10/17 PLEASE ADJUST THE TEMPERATURE
Drake f/ Gucci Mane – “Believe It Or Not”
I’m so fucking dumb I wear diamonds on my thumbs
it’s a diamond on my dick, so that’s a diamond on her tongue
I can’t feel you baby, ’cause I’m romantically numb
emotionally drained, I came here just so I could cum
Gucci beats Drake at his own honest misogynist game. Via TNT.
And in world news:
“Gucci wants to flood the streets, takeover,” DJ Holiday said. “The mixtape is called The Cold War, and it’ll be a three-part series, [subtitled] Guccimerica, Great Brrritain and BurrRussia. They’re droppin’ Saturday at 10:17 p.m.”
Flocka has a new tape today as well.
October 17th, 2009 at 12:12 pm
this is good.
October 17th, 2009 at 12:19 pm
“BurrRussia”? Gucci’s really stretching on that one
“GuccSSR” would have been better, imo
October 17th, 2009 at 1:02 pm
yea this is good except for the drake part…
October 17th, 2009 at 1:03 pm
Dope ..gucci killed that I wish his part was longer
October 17th, 2009 at 3:31 pm
meh.
October 17th, 2009 at 4:24 pm
^ CLAMS CASINO?
October 17th, 2009 at 4:31 pm
Damn. I download Gucci shit on GP. At the same time, I can’t have any Drake on my hard drive.
Temporary solution: Keep the track untagged. Maybe just call it a Gucci song & pretend I didn’t know who that other dude was.
October 18th, 2009 at 10:56 am
It’s borderline amusing to see these Drake detractors (including you Noz).
Here’s a dude who can rap, stay-on-topic, and craft pop-hits (to date) – something most rappers aspire to do, yet he’s getting the quarantine treatment something fierce.
Since I’m here I also have to say I’m surprised to see so much Lil B support, but nothing for Kid Cuddi – especially since they are creatively in the same spheres. If Lil B lived in Williamsburgh you wouldn’t be able to tell the two apart – musically.
It’s extremely disappointing to see harsh criticism that is based on which crowd likes a certain artist vs. the actual music. In these cases it’s females (Drake) and the ever-elusive Hipsters (Cuddi).
It’s low-grade behavior and I expect better from you Noz – as you are the John Conner of rap journalism. Now go save the world.
October 18th, 2009 at 12:20 pm
I don’t think that’s a fair critique, Thaddeus. One of the main tenets of this site is valuing originality in rappers. Drake does not offer that. At his best he’s a Wayne/Kanye hybrid at his worst he’s a failing impersonator of either. Do you think that he rapped better than Gucci on this song?
And the glaring distinction between Lil B and Kid Cudi is that one of them knows how to rap well.
I’m open to check counterexamples if you have them. But I listened to both So Far Gone and Man On The Moon and the rapping was rarely better than forgettable.
October 18th, 2009 at 2:08 pm
kid cudi is the worst rapper to ever release an album on a major.
October 18th, 2009 at 3:06 pm
Drake CAN rap, and not only that, he does rap with competence on more or less everything he puts out, but the guy is just so fucking boring, and as Noz says, such an uninteresting carbon copy of little pieces of different rappers who I never liked that much in the first place, especially Ye.
October 18th, 2009 at 3:36 pm
I think it’s a fair critique to say that Drake patterns his rhymes after Kanye and Wayne, but that doesn’t make it less-than-quality. It just means that the source for his template is trace-able. He’s young and has a lot of promise (in my opinion).
I do like his verse better than Gucci’s here, but that’s just what it is. When I hear Gucci I’m not thinking “wow that’s never been done.” He’s just part of the continuum as well. With that said I’m not mad at him either.
