HAGS
it always feels like one rapper just owns each summer. i don’t have scientific facts to back this up but it feels this way. like that one summer where fat joe had lean back and dropped the remix with mase, eminem, and lil jon that was his summer. it was his only summer, or moment period, but it was a cool time kinda. rick ross was the summer king like 2 years ago when BMF unexpectedly created a genre with that whole lex luger sound and tall tales of selling cocaine. there’s no rhyme or reason for who owns a summer, unless the big tastemakers in the sky gather around in april and decide who to push but i dont think rap is illumanati like that. or is it?
2 chainz unquestionably was the star of this summer. i’m not sure if that’s more of an indictment of today’s current scene or the taste of the times, but it’s fact. 2 chainz ‘wayne esque’ output along with vulgar and often corny punchlines only helped his cause. a lot has been made about his path to stardom which seems to have come out of nowhere accompanied by a name change from titti boi to 2 chainz. comparable to a middling mid card tag team wrestler who received a gimmick change and suddenly saw himself at the top of the PPV’s.
perhaps the most interesting aspect of his rise to stardom would be how he exposes the dick riding nature of the rap business. he manufactured his own buzz and suddenly got features and deals with the biggest names in the industry. after all the heavy lifting everyone gathers to act like they carried it for you. jay’s business savvy has been rubbing off on kanye who hitched his name to the 2 chainz rocket as soon as he saw it taking off and really added nothing to the formula.
2 chainz has a good ear for beats and i’m a fan of his writing style but i think his debut album suffers from overexposure. having done so many features over the last 6 months it seems like we’ve heard these songs in better versions before. the best song on the album is “Riot” which is months old. if you want some riding music that bumps or a ton of pussy lines this is an album for you. if you want something with some substance there’s much more out there. but sometimes you just want to dumb out.
