Drake, the reluctant baller, has purred about the pitfalls of progress. 50 hasn’t pretended as much about his need for riches. Here, the first signs of wealth’s drag on his conscience. Not one for window shopping, he’s indulged even the negative parts of fame, namely feuding and vanity. But the yield has been curious.

“Brought you from the hood/Destination, hell or heaven?”

The floating question mark deranges his song nearly as much as its groaning vocal thump. In one “mm,” there’s baby mama drama, death visions, astuteness. Like Biggie before him, 50′s been ready to die from the inception. Specifically, it’s the imminence of his dream. As he nears the symbolic end, life’s hold tightens inexplicably. Black manhood ultimately corrodes vitality, discarding dreamers in the offing.

I’m a rider.

Trendy but seasoned. King of New York? No one likes a monarch. Divine assignment. Progressively tyrannical. Mirrors a mafia, in name and destruction. Pacino fixations. Queens rival unearths past envy, weakens the throne. Still, dollars pile.

He won’t wear jerseys; he’s thirty-plus. Lingering “Ether” flares nostrils. But relevance trumps quality. Sponsors love it. Insecure icon begets imitative Italian. Brooklyn nostalgia punctuates.

Jordan metaphors are yet-fulfilled prophesies. Maybe you’ll love him when he fades. Spotted in St. Tropez. Bottle service and champagne flutes. Excuse me, Miss…married?

World tour, Coldplay, water for the Continent, Live 8, Minority Ownership, Kingdom Come, executive suite, Leering at landscape. Hardly photogenic.

Petty feuds dissolve. Hardcore swagger. Mid-life musing. Unsuited for introspection. American (Gangster). What’s Kanye up to? Forgets to text LeBron about soundtrack. They’ll catch up.

Oh! More classics! Redemptive leftism! Studio never seemed so small.

Crotchety formalist or unabashed trailblazer. You decide, of course. Afraid to run it back. Very afraid.

Link Round-Up for “Off That”

Smoking Section

NahRight

2dopeboyz

Also: Jay-Z looking squirmy on Bill Maher’s show. Terrific interview with surprisingly candid answers from the Jiggaman. Makes you wonder how much this “guru speak” about manifesting confidence on the surface level rings true. The man is clearly uncomfortable on camera as “Shawn Carter discussing Jay-Z.”

Both sides of the digital divide have their place, but only the artists whose voices we hear materially captive, confined to cassettes, compact discs, and videos exist for our grandchildren. All the same, cardiovascular rhythm burns off technology’s bulk, leaving traces of the human soul within the filaments. The music with the best chance of survival inside the techno-sphere, then, is the kind that forces its heart into the robot, filling it with lifeblood to make it distinguishable from just another voicebox. Audio recording methods will forever mold how songs are preserved, but the true measure of timelessness is our ability to operate both inside and outside of wiring. Aretha Franklin, Nas and Jimi Hendrix will outlast any disc where their voices are heard partly because of their extensive catalogs and partly because of their infinitely soulful stance.

Now, as before, there are countless tweaks to enhance the vocal register, including the machine we know simply as Auto-tune, which eponymously indicates just how to “automate” a human sound with a robot’s hand. The current music climate welcomes robotic sounds, the metallic hum of a thousand modems. But it can be hard to differentiate the refuse from the jewels. Jamie Foxx’s “Blame It On the Alcohol” exists in the same crowded room with Jeremih’s “Birthday Sex,” shoving one another for space along the same frequency. Foxx wins. Mavado and Vybz Kartel smooth the edges of gangster dancehall with bleats and beeps, while Drake and Lil Wayne observe looking for clues. Which of these robotic voices makes sense to the human ear over decades?

The science fiction genre dependably sorts benign robots from malignant ones. Val from 2001: A Space Odyssey — bad. Eva from Disney Pixar’s Wall-E — good. V.I.K.I, the well-meaning pro-human droid from I,Robot, straddled the line between good and bad with some suspicious, subversive motives lurking beneath the surface. In music, there are good robots, gently aiding song clarity; and there are bad robots, who pry open the disc and insert the tentacles of inhuman squeaks. Stevie Wonder and Michael Jackson experimented with good robots, careful not to yield too much power to their recording equipment. T-Pain surrenders much of his human identity to the Auto-Tune robot, while constructing a playful paean to soul music. Based on the recent slew of machinated tunes, the robots have laid their strongest claim to music yet.