The “originality” argument doesn’t neatly fit into the cannon/continuum argument (that you make here quite often) because you need both working together to create each-other (there’s got to be a better way to say this?…ahhh…symbiosis?). A lot of artists make similar music at the same time, then there’s a mutation and people start copying the mutant, it’s the nature of innovation…
If we were to compare Lil B with Cuddi the same way we were to compare guitar or trumpet players of equal skill – we’d (or more likely only me) would see that they have similar skill, command, and approach. I think (and I hate speculating) that you just don’t like Cuddi because of his actual content, which is fair-fucking-game, but Lil B’s content isn’t far off from Cuddis’…
I’m not some longtime follower of Cuddi, but the album was like 3.99 on Amazon on the release date (for the download) so I gave it a shot and all I kept thinking was “damn him and Lil B are on the same narcissistic-free-form-just-hit-record-type-shit” and really that comes from Wayne. But I don’t see you pointing out that obvious parallel (or maybe you did?) but it doesn’t change that fact that B is making, at times, enjoyable music and he’s still hella young and things will hopefully keep getting better for him…
October 18th, 2009 at 4:23 pm
thad… I don’t usually say this but I think you’re gettin too analytical over this shit… its just music man.. now music to me is everything… but at the same time, its just music..
I heard some dudes on a college radio hip hop station the other night in between playing sets, just tryin to analyze and spit game on everything- some shawn price bullshit and where wale is touring and blah blah blah and I called them up said, you guys should shut the fuck and play some hip hop.
I’m not saying don’t discuss things because they aren’t important enough but don’t try so hard to change other people’s opinions with analytical bullshit… if someone don’t like an artist on here, that’s on them.
I’d just get annoyed with your words of persuasion if you found out I didn’t like dude and we were like face to face co-workers or friends or something and I gotta sit their and listen to you forever about no, this is why he IS GOOD.
I’ve heard a couple drake joints that I thought were coo, but in this case (this song) he pulls the quality down… gucci’s on another level, lil b is on good drugs and drake just has this good two shoes image or vibes that I get that just turn me off to the dude. Real similar to the vibes the late common gives us all.
October 18th, 2009 at 4:24 pm
oh shit now you got me typing just as much as you over some bullshit. sorry folks.
October 18th, 2009 at 5:59 pm
Originality doesn’t necessarily mean something must be created in a vacuum. It’s about drawing on a variety of sources and ending at a new point. I definitely hear traces of Project Pat, Big Gipp, Kilo, Bun B, etc. in Gucci’s flow, but he builds that into something original. That is distinctly different than Drake just fluctuating back and forth between rapping like the most popular rapper and the second most popular rapper.
I honestly don’t see the B and Cudi comparison beyond maybe their attire. B is so far beyond what Cudi is doing on both a creative and rapping level.
October 18th, 2009 at 6:55 pm
I’m just not sure what people get out of Drake. Wayne is crazy and virtuosic, when he wants to be. Kanye is funny and human, in his good moments has some interesting things to say about the black middle-class, shitty mall jobs, fame. He also sucks, technically, most of the time and hasn’t made, in my view, more than 15 good songs since his first album, but at least I see the point of a Kanye. Drake is just this clean-cut competently rapping creampuff who loves girls, girls, girls but doesn’t have anything genuinely romantic, amusingly misogynistic, or clever to say about them. He also has some Ye-inspired issues, or so I gather from his second single, with being successful. The Kanye “I’m famous and it’s really alienating and sucky” shit was bad enough; with Drake, it’s like, maybe you could wait until your second album to bitch about how famous you’ve become? Other than that, boring but okay flow, mediocre but not Kanye-level-embarrassing punchlines, vaguely lyrical lyrics, and a really robust self-image (”the young spitter that everyone in rap fear”) that just comes off as totally unjustified.
October 18th, 2009 at 10:50 pm
@ Tray
You obviously don’t listen to Drake…even your synopsis of the song you heard (successful) is wrong
@ noz
If you can only hear Kanye and Wayne in Drake, you not trying….there’s also some Jay in there
Drake has very quotable and relatable lines and he touches on certain topics in a way that other rappers haven’t, he talks about things so that they sound like they actually just happened to him. thats what that is.
