on it and other than the occasional check up, it worked fine until it died somewhere in East LA when I was trying to drive back home to Long Beach.

I wouldn't find out until later, but my trans-axle apparently cracked in half and, for a piece of shit car like the one I drove, it was literally more money to fix my car than it was to turn it into scrap. My favorite part about this whole memory was that I was stuck off of the 710 somewhere at 11 at night, listening to the Love Line episode with Johnny Rotten as the guest. I parked my car in the middle of this neighborhood I have never been in before and, luckily, this guy was walking across the street, so, I ask him the question you would naturally ask anyone when you don't know where you are located.

"Excuse me, what's the cross street here?"

I got a look like I was speaking Martian. Now, I realize that I'm in East LA. English does not exactly fly fast and loose in that part of this county, but I didn't think the word asking where I was on Earth would hit a brick wall that quickly and that soundly. I'm not the kind of guy to try to force English on people who live in this country, but, seriously, dude, how the fuck do you not have the vocabulary to express to a person with a car that is spewing smoke what street you are near? I feel confident that if I moved to another country I would understand the word "where" or "street" or the idea that I lived in a place that has a name. Just saying.

Of course the punch line in all of this is that, naturally, I tried calling my folks to tell them "Hey, my car just croaked" only to get nothing in reply. This ties in with me having to call my mom about mystery charges on my credit card. It is like bleeding a stone sometimes and there is no better example than that night.

I called my home, no reply. I called my mom's cell, no reply. Then I remembered, they close the door to their room and my dad is almost deaf and my mom has ear plugs because my dad snores, thereby completely securing themselves from ever being called by a family member after 9:30 at night. It's a wonder they ever got the call that my sister's water broke (not that we headed out to the hospital or anything).

After calling AAA, I got my tow to my mechanic and a ride home to boot. I'd bitch about that, but, to be fair, my folks do cover my AAA.

Moving on.

The moment of ambiguous noise at 11:30~ is me half-choking on a chicken nugget.



And Escape From New York was made in 1981, continuing my roll of completely incorrect statements.

(This is where I would link something about Wilford Brimley and his famous "diabeetus" ads, but it is honestly harder to find the actual ad than it is to find roughly 700,000 parody videos. You've gone too far, internet.)

And now we get to Sid Ceasar V. Cesar Romero. More butchered names given up to the podcast god (who lives on top of a pile of Zunes and minidisc players).

I don't want to know this information, but for you people, anything.

Here's an explanation of Dog Fort, which is majestic. Thank you, Richard Dawkins for giving us the word "meme," because, Christ knows your run as an atheist fuckhole hasn't done anyone any good. Not to say that you shouldn't keep on talking shit on your fellow man for no fucking reason. People really like it when intelligent people act as bitter as possible for no apparent reason. Keep up the good work, shitwad.

With that said, if David Attenborough* wanted to talk shit on Christianity, I could take it. Or anything else.

Here's a link about Oprah's Oscar. I don't give a shit. I don't even give enough of shit to read the article or what she's received. Oh, and here's a reply from BET about us haters. It could be good, I don't know.

I was also talking about the tenuous thread that connects folk to country to blues to rock to punk, which is something I could go on and on and on about and, frankly, I've done more than enough of that in this entry, already, but seriously, listen to Are You Experienced and listen to Live From Folsom Prison or Bringing it All Back Home and tell me that those albums don't sit at the crux of more than a few genres. Genre is a vague and ambiguous thing. That holds for movies. It's art, there aren't any hard and fast rules about these things.

Unless you're an asshole, I mean.

Here's one movie where Ian McShane plays a gay gangster. Again, not a terrible thing, but a terribly specific thing.

Oh, and Max von Sydow is awesome, even as a Nazi.



Maybe especially as a Nazi.

Haha. The Ian McShane movie with Sean Connery where they play "IRA members" is called The Terrorists. That's right. The movie where Ian McShane plays a terrorist is called exactly that. Also there doesn't seem to be any IRA terrorists in the film. There is something clearly wrong with my brain. And maybe Joe's brain.

Here's the clip of the awesome Ian McShane story--

(Enjoy, or fucking else.)


Ugh. This podcast just keeps on going, doesn't it?

Alright, fuck it. I'm 25 minutes in, but this thing doesn't need to go on any longer than it already has. We'll be doing a part II on this particular episode. Hope you enjoyed this so far!



Also, please, if you find the time, give us a review on iTunes. It's how people find us and it'd be swell if more people listened to us. I'm not blaming you for our lack of renown, but, it's pretty much your fault that we aren't better known or respected. Something to think about.

*Another person I've confused for far too long is Richard Attenborough and David Attenborough. At least they're both old, white, avuncular British men in this case.