“Dancing Machine”, Jackson 5
The lyrics alone explain possession of the human soul by the relentless dancing machine: “Automatic, systematic/fully colored self-contained/Tune the channels to your box.” But that’s only the beginning. Soon Young Michael Jackson is in full controlled flail, snapping and popping his joints across the stage like so many sprockets. The refrain impels his faux automaton with trumpet blasts and drum clicks.

“Darling Nikki”, Prince
Only the confines of a programmed microphone and acoustic guitar could contain Prince’s squealing sex ode.

“Needy Girl”, Chromeo
Chromeo set out to be well-meaning copycats of the 1980s synth-funk and created a bona fide robot hit.

“Digital Girl” (remix), Jamie Foxx ft. Drake, Dream, Kanye West
Drake’s best verse, flat out: “I remember Amy/she used to AIM me/she stayed up late, and used to blame me/she say I’m too wild, she wanna tame/I told her even Photoshop couldn’t change me” Kanye’s funniest verse of late tracks the process of taking indiscreet photos and videos for digital arousal.

“Lollipop”, Lil Wayne
Forget the 33 million-plus YouTube views. This song is a mixture of bluegrass, pop, soul, and rap with just enough syrupy lubricant to make you feel its prurience. Robots don’t do oral sex, after all.

“Rompin Shop” Vybz Kartel feat. Spice
Pure raunchy dancehall tune with Auto-Tune as the guise. Vybz has no qualms with being the oversexed DJ, proven on his first worldwide album with smashes like “Tight Pussy Gal Dem” and “Rough Sex”

“Can’t Believe It” T-Pain feat. Lil Wayne
You already know how I feel about this one. What a voice embodied by the ultimate robot trickster, T-Pain. He wraps his voice in extreme harmonies and then dresses them with twinkling interjections. He make the people say “Yeeeaah.”

Honorable Mention: “Cry Me A River” Justin Timberlake, “Blame It” Jamie Foxx feat. T-Pain

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Or maybe not. Defining the ontology of Stardom As Artistry and vice versa is a useless quest.

Maybe it’s just my merciless discerning taste. I fight tooth and nail for hip-hop culture because it’s the same culture that extends from blues and reggae. The Culture of Black Rhythm produces books, albums, artists and works of note. It also swaddles the individual voice in the rich cloth of collective, choric, chanting traditions. There’s a double-edged sword to the material manifestation of that kind of art: rap music, in its frenetic commercial cycle, produces none of the above. There are boastful gunmen, conniving hustlers, shameless players and romantic poets, but they exist in separate spaces of the public covenant. As critical listeners, we’re lucky to get a universal morsel out of a song, much less food for thought. Thus, I’m at a loss when it comes to Drake, the young performer whose entire portrait is a John Hughes caricature of the arrogant team captain.

But he sings, he acts, he raps. What more could you ask for?

Well, talent. Throw on your tap shoes, young man. There’s no longer room for mere method acting in rap music. Although that is a talent: fitting a perfectly scripted role provided by publicity managers and record labels, it won’t swim unaccompanied. For starters, if hip-hop is to thrive (not merely survive) rappers must bring a modicum of talent to their too-large audience. Meaning, they should know how to put syllables and metaphors together in a coherent way so that songs have a theme, beats sustain our active imaginations, and records have a shelf life beyond the corporate quarterly report. If they can muster it, they should learn a dance step, create an indomitable stage show and take it on the road.

Then again, Drake’s deference to an “acceptable Negro” template is also troublesome. In the age of Barack Obama, when multi-racial identity is synonymous with success, but where the same is not true for single, downcast racial groups, Drake represents the deceptively “safe choice” for teen girls of all colors. At first, the thug paradigm in hip-hop appealed to mainstream American teenagers because of its exoticism, but then African nationalism took over before finally giving way to genteel sportsman in Puffy, Jay-Z, and now Drake. The Aubrey Graham Experiment is no embrace of the diversity of multi-racial performers as much as it is an indictment of the rebellious, ill-fitting archetypes embodied by ruffians like Jadakiss, Freeway. Those black rapscallions provide a contrast from the American television-reared norm (except in the case of 50 Cent when that rebellion is commodified). Drake lives in the Eminem continuum, in this sense, because he blends with preconceived expectations of racial parity, of preconceived norms, and inoffensive vanilla appearances, while telling us that (really!) he’s all bad ass. This way, Sarah need not fret when that poster of the rap superstar hangs on Becky’s closet door. After all, she’s traded bare-chested pin-up shots of thugs with the tattooed tear for a beautiful petticoat and handsome knickers.