October 18th, 2009 at 11:24 pm
“If you can only hear Kanye and Wayne in Drake, you not trying….there’s also some Jay in there”
My bad, he’s only biting the three most currently popular rappers.
“Drake has very quotable and relatable lines”
True, his condo is the crack spot.
October 19th, 2009 at 8:02 am
de only good thang bout Drake iz when he sez thangs like “im de wun ta paint a vivid picture, no HD” an aywun looks confused trynna make sense uv it.
October 19th, 2009 at 11:59 am
Drake is a rapper I’m phenomenally uninterested in listening to, but if he can really make a girl’s pussy whistle, then he has my respect. (also, how unsurprising is it that he’s acutely aware of his charting, like he’s a metrics-based rapper?)
October 19th, 2009 at 2:02 pm
“de only good thang bout Drake iz when he sez thangs like “im de wun ta paint a vivid picture, no HD” an aywun looks confused trynna make sense uv it.”
LOL
October 19th, 2009 at 3:38 pm
“Drake has very quotable and relatable lines”
True, his condo is the crack spot.
^^^
lol…if that’s sarcasm, I have to ask if you recognize a metaphor when you see one…the line before that is “Feeling for a fix, than you should really get your fiend on”..the drug of choice is sex…I don’t know about you, but replace condo with apartment and i can relate….you’re just as bad as people who dismiss Gucci as a “ignorant mumble-mouth coon”(im sure you know about that rhetoric)
If don’t like Drake cool, but don’t try to break his shit down like it’s generic, cus it’s definitely not. He might be easily traceble stylisticly but he brings his own unique perspective.
October 19th, 2009 at 5:31 pm
Sheesh Noz,
I didn’t mean to inspire the pro-Drake-commentary, but it does feel assuring that I’m not the lone-wolf on this one…
BUT
I feel there’s some inconsistency here -
you shun Drake for having traces of Kanye/Wayne-isms, but Lil B is clearly following Wayne’s blueprint of:
Volume freestyle output
Meandering on then off storytelling
Loose delivery
Rapping over anything
and he’s getting nearly the same results – some potential & some not-so-interesting songs. But you’re touting him for his promise (which you have every right to and I don’t disagree with your opinion).
However, with Drake he’s not so lucky to get a kind ear. When in actuality regardless of the parallels with Wayne/Kanye (and it’s not on every song) – he’s making polished songs with strong-hooks, but instead you view him through the shit-covered-lens.
With Lil B – the relatively unknown artist whom has yet to attract fans that you dislike – the promise and similarities with other artists (I’ll stick by my Cuddi comparison) are overlooked, but with Drake they’re highlighted?
You know I respect your work here and I’m not trying to create a big issue either, but I’m genuinely disappointed that I didn’t hear about Drake here (whenever he came out – extra late pass for only hearing his mixtape 2 months ago) and I’m wondering why? There has to be a better reason than “originality” or too close to Big Rappers 1 & 2, right?
With that said: it’s your blog, your preferences, and maybe I’m asking for too much?
October 19th, 2009 at 5:42 pm
Yeah I don’t really feel obligated to defend my disdain for Drake against every rap artist I’ve ever supported. Suffice to say he just doesn’t have “it.”
(”It” being “the good taste to not rap about his own ass crack.”)
October 19th, 2009 at 5:42 pm
Also this idea that my interest in an artist is swayed by whether or not I like their fans has one major flaw: I don’t like most people.
October 19th, 2009 at 6:30 pm
Fair enough
October 24th, 2009 at 2:37 pm
“nico
^ CLAMS CASINO?”
yes sir
“DR. NO
Damn. I download Gucci shit on GP. At the same time, I can’t have any Drake on my hard drive.
Temporary solution: Keep the track untagged. Maybe just call it a Gucci song & pretend I didn’t know who that other dude was.”
^^^ if anybody wants a file of just the first about 45 seconds so u dont have to go in and change it on ur ipod everytime lemme know ill make it!