Ice-T
7th Deadly Sin
*4.0*

According to my calculations - give or take - Ice-T says "nigger" 885 times on The 7th Deadly Sin.

Ho hum.

Man, Ice-T used to be an innovater. He nearly created gangster rap. He opened a lot of eyes to a lot of things; like when a black man says "nigger," there’s a good reason. When Richard Pryor released That Nigger’s Crazy, everyone said, "Huh? Can he say that?" And the answer was, damn right he can say it - he owns it now. Richard Pryor helped reclaim the N-word from rednecks for comedy; Ice did it for music.

But that was then - today it doesn’t mean anything anymore. "Nigger" is sung so often in rap, it has become a conjunction, or a pause, or an easy way to add an extra syllable to match words and music; it has become the word between the words that matter. And now you have white skate rats, corporate rock Yo-Yos, and housewives all saying it. Hell, even grandmas are yelling from their bedrooms, "Fix me a sandwich nigga; I’m hungry!"

What happened was, the man got a hold of the lingo, and now rap is dead. If you care to see the body, it rests in peace in the jewel case of The 7th Deadly Sin. Ice has stopped evolving and when that happens - you’re dead. He’s spouting the same boring noise, and has become a caricature of himself.

There is hardly anybody in contemporary rap who compares to what Boogie Down Productions and Disposable Heroes of the Hiphoprisy were doing. Don’t even talk about Gil fucking Scot Heron - who wrote the soundtrack to the revolution and was the pre-cursor to what rap was supposed to be: an intelligent, emotional documentation of the black crisis. Today’s rappers aren’t even on the same planet with this guy and they all owe him royalties.

Yep, rap is dead, but there’s good news - now that the man has rap in its icy grip, blacks will have to invent a whole new genre for whitey to steal. Like a Phoenix from the flames, expect something new and exciting to emerge from the African underground. I can’t wait.

"Young rappers, one more suggestion before I get out of your way You can’t talk respect on every other song, every other day . . . Four-letter words won’t make you a poet. It’ll only magnify how shallow you are and everybody know it."

*Gil Scot Heron - Message to the Messengers

Originally published in the Seattle Stranger 10/99

Kings of Leon
Aha Shake Heartbreak
(RCA)
*8.1*
Goes well with Strokes, Hives, and terrorism.

What we have here is a bit of rock and roll terrorism. Everyone knows that rock music is Satan’s domain. Yet, in recent years there has been a surge of Christian bands who have infiltrated the genre and are trying to dismantle it from the inside.

At first it was blatant, as with bands like Stryper and Petra, whose every song lyrically praised the Lord so that you always knew who the Christian rock bands were. Then they got a little harder to identify, and consequently more popular, as with POD and Switchfoot and countless other not so blatantly Christian bands. But now things have gone too far. Except for the fact that the Kings of Leon named their band after their evangelist father, there are no other identifiable Christian characteristics to this record whatsoever.

The sons of bitches have gone undercover!

Still, there’s no denying, this record is fantastic. You should get it for sure. Just don’t buy it. Otherwise the terrorists win. Steal it off the internet instead. It’s the Satanist thing to do.

Originally published in San Diego CityBEAT Magazine circa 10/05