Which brings us to an important question about Drake: does his adherence to a standard, safe, orthodox style make him a poor artist, an unrealized artist, or merely a reflection of the current culture? As a lyricist, he falls somewhere between Lil Wayne’s casual and Kanye’s self-important. But those two artists showed verbal improvement during the various stages of their career before they were knighted as rulers of hip-hop’s mainstream. Lil Wayne had to release “Go DJ” and a slew of mixtapes before anyone dared notice how his improvisational skills could overshadow many of the prosaic songs of his contemporaries. Kanye West practically learned how to rap before an unforgiving audience, straining first for breath control, and then for more potent similes. His majesty behind the mixing board also built his legend in a tandem with his bold public statements. Drake has benefited from the iconoclastic traits of these two without necessarily carrying with him their attention to personal detail, to variety, and to composition. Of his slim volume, Drake has mostly touted the powers of auto-tuned, caramelized melodies. But in rap music, where the melody and harmony of blues music and reggae meet the archly defiant voice of the emcee, he is only half developed. His lyrics, when examined as an expressive tool, fail even at the rudimentary level of execution. With attempted double-entendres, Drake leaves the doubling unfinished, rhyming the same words over again without changing the meaning from couplet to couplet. Even more egregiously, his main duty as an artist, to demonstrate the full depth of his points, always seems just beyond his reach.

In his most “thoughtful” song to date, “Successful,” with Trey Songs’s crybaby crooning as a charming backdrop, Drake recalls a murky story about his mother. The lyrics are an absolute puzzle of inadequate rhetoric however:

But as of late, alot of shit been going sideways

And my mother try to run away from home

But I left something in the car and so I caught her in the driveway

And she cried to me, so I cried too

And my stomach was soaking wet, she only 5’2″

Just as the story might have explored the reason his mother ran away, or the reason for her tears in the driveway, he talks about her height. How perplexing to even go down the road when only shallow discovery would come of the couplets. But berating Drake’s commercial hit seems neither here nor there as even legendary artists have stooped to numbing simplicity in the name of driving a hot beat to its eventual destination. For whatever he may lack in depth, he has certainly captured this summer’s imagination with his songs, videos, and all-around charisma. The striking thing here, though, is that there’s an overwhelming sentiment that he is the “next coming,” the singer with a rap sensibility, the polished actor with a brash hip-hop attitude. In the age of charlatanism, of surreal swagger (I swear some of these performers would gild their caskets for more swagger points), Drake is not just the perfect fit, he’s the only fit. He will be only what we, the ravenous audience of fickle followers, require him to be. As it is the charge of an artist to be both slave to his spirit, the thing that makes him human, and to be the frank interpreter of the common spirit, Drizzy makes short sloppy work of the tasks at hand.

Now, would we be pleased if he brought his Black Thought rhyme book out for every recording? Or if he displayed some surprising emotional clarity on a debut album? Who’s to say? The intrigue of Drake remains in his status as an incomplete but compelling demonstration of the ego’s influence on emceeing. In a sense, Drake does what Kanye did before him, daring listeners not to like him, as if those who do criticize are at a distance from what’s “hip.” Hipness notwithstanding, when you’re mantled with the label “Great” too early, the results can only be disastrous.

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1. When Politico broke the story of Palin’s wardrobe spending, I thought it appropriate to talk about the contradiction in terms that is saying “spending freeze” and “fiscally responsible” and then splurging because you have enough money to do so. It’s an insult to the same hard-working Americans they’re making an appeal to.

10 Things Palin’s $150K Outfits Could Buy

2. In the same aspect of pushing the cultural message, McCain-Palin and Co. have been helping themselves to a large portion of the white American apple pie. Nothing wrong with saying you advocate for a group as historically critical as this one, but there was another easy contradiction in dissecting Joe’s aspirational sense of capitalism. The media bit at this kind of white-branded individualism, almost missing the point of a national, broad-based election. 

Media Chases the White Joe Vote

3. It wouldn’t be the internet without some instant commentary, would it? Nazneen Patel of NewsOne.com and I talked about the final presidential debate as it took place. Think high school time capsule. 

