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Slap-Boxing With Jesus

Def Jam Is The New Koch

It doesn’t take a genius to directly correlate the lagging sales of hip-hop music to the simple fact that the music sucks balls. But now it's gotten to the point where it's so shitty that I won't even listen to my old joints anymore. I never imagined that Amy Winehouse’s Back In Black would get more spins nowadays in my iPod than Illmatic, which is my favorite rap album evar.

It’s easy to throw the blame on the artists’ willingness to make a whole shitload of crap tracks so they can break even. But in their defense, some of them don’t even want to make the shit they end up releasing. Whether it’s shitty rappers signing deals on a regular basis or the pressure of making a club jam the TIs force on them, rappers signing to a major label may not be that pot at the end of the rainbow everyone once perceived it to be.

Back before I realized that stealing tapes from the local Circuit City was a lot cheaper than buying them, I used to look forward to record releases. Off the top of my head I can think of at least six separate instances where I had to buy Only Built For Cuban Linx... when that shit was borrowed and never returned back by random-ass friends. Nowadays I can’t tell you the last time I actually bought an album because I don’t remember. I think it was Hell Hath No Fury, but I haven’t played that shit in months.

There was once a time where every rapper wanted to sign to Def Jam Records because every album they dropped went platinum off the gate (DJ Clue? did it twice. WTF?). Now with Grandpa Simpson running things into the ground over there, your favorite artist can’t even hope to have their album released within six years, much less sell over 100,000 copies. When a rapper’s ringtone sells more than his own album, you know something is seriously fucked the fuck up over there. Is it any wonder that more and more artists choose to go to Koch, where 50,000 will get them the key to the executive washroom?

I think it’s wrong to solely accuse all the artists of creating these botched abortions that plague the radio and television everyday. With more and more albums going plastic wood grain, the pressure is not only on them to at the very least go gold, but also on the TIs to miraculously squeeze blood out of a turnip to recoup their losses. Sure, we can blame all the file-sharing fucks that flood the message boards with new joints weeks before they arrive in stores, but bootlegging has been around since Amistád. Plus, nobody on those things is telling these rappers that “Lip Gloss” is some hot shit.

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