Wednesday, June 28, 2017



So this past weekend I attended a cookout with my wife, my wife's sister and her sister's husband. They did us a favor by watching our son over the weekend and then Sunday afternoon my wife and I joined them for a little grill action. The weather was perfect, the water was warm, my son was getting himself tired in the hot son, and there were copious amounts of food and spirits.

During the second half of the cookout, my in-laws were nice enough to let me DJ via my Tidal account, but during the first half of the cookout I was subjected to all kinds of trap music. There were all these songs on the radio that I did not recognize and they all had common traits: The beats were fast, the lyrics were mumbled, there were lots of drug references and the shit was wack.

The song I posted to start this blog was one of the ones that everyone at the cookout (including my son) knew except me--and I was mildly embarrassed. I could not figure out if Future was saying Percocet, Mascot, hurt your self or what. The beat was addictive as hell but Future was rapping like someone who was contractually obligated to spit four words at a time, and the last one had to rhyme. There was no attempt to rhyme two words in an eight-word line like Big Daddy Kane or Black Thought would do, and Future seemingly had little to no obligation to flex his rhyming prowess to his peers or fans. He just kept mentioning drugs, his lack of love for ladies (or bitches as he called them), and performing his best minimalist impression over the beat. I felt old and out of touch, but I refused to act like I was a fan of this non-rhyming ass Future character.

Then the second half of the song came on, and rapper-of-the-moment Kendrick Lamar came on and rescued the song. He shunned the four word per line rap style and decided to focus on more cohesive and complex sentences which is one of the things I've always loved about Lamar. After four or five lines, I started to wonder why Future would even let a dude like Kendrick--a dude who could completely upstage him in his sleep--on this remix. It wasn't the best I had ever heard Kendrick rhyme, but compared to Future, who came off like Tito to Kendrick's Michael (Jackson), he was a genius. I didn't love the song, but I decided that it was decent enough to finish listening to while I was in the pool. Then, the inconceivable happened....

When my family and I drove home, I could not get the damn chorus out of my head:

Percocets, molly, Percocets
Percocets, molly, Percocets
Rep the set, gotta rep the set
Chase a check, never chase a bitch
Mask on, fuck it, mask off
Mask on, fuck it, mask off
Percocets, molly, Percocets
Chase a check, never chase a bitch
Don't chase no bitches


I don't even like the damn chorus due to the drug and bitch references, but here I was in the car wishing my son would go to sleep so I could play this song in the car without him hearing the cursing. Then I slowly realized that this is how the kiddies get reeled in to buying and loving the song. In my teens, 20s and very early 30s, rappers reeled me in with rhymes, beats and maybe a good hook (in that order). But these days, the order seems be the beat, the chorus and then the rhymes. I quickly snapped out of the catatonic state I had been suckered into, and I extracted the elements of the song I really liked. First I played the instrumental, then I played the remix again and fast forwarded to Kendrick's rhyme to justify my infatuation with this song.

The second half of the cookout, I made everything right with the world by playing The Jacksons, A Tribe Called Quest, Usher and Michael Jackson. Everyone danced and smiled, and at least for 40 minutes, no one longed for the wack ass musical stylings of Future and anyone who sounded like him. Advantage Rashad

So how old does this blog entry sound? Should I have added a get-off-my-lawn paragraph?