NewsOne Debate Chat

4. The list of Republicans who have joined the Obama cause. Apparently, the ideological rift in the party between the sensible intellectuals and the class-race-tinkering cowboys has become external, prevalent. With Buckley, Will, Kristol, Brooks, Parker, Noonan and a host of others leaving for the moderate outskirts (or gasp! the left), there will be a vacuum of new ideas. Tucker Bounds just won’t do in heady economic times. Hat tip to the Jed Report.

List of Republicans Ditching McCain So Far

On TheUrbanDaily, there’s a review of Wale at a CMJ Showcase for SOB. He disappointed the crowd using his body of work is his defense. Giant Mag has a review of Eagle Eye also. This is a March essay about New Orleans recently found on King Mag’s site. 

Good night all. 

Kanye West is the most relevant musician on the current music scene, because he operates in a dying genre that he’s somehow resuscitating by reminding everyone what it’s like to take a gumbo of music forms and make it into one thing. He has this bold vision that he may never specifically articulate, except to say that it deals with greatness and dimensionality. Some of his best work is a berth of pride and spiritual boldness. “Love Lockdown” is part exceptionalism, not one rapped lyric finds its way in; and part leapfrog into a world of little accountability. If artistic liberation metes itself out in the quixotic “experimental” album moment for every musician, this is Kanye’s Electric Circus/Perfect Imperfections/Sgt. Pepper, if you will.

Writing about Kanye evokes confusion and amazement. Mr. West for years could not get past his sense of arrogance long enough to break through as a supernova. His persona was all about vindication until further notice. Talent was his established partner in crime, of course, making it all but impossible to dismiss him based on his bristly encounters. Whatever claims to his throne he made, almost all of them pushed the meaning of hyperbolic (he compared himself to Jesus more than once). 

Gilbert Arenas suffered the same fault in his early career. One feared that his need to exact revenge on every team who passed on him in the draft (there were 30 picks before him), might prove his unraveling obsession. But he played beyond his slights, while remaining consumed with the idea of becoming even better than the marquee players. He was the Kanye West of the NBA, searching for All-Star votes even as people complimented the rapid development of his game. He led not-so-silent campaigns to expose his snubs from Olympic teams, and All-Star rosters, using every resource he had available (most notably his weblog). The arguments he laid out mirrored Kanye’s substantiation at the Grammy awards when he was excluded: a) I have the numbers b) I excite the fans c) I’m as entitled as any of these folks who are less skillful. And when Gilbert argues his case by vowing 50 points against any Mike D’Antoni team because of his role in excluding him from being Gil the Olympian…and then doing it, he concedes no humility. Ironically enough, Arenas and West both fought their battles against willful public ignorance in 2006. Arenas was eventually named to the All-Star team that year, replacing oft-injured Jermaine O’Neal. Kanye went on to release Graduation in 2007 to universal fanfare. Gilbert Arenas had one of his best seasons as well, posting six 40-point showings, two 50-point performances, and one debutant romp season-high 60 pointer at L.A. Victory is mine through vengeance, they said. But what makes this experimental lunacy flirt with untamed genius? 

A few friends of mine have been contemplating the idea of hubris as it relates to black men in popular culture. The talented ones of us who were nevertheless cast into the fringes of doubt and aspersion really never had much internal motivation to enjoy our fait accomplis because we were too busy contemplating the will to prove folks wrong. How can a man be driven if he is wrapped up in the envy of what he has not yet become in the eyes of others? 808′s and Heartbreaks is the apotheosis of Kanye West’s fragile ego rants from 2002-2006 and his devastating haunts from 2007-2008. Now that he has embraced the self-imposed suffering of not meeting even one’s own standard, he seems free to do as he pleases. 

I heard so many negative reviews of Love Lockdown — song and video — when it came out, I couldn’t help but think that it was good. Since so many people were willing to disparage it among the early experts, the masses would surely love it. No artist with a track record like West’s will be half-hearted in going left field. This song is proof of that. That no one understood it readily gave it a new insight into the abstraction of moody vainglory. When Kanye shows he’s no longer making songs to be acceptable, award-worthy and arduous, something’s up. This forthcoming album will be the change of essential composition that Graduation began a year ago. Having lost his mother, moved into a new sector of stardom, he can be the isolationist megalomaniac he always dreamed of being. Thus, hubris is not as much a factor. 

