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Slap-Boxing With Jesus

Gym Class Heroes: Better Than Rap Music

Way the fuck back when I still hadn’t experienced that warm, tingly sensation one can only achieve from blasting off of a woman’s honey pot for the first time, I was my, um, junior college’s go-to hip-hop head. At the time I simply used hip-hop music for a variety of things: motivator when it came time to start robbing these fools Lyfe Jennings-style, background noise during bus trips and, on occasion, comforter for whenever I was going through the proverbial ringer, the latter of which happened more often than I’d liked it to.

Interestingly enough, since that fateful day when I rammed out my stripper ex-girlfriend for the first time (let’s just say that I can tell you more about the Lakers/Trailblazers playoff game that was going on than the actual fucking part, sad to say), I’ve had those moments where I needed to turn to this rap shit more frequently. Unfortunately for me, I’ve been stuck with the likes of repugnant sing-along rap music that’s ironically coming from a region where slavery used to run wilder than it’s current down-low influx.

I could correlate the fact that these god-awful Southern rap songs are a direct descendant of the hymns the cotton pickers used to sing in between gang rapes from their white slave owners, but I’ll refrain from doing so at this time. Lord knows I don’t need the wrath of some non-spelling refugee trying to cyber-pistol whip me in all capital letters.

So needless to say, I began expanding my horizons a few years ago in order to calm my nerves after a long day of catering to YTs. In between rediscovering my love for the buttery-soft stylings of Lisa Lisa and the Cult Jam, I discovered (read: “acquired”) the Gym Class Heroes’ As Cruel As School Children. Like most of my catalogue, I’d instantly pass on it for weeks, but one particularly uneventful day I gave it a listen, and damn if – in all its “emo rap” glory – it isn’t one of my frequently-played joints in my iPod.

A semi-related nod to yesterday’s post, I’m more attracted to the live instrumentation than anything else on the album, and in some cases it powers the album past its mediocre parts. The lead, um, singer(?) can’t really rap his way out of a wet paper bag with scissors in his hands, but the melodies effectively cancel out his jibba jabba.

For someone such as myself who was strictly a hip-hop head, I find it amazing how its elements are slowly breaching into other genres. Let’s hope that not all of it infiltrates though; I’d probably slap the ever-loving shit out of Amy Winehouse if she started throwing Crank (Crack?) Dat-type of foolishness in her songs.

***

As a bonus I decided to throw in my favorite GCH song. Don’t say I never did anything for you humps.

Gym Class Heroes - Viva La White Girl

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