CHRIS BROWN BEATING ON RHIANNA AND NOW DRAKE
As far as I understand it the singer-turned-rapper Chris Brown recently got into some kind of altercation with the tween soap opera actor-turned-rapper-turned-singer-turned-rapper again Drake. Details here. From what I gather they’re beefing over Rhianna. Let me go over that again, Drake the dude who basically invented emo-rap is beefing with the dude who beat the God outta Rhianna. The same Rhianna who is apparently doing so much blow that HOV won’t even sell to her anymore Or at least won’t keep her on the label ITS THA ROCK eh heh! I’m not writing this as a gossip column, no that’s not my intention at all. This piece is to serve as a proverbial mirror, or a wake up call to everyone pretending that EVERYTHING about this isn’t absolutely absurd/borderline hilarious/awesome.
Let’s start with Rhianna who is famous because Aliyah is dead, and we got tired of Ciarra. Rhianna is so vapidly un-unique and fills such a generic void in pop-culture that she is completely replaceable, and maybe even interchangeable. To demonstrate my point, picture your favorite three Rhianna songs, now take her vocals out and replace them with either Akon’s or Beyonce’s. Song was just as good wasn’t it? And there you have it. We don’t NEED Rihanna, but she is nice to have and if we ever lose her we can replace her very easily, you know like a pet or spouse Couple that with the fact that she is drafting off Gaga’s eccentric fashion jet-stream and I don’t understand how she’s even stomach-able to the general population. We’re paying Rihanna to fill a void for something that I believe any moderately talented female singer could do.
Rihanna was in a movie that came out y’all! A MOVIE that had Liam Neeson in it! I’m not saying she’s not talented, I’m simply saying she’s not unique, and I find it infuriating that she has to constantly state how unique she is in ways that are obviously attributable to other celebrities. Putting all that aside, and I want to be real clear on this point, Rihanna is uglier than dog shit. If someone could actually make an argument for Rihanna being hot I’d listen, I really would, but no one has ever really fought me on this point and it speaks to the absurdity of her fame, praise, and success. What we have with Rihanna’s hotness is an “Emperor’s New Clothes” epidemic, whereas because she is famous and not overweight people think they’re supposed to think she is hot. If you look at her features individually she does have some stunning aspects to her. But hey Kia’s have some cool features so fuck Mercedes right? Rhianna’s eyes would be enchanting if she didn’t have the forehead of a premature baby with Aspergers/Bratz doll.
I’m not sure which one looks dumber and which one looks more whorish..
Moving on to her current lover (I guess) Drake shouldn’t be here. He shouldn’t be successful, and he most definitely shouldn’t be good at rapping. But yet despite the odds, Drake is not only here he’s dominating hip-hop. (Although I will say I have a theory that hip hop is cyclical and we go through turns where we enjoy rappers who are more pop oriented and eventually we tire of them and look for “harder” rappers. Sales peak with Biggie/Pac to Will Smith, to DMX to Nelly, to 50 Cent to Kanye.) The fact that Drake has been able to rise so quickly and gain such popularity without being turned into an absolute joke says a lot about the state of hip hop and the open mindedness of its audience. Today in the rap game it’s okay if you didn’t first sell drugs, or never shot someone, in fact it’s almost preferable. Lil B the Based God talks about cats and being a deity, and homosexuality, Kayne raps about shopping and being a brat. We’ve reached a point where authenticity is so easy to verify that entertainers only embellish a tenth of what they did in the 90′s; and this extends to the realms of hip hop as much as it does anywhere else. You can’t lie about dealing dope or being a kingpin (unless you’re Rick Ross) because audience’s can google (or bing it if they’re gnar) the facts to confirm them and the falsity of your statements takes away from sound. Art and music should be sincere, and to be sincere it has to be truthful.