Gil Arenas does not have such a luxury. His season-ending knee surgery last year crippled him with hubris. Agent Zero returned prematurely for a playoff round against the Cavaliers, and like years past, was dispatched quickly. The most troubling part of his return is that he knew too well this particular injury could be exacerbated if he didn’t take the full recovery time. But even his supporters knew that his drive would not let him sit out the series, as much as it might serve him well in the long run. It begs some explanation. His character is bolted down by his pride, and will push him to do obscene things in the name of it. Like Kanye’s humbling moment, Gilbert’s illusion of invincibility forced him to confront some of his existential fears of failure. Whether it will improve his game or his approach to life remains to be seen. Where Kanye has tried desperately to reconcile his childhood trauma by tributing an album to his lost mother, Gil has yet to find that place of reckoning. 

Maybe having Kanye’s album on hand through the first few months on the bench will illumine a new path. Or else, what a cold winter it will be. 

Kanye’s 808′s and Heartbreaks Tracks (hat tip to the Rap Up):

Peep 808s & Heartbreak tracklist below.

1. “Welcome to Heartbreak”
2. “Heartless”
3. “Love Lockdown”
4. “Robocop”
5. “Anyway”
6. “Streetlights”
7. “Say You Will”
8. “Real Bad News”
9. “Amazing” (featuring Young Jeezy)
10. “Tell Everybody That You Know” (featuring Lil Wayne)
11. “Coldest Winter”

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

The short ad-lib that clips the melody of another T-Pain croon. Either we believe that T-Pain is the loose assembly of hollow machine sounds. Or we believe that he is the brilliant incarnation of many soul singers pressed through the strainer of digital synthesis. Obviously, he is a bit of both, and it’s hard to assign him a mode as he adopts a similar harmonious template for most of his songs, whether they are cloying or redemptive.

T-Pain is brilliant emptiness. He is not vapid. His clownish costumes recall Flava Flav, but there’s always some hidden meaning with the jester. I remember The Source article covering Flav in the nay-day of Public Enemy. The formerly grand hip-hop rag made sure to color Flav’s run-ins with authorities, and family court issues as part of the mad genius that made him. In a way, T-Pain is a Flava Flav protege.

With the T-Wayne hit “Can’t Believe It” we get the best of the circus motif, from the track’s insistent twinkling bells to the top hat on a dancing teddy bear’s dome. The video is a work unto itself because it renders T-Pain as the ringmaster, the sad engineer of a strange world in which only he and some bizarre others fit. To keep with the running theme of being in love with a stripper, T-Pain indulges a wild fantasy about saving her from her life of lecherousness. He has this absolutely morose dream of loving a woman who has set herself up not to be loved. And he wails distressingly about it.

“Cause you look so gooo-oood, you make me wanna spend it all on ya”

And the poetry there is that he cannot spend it all on her. For all the “you ain’t tricking if you got it talk” seeping into the framework of his songs, he is bitterly deciding against being with this morally insufferable woman. This stripper-harlot-trope makes T-Pain’s exceptional use of melody more than a jester’s prosaic call: it’s his pastiche for invention. In a radio interview on Hot 97, T-Pain talked to Angie Martinez about his married life possibly being in contradiction with his woeful Single Man in the Club image. And as playfully as Angie brought up the randy contrast between the two value systems, T-Pain niftily explained that he wrote many of those songs (about strippers) while broke. This leads me to believe that he was never fascinated as much about the marketing of a Strip Club song as he was about getting to the heart of the troubled, enraptured club patron.

If T-Pain’s Can’t Believe It is ostensibly about being in the V.I.P. section of some seedy strip joint, it makes no real pretense out of being that close to its subject matter. “She make the people say yeeeeah” could just as well be a chant in any other R&B song, but here it’s as if he’s commenting on the allure of some dancer in some flashing light panel. He is bathing the song in that same light of ominous revelations: that strobes can hide the scars; drinks and tips can push a good man away from reality.

That is why T-Pain has the most appealing song in radio rotation for my money. It’s not because there is something honorable about using the auto-tune capabilities as instrument, rather it’s the audacity of hiding such depressing themes in such upbeat music. The whine of the “yeahs” is fully submerged in their electronic coating. The ardor of unsanctioned love is also there beneath the sweet surface. To be honest, I didn’t know T-Pain was so deep.

