The Sunday Roast # 4 - Snoop Dogg

Settle in fuckers, I’ve got some shit to get off my chest.

Who the fuck is supporting Snoops career? Has there ever been a more successful, no talent, one trick pony in the history of hip hop? Thats not a rhetorical question either. Maybe I’m missing out on something really great here, but I doubt it. If i ever discover what I’m missing I expect it to be as exciting as finding out you have HIV when you thought you had full blown monkey aids.

I can only assume my downfall in understanding Snoops ‘music’ is my chronic lack of weed intake. How much weed (pronounced: sticky icky icky) do I actually need to smoke to find Snoop’s illiterate drawl even moderately appealing. While I’m on the topic of sticky icky icky, is it just me or does it sound more like the aftermath of his love gun accidentally firing, after not-so-dry humping Dr Dre’s leg, than it does weed? Either way he’s definitely gone off script when selling the appeal of that product as an illicit substance you’d want anywhere near your mouth. 

As far as I can tell his entire career is built around Doggystyle, his guest spots on Dre’s 2001 and one way-overhyped beat that Pharell threw his way. With the exception of the aformentioned selection of songs I’m sure no one of any respectable hip hop creed would be seen dead buying, stealing or even using their terrabyte download limit to obtain one of his alleged hip hop albums. His solo mediocrity has been cemented fairly firmly since he dropped 3 terrible albums on Master P’s No Limit Records that not even his ‘fans’ own copies of. It sounded like he’d got a bunch of over processed g-funk samples and hired a television jingle writer to produce his beats.

Don’t even get me’ started on the pimp act? Is anyone buying that shit. If snoop dogg’s skinny ass could be a successful pimp, hell would freeze over quicker than an audience leaving a Weapon-X gig.

What Snoop D-oh-double-gee does I refuse to acknowledge even as ‘urban’. What he does do rather succesfully is rape and pillage the English language to within a syllable of its life, and inject it with more unnessesary z’s than a French-Canadien Scrabble game at a heroin clinic. As his career goes from bad to worse, now resembling a mere parody of himself  (remembering it wasn’t much to begin with) I’m actually hoping Dre never gets around to releasing Detox as I’m sure it will feature the good doctor unnecessarily thrusting this tall, malnourished, drink of water onto us yet again

29 May 5 Permalink

The Sunday Roast # 3 - Acclaim Magazine

Fact - Acclaim Magazine is the Michael Jackson of the Australian hip hop scene. There we said it! Y’all can stop asking what we think of Acclaim.

What started with great potential as Out4Fame has long since slaughtered its street level hip hop essence. To their credit they were representing hip hop in print when the majors didn’t give a fuck (they still don’t). Years went by and shit done changed. The pocket sized zine got a bit a of celebrity, a rush of blood to the frontal lobe and started to back itself. It booked in for some surgery, a nip here and an enlargement there and then started hanging out with the cooler kids with limited edition cock-rings. What we were left with was a magazine that was a comical version of its former self. This walking corpse of a hip hop magazine (the white kiddy fiddling Michael Jackson, for those keeping track of the analogy at home) is Acclaim Magazine. 

At this point its origins are inconceavable to most. If Out4Fame is pre-Isreal Palestine then Acclaim Magazine is the Gaza Strip. The only difference being no-one wants to steal Acclaim mag. What was a once a sought after hip hop bible for the Australian youth has become an Ikea catalog for ‘urban’ scenesters with tight jeans and flat brimmed hats and pirate tattoos. How did things get so bad? Where did they go wrong? Was it simply a case of over-exposure to Weapon-X and Ken Hell’s terrible music that short circuited some wires? Or did one of those surly kiwi’s smack Montell upside the head at the supremacy battle?

Now we’re not hating just for fun or because we started as a mag - we’re fans first. Without them committing hip hop suicide it would be harder for us to do our thing. But watching its decline is akin to time lapse photography of a Suge Knight having a bowel movement.

Maybe one day they’ll get back to their roots. But I for one will not to suffocate waiting.