Who’s buying Drake albums or requesting his songs on the radio? Rich young white chicks. That is not to say they’re the only ones listening to Drake, they’re just the only people dumb and wealthy enough not to just torrent his songs or rip em off a blog. So, to one of the main moving forces of the hip hop market it’s not crazy that Drake is Jewish, or was an actor and played a handicapped soap opera character, or even that he’s Canadian. Please understand that I’m not saying any of those things as insults, what I’m saying is that the landscape of this genre has changed because of its saturation. How was Ja’rule an easier target than Drake? Does anyone ever think about that? How come Fif and basically everyone else so easily made fun of Ja’rule when Drake is so much more ridiculous. Have you SEEN Drizzy?! How is this dude telling me what to wear in GQ?! He wears gloves for no reason…walking around looking like the kid with down-syndrome they let play football. But I digress, the focus here is on the absurdity of this fight not just the absurdity of the idea of Drake. Drake is beefing with Chris Brown. This isn’t irrelevant…it’s hilarious. Seriously, this is pretty funny.
“Fuck a neck and crutches I don’t need neither! Where my gloves at?”
As absurd as it is that Drake even exists, it’s pretty god damned absurd that Chris Brown still has a career. Remember when he beat the shit outta Rhianna?! Yeah, me neither, #TeamBreezy! You know Bobby Brown, Ike Turner, and Jim Rome are all so pissed that Brown got to beat up a girl and still was able to work with the likes of Justin Bieber and Wiz Khalifa. Truthfully, I’m thankful that Brown hasn’t gotten the pariah status he so justly deserves because I like his music. I mean it’s not like he sexually abused children over and over again and got away with it, then went #1 on itunes when he died. That would be unforgivable if you ask me, unless his music was REALLY REALLY good. Chris Brown has so obviously spun out of control that the fact he isn’t treated like Lindsay Lohan or Charlie Sheen in the press is extremely peculiar to me. For those of you not following his antics here’s a quick elapsed timeline: Brown is super famous cause he’s an awesome singer and a dancer with some seriously cowabunga dance moves, Brown starts dating Rhianna, Brown hits Rhianna so hard she stops dropping number one singles for a month, Brown jet skis with Puff Daddy, Brown dies his hair to look like Sisco’s from Dru Hill, Brown starts rampantly covering his body in the type of tattoos that girl who manage Hot Topic have, Brown snaps a dick pic that goes viral, Brown loses his shit on the Today Show, Brown is super popular again, Brown beefs with Drake, bottles are thrown, Brown tweets that Drake’s security guards aren’t as tough as his, and somewhere Soulja Boy is slowly and carefully nursing his raging drug addiction to Codeine and tall tees.
A hilarious, but REALLY REALLY obvious cry for help.
How has pop culture not exploded?! This is the modern pop-culture equivalent of The Spice Girls getting DP’d by The Backstreet Boys and N’Sync while 98 Degrees watches with All Saints and Monica. Okay maybe not that awesome but still. I need to slow down though. Take a breath. What does it mean that Drake exists, that Rhianna is the most successful female pop star at the moment, that Chris Brown fell from grace and returned to the spotlight with seemingly no behavioral modifications or any real sense of remorse? How do these things factor into my perception? Should they factor into my perception? This bizarre love triangle is an opportunity for all of us to sit back and deconstruct the process of our own perceptions. After all it’s our fault that all these people are famous. So what’s my part in this? Should I feel guilty that I still sing Jordan Sparks’ part to “No Air” in the shower? Or that I have a go to gnarly foot shuffle move for when Brown sings “all you gotta do is watch me just look what I can do with my feet?” Should I be more vocal about how disappointed I was when Childish Gambino rapped “fuckin’ with the baddest, Like we tag team Rihanna?“ I don’t know, I’m so lost help me Based God…please help me.
Definitively, what I can say is that this is most definitely pop culture, but that is not to say that it’s trivial. In fact, this is more important than what Mitt Romney is saying about taxes, because unlike politics, pop culture evolves and so does the audience. I remember a few years ago when God’s Son Nas said that hip hop was dead. He was right, but hip hop didn’t die because of Nelly or Young Jeezy, it died when we threw hypocrisy out the window and started accepting rappers for who they were, and not for how good they were at creating elaborate impoverished back stories. How dare we. If Biggie and Pac were alive they’d…they’d, well they’d be as confused as we all are.
- NL
