"Up to date / state of the art / take part, get taken apart as I make my mark"
Welcome to the South Easy
Ringomatrix: Being S.A.F.E. (Sensitive As Fuck Everyday) [@Ringo_P]
Time to hand over once again to The 273‘s newest signing. Ringo’s back, to once again, tell it like it is.
• Koaste
Keep on wheeling back to the first time I came across the concept of the internet – Robert Heinlein’s 1982 book Friday. As I remember it Heinlein’s protagonist is a genetically engineered superwoman, fully-formed physically but mentally under-developed. She educates herself by sitting in front of a computer wired up to a huge database and reading, until such point as she’s absorbed the entirety of human knowledge. On a good day I can still dig deep enough to catch an echo of how exhilarating this seemed when I first read it. Most days I’m too caught up by what Heinlein failed to grasp, the constant danger of overload. The torrent of bullshit, the way those who curate humanity’s shared wealth are motivated by quantity rather than quality.
It’s such a fundamental mistake, the way our society values those who produce crap more than the people who sift through it. Given how central the consumer is to a capitalist society, you’d think the state wouldn’t have a problem with paying people to consume. If all I’m good for is sitting on a sofa all day watching daytime TV, if I’m validating the very existence of daytime TV by doing this, why shouldn’t the state provide me a comfortable sofa and a large flatscreen TV with a sharp display so my eyes don’t get too strained? What most folk don’t seem to grasp is it’s a difficult job, exhausting and such a threat to mental health that full-time consumers should qualify for danger money and an early retirement at middle-age when their brains are too fried to provide coherent feedback. Or maybe not. Some might say this is exactly when this is when the consumer reaches their peak of usefullness. Not me, though, I’m an optimist. For now.
Punk Rap
• Chief Keef‘s Macaroni Time is a total con. There was me thinking he’d done a song about lovely gloops of cheese sauce, delicious globules of fat, and it’s actually another bloody ode to smoking herb. Bastard. In a moderately comic side note, the cutting edge hipster businessmen at FACT described this tune as ‘synth heavy’. Tune in next week for their opinion on the new Premo record which, apparently, has some scratching on it.
• Nipsey Hussle is one of those names I’ve been hearing round for years but never got round to checking out. Life is busy these days. Or maybe I did check him out once and he made absolutely no impression, I forget. Maybe it’s cos his name makes me think of nipples, but I always figured he would probably be the lamest of hipster rappers. So lame he can’t even think of a cool name to pretend he’s not a hipster. He puts me right on Face The World, saying ‘six words to help you get this: rich rapper on some crip shit’ before taking shots at racist judges and offering sober words of wisdom: ‘it’s too late to run to christ once you’re caught up in this life’. Which, uhhh… may be true in practice but doesn’t quite conform with orthodox Christian doctrine. It’s never too late to turn to Christ, guys. He died for all our sins. If he can forgive politicians, he’s hardly gonna have much of a problem with a few gang bangers, right?
• Just. Didn’t. Expect. This. Most mindblowing, surprising comeback of the year. Who’d thunk Goodie Mob would show up in style, in 2013, eating nuclear waste and spitting atomic bombs, mushroom cloud and atomic brain farts on a track called Special Education? With Janelle Monae asking ‘don’t you want to be special?’ It’s kind of like Julie Andrews guesting with the Ultramagnetic MCs. If Bobby Brown had been down with Ultra. Bonus points cos when Cee-Lo says ‘V.I.P. stands for very insecure people’ you know he knows what he’s talking about.
Britcore
• Dabbla from LDZ pretty much sums up my feelings from the point I thought I might be addicted to weed on Blaze It Up. Not only, ‘that’s my medicine, ladies and gentlemen’ and the bit about blazing up from first thing in the morning to last thing at night but the bit where he acknowledges his habit may not be entirely healthy, justifying it with a resigned ‘yeah, well, at least it’s not meth’. Indeed.
• I was feeling guilty about paying zilch for Sonnyjim‘s pay-what-you-want Bandcamp release Purple Patch 5 until I checked the video and saw the amount of weed and booze he’s got in his life. Anyone that’s got ’03 Chianti and the cheese bud doesn’t need my money as much as I need my money. On the other hand, I wouldn’t advise anyone else to follow my lead. Quite the opposite, if I was gainfully employed I’d see it as my duty to send as much cash as possible to support the artistry of someone with such expensive habits.
• Keep on coming back to Sneakbo, almost despite myself. His mixtape was real cheesy, and I suppose the single Ching-A-Ling should be shelved somewhere with the dairy produce also, but there’s something about it’s joi de vivre that got me rewinding a couple of times just now. The difference between actual fun and the mandated facsimile? Something like that.
Guilty Pleasures
• Some people say there shouldn’t be such a thing as guilty pleasures. They’re wrong. Some music is just shameful, cos it embodies a repugnant sentiment or it’s made by a repugnant person, or not even someone totally objectionable but someone who’s just in a really bad place when they made it. Cyko Logic & Bimbo Jones When I Walk In, for example, takes narcissism to a level I personally feel uncomfortable with. But still, I can’t help but kinda like it. Guilty pleasure, for sure.
• My guess is Plies‘ seduction tactics in Fucking Or What aren’t that successful. Basically, he wants to know the answer to one question: are you fucking or what? But then I’m not a woman. Or a lady. Or a bitch, or whatever type of creature Plies is trying to get with. But…there’s something about his honesty I find refreshing. Y’know, I can listen to these type of booty bounce beats all day, all I need lyrically is something that isn’t too offensive, and mealy mouthed two-faced attempts at seduction are always more offensive than a straight up horndog request for carnality. I don’t think you need to be a bitch to feel me on that.
• Oh-kay, so Juicy J is the Snoop Dogg of the south these days, so I shouldn’t take anything he says too seriously, but then again…I just can’t help myself sometimes. So when I listen to his new single Boss Nigga and he’s raging on some poor soul because they’re getting their top peeled off while he’s ‘somewhere with some rich white folks playing golf’ it just makes me feel sad. Nothing wrong with playing golf, I’m sure, but boasting about hanging with some rich white folks is kind of lame, especially these days. In other news, it seems Juicy has switched to lean cos the weed got him coughing. Careful out there, Juicy. Edibles are the way forward. Hash brownies. Lean is bad news. Borrow some stacks from your rich white friends, hire a medium and ask Pimp C.
• Ringo
"Up to date / state of the art / take part, get taken apart as I make my mark" 