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

Graduate Hard Knocks by the Narrowest Slither

I’m Smart But Not the Flashiest Nigga and once I learn lessons

Class dismissed 

A Homerun Hitter no asterisk; though you try dealing your fastest pitch

When Last I quit, I can’t recall proper

Scalded lungs pass the spliff poured Vodka I am neither man

Nor monster; won’t deny I have a sore spot for 

classy chicks

I’m aloof like the shower sponge, crass emit a sour tongue 

Amass my riches outta slums; jousting with guns is such a downer

One dollar does not a dream make; Gun Powder to prop extreme statesmen

But –

No bwoy nah guh test me yo

We posture ’cause it’s the best we know

I’m the poet-emcee’s wet dream though

‘specially blowed off the best weed, cho!

slipped inside the vestry door 

forget priests I got some questions

Dear father, does my ambition beget greed?

A balladeer 

I asked him cavalierly

I’m strong in my heart

My feet are rather weary 

What sign of the weak

that I splatter theories so loud

the people have to hear me

The youths are misguided 

we split sides spit fire piss iron

the best of us tip tides amidst liars

but after our time 

we git tired

I wanna 

collect bitches like figurines 

walk o’er floods to kick a breeze 

smoke more buds with thicker leaves 

Stalk tall funds like nigga please 

Feel familiar like six degrees 

The treasure is in the mysteries

Are these

Men or monsters

reading from teleprompters?

(per my advice 

you better watch)

Mind parables that ignore your children

And demagogues who war for scores 

Hording billions 

I used to hate but now I sorta feel ‘im 

I realize now that we was buildin’

That Gen. T-SO got me right mah nig…

The Genteel Oath To Life Unlived 

I spell dawg with an A-W

The first and last letters of my name trouble you 

I taint love the way lovers do 

Plus got flow like rain puddles 

We gain through struggle so who could say I ain’t true?

It yields a humorous distance from reality for me. I like a good rap battle as much as the next fan. But when it deteriorates–like these do–into fights for physical dominance, I still appreciate it for just showing its ass. Hip-hop can never really be bought or framed for the positive or negative because it’s visceral. These reactions come from outside factors even if the music itself has a dandy relationship with violence. Violence courted hip-hop from the get-go, and now we have YouTube to watch the result. Enjoy!

In the storied legacy of rap battles, there have been some heated exchanges on wax. Since the millennium turned, those turned into knockout blows knuckle-up style in the form of Smack DVD clips and YouTube snippets. These fist-fighting battles trumped the tradition of wordplay, and sunk hip-hop into the dregs of other internt sensations like Bum Fights, Street Fights and Kimbo slice marauding.

Here are the HeardonmyStoop faves:

Nikz and ENJ are having a pretty sound, typical street-style battle until ENJ drops the line of the year “Oh you mad cuz I’m stylin’ on you” which throws Nikz into a rage unseen…and then KNOCKOUT!

Math vs. Dose The Gym Brawl

Math and Dose are obviously not on good terms. But something about Dose’s gestures are rubbing Math the wrong way. After a tip of Dose’s hat grazes Math’s nose, all bets are off. Math’s “Yo son get out my face” and then *PUNCH!* starts a crew wide brawl on the gym stage.

(Related: some comedians took the time to translate Math v. Dose for the non-slang viewers. Also funny.)

Saigon v. Prodigy Sucker Punch Brawl

So Saigon was not fond of Prodigy, and had some words about him prior to this show.  Why then perform at a show with someone whom you criticized? Maybe no press is bad press. The blogs covered this immaterial mess for a few weeks. Prodigy said he was sucker punched. Saigon said he was being set up. Blah Blah. Mediocre fight between overrated rappers in the end, but when is a sucker punch not appealing?

And the new favorite…

The Reality Show No-Names Go At It

Note: Viacom makes it a point to take their copyrighted content off YouTube quickly so they can control how this Kesan/E6 thing makes ad revenue. Here’s the link to their site with the official video in case this one gets removed.
Kesan and E6 are part of a show called “G’s to Gents” on MTV, hosted by Fonzworth Bentley. Already it’s a bad start. The show reforms Geez, so to speak, by training them in the rules of etiquette. Fish out of water, class tension, pissing contest and what have you. E6 wants to use this as a way to pump his rap career (because how else would he?) so he drops a Hot 16 on a backstage camera. Kesan, who has beef with EVERYone on the show, drops in for a little sucker punch action and then runs. Watch the hat spin. I haven’t seen someone get punched out of a hat so hard since Bugs and Elmer Fudd got it going.

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