27 December 2 Permalink

Sunday Roast #2 - Old Hilltop Hoods

How many people remember the other Hilltop Hoods? Not the the chart topping, commercially viable, hip hop success story they have become today. But the last-millenium, pre-radio, zombie-Organised Konfusion version of the Hilltop Hoods?

Now we love the Hoods, but we also love Organised Konfusion. Obviously so did the boys from the City of Churchs when they took local hip hop to an alarming new low back in 1997. It was then that a couple of then unknown Adelaide boys with the monikers Pressure and Suffa, armed to the teeth with gusto, decided to get into the studio booth and do their best Pharoahe Monch and Prince Po impersonations. It was like something out of a twisted Australian hip hop Simpons halloween special and the outcome of this tomfuckery is the somewhat forgotten (thankfully) EPBack Once Again.

Back Once Again is the EP that should have been created in some Freaky Friday parallell universe, but  unfortunatly for the Hoods and hip hop fans everywhere it wasn’t. It exists here. Theres no Jamie-Lee Curtis, this isn’t a parallel universe and not even John Farhnam can take the pressure down.

Luckily Pressure has the deep and rugged barotone to almost pull it off, but while biting so much style I’m amazed his mouth even had enough real-estate left to breathe and vocalise audible sounds. Listening to Suffa is where things get bad. Seriously, hand the man a fucking bottle of robotussin and punch me the fuck out cause I can’t take it anymore. Thankfully we suspect Suffa’s vocal strain is the one saving grace that limited this release to an EP and not a full blown album of disasterous proportions. Thank fuck he has long since realised his smooth polished flow should be just that and left the Organised Konfusion act in a box hopefully never to be re-opened.

So here is to the Hilltop Hoods and being able to delete your back catalog, but not our record shelves or youtube….

Back Once Again

Shades of Grey

No Redemption

Mankind Must Suffer

Gemini

Back Once Again Remix (with Flak)

19 December 2 Permalink

The Sunday Roast # 1 - Kanye’s Dark Twisted Fantasy

Come on in motherfuckers. Pull up a chair. So glad you could make it. Here, have some brandy, you’re going to need it. Why? Cause it’s the Sunday Roast bitch! That’s right, every Sunday we’re going to offend everybody by putting on a good old fashioned roasting. Nothing is sacred, even artists we love and respect. Trust in Peak Street to deliver you raw and completely biased opinions that others are too afraid to spit.

Kanye’s Dark Twisted Fantasy

I read the most absurd shit the other week. Kanye West’s new album actually got compared to Rage Against the Machine in the 90’s. Apparently they are on some kind of even plane of greatness or some shit. It got me thinking - and you know what? You’re right! Kanye West is exactly like Rage Against the Machine! Only not the RATM that tore music a new arsehole in 1992; but RATM when Zach walked out. Thats right mother fuckers - Kanye West is Audioslave! Musically gifted and ahead of the game, soured only by the poor choice of a whiny overated front man. With that thought in mind I ventured down the winding path of Ye’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.

You gotta hand it to Ye though. He is the master at making you forget how severly lackluster his lyrical prowess can be. There are some good songs in the mix but you still need to come to grips with how nasally nausiating and whiny his rap flow is. Putting himself next to the likes of Rae, Pusha T & Jigga does his abilities less favors than a catholic nun at a footscray brothel.

The albums self-depreciating, honest and even mature at times; but the fact that he is telling us a whole lot of shit that the rest of us already knew about him out weighs any true sense of vunrability. If anything it shows how truely self-indulgent he really is. It’s quite clear that Ye has a grip on his own dick so firmly that his head might just explode if he doesnt let go soon. But with all the critical acclaim coming his way (from everyone from the likes of piss-ant Australian MC’s to Pitchfork) I don’t see him letting up anytime soon. The best we can hope for at this stage is that his people keep feeding him coke and Hennessey until he donkey slaps Jessica Mauboy at the ARIAS.

Enjoy the ride!

12 December 3 Permalink