Best: “Hello Good Morning (Remix)” by Diddy – Dirty Money feat. Rick Ross & Nicki Minaj
Listening to Diddy rap is like watching him dance: he is clearly trying to hard, and every move is almost scarily unnatural, but a mix of ego and legitimate talent make it fascinating to watch and listen to. His verse at the end of this remix of the second single of his Last Train to Paris project is definitely the highlight. This despite being riddled with hints of his rising age: “How fly is he? / Your baby mama cry for me like Jodeci”. It’s a good line, but it’s been almost twenty years since “Cry For You”, and the reference would lose the young listeners he’s gunning for, if those young listeners he’s gunning for cared at all about lyrics. Still, his two back-up singers keep him young and string together these three verses together seamlessly. Nicki Minaj will keep him young too; her verse is characteristically erratic, but that’s half the fun. “Last time I checked I was bubblin’ out / I gotta turn down shows out in Dublin now”, she brags after recovering from a strange opening rhyme. Hers is a new brand of ego, and Diddy’s is so old that we haven’t seen it in long enough for it to feel new. Rick Ross is in the middle, which makes his verse the lowlight, but it’s right in the beginning. Listen up after that; Diddy and Minaj are so undeniable that they make it seem likely that the future of hip-hop belongs to the misfits.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OciO2MPnmzU
Worst: “Not Afraid” by Eminem
Forget the singing, because it’s obviously awful. Let’s focus on the parts of the song that actually had a chance of not being terrible. Em informs the listener in the second line that “You won’t take the sting out of these words before I say them”. And no, I won’t; he already did. I mean, hasn’t he made this song, like, a billion times? “Beautiful”, “The Way I Am”, “Cleanin Out My Closet”; I’m so sick of Eminem cutting the crap and telling it like it is, surprising us with how serious he can be. By now, the way to really surprise his audience would be shooting a video that doesn’t involve him jumping off a tall building, or wandering through the sad, gray streets of Detroit, connecting with the “real” people with a determined, stern face. He can still rap, but why do I care? It doesn’t matter how fast you talk, there’s a limit to how many times I can listen to someone say “YOU CAN’T HOLD ME DOWN!!!!” and he passed it a long time ago. Also, there are some pretty terrible lines in here. Most notably, “Like a ‘fuck you’ for Christmas / This gift is a curse”. Gawd. I hope this isn’t how it ends for Eminem.
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