The Mastermind
The evidence is everywhere. I calculate it took about seven minutes, give or take, after Steve Jobs finished introducing the shinypretty iPad before the whiny attacks on the wondergizmo began flooding in, how it didn’t have this or that expected feature, how it can’t do live video chat, doesn’t have Flash, the bezel is too big and it won’t double as a meat thermometer, how it doesn’t really revolutionize much of anything despite how it’s, you know, this gorgeous 1.5-pound slab of aluminum and glass that works flawlessly and can perform roughly one thousand tasks in a more fluid and astonishing way than any device of its kind in history. Big f—ing deal. We just do not care. It’s all a big disappointment. Hey, I was expecting to be blown away. I was expecting miracles and transformations and multiple twitching orgasms on sight. Do not come at me with tantalizing promises only to reveal that you can fulfill most of them to a fairly good degree, and not far exceed all of them in every imaginable way. We’re Americans, goddammit. Ye shall know us by the tang of our bitter and untenable jadedness.
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
Game - Bang Along
I’ma take these niggas back, man…back to them number four Jordans nigga them shits was suede you remember them motherfuckers? We had the number four Jordans, man. When them shits got old we couldn’t afford no new ones, man, so we went to motherfuckin Payless and got that black shoe polish. We put so much shoe polish on them motherfuckers tryin to keep ‘em shiny black but them motherfuckers turned leather. Or like when the motherfuckin ice cream truck nigga came through, I remember the nigga name, it was Hector, man. And he’d come through in the ice cream truck and had all the motherfuckin stickers on the ice cream truck, like he’s just ballin crazy out the game, this nigga got stickers of…motherfuckin ice cream sandwiches, strawberry shortcake, UFOs, motherfuckin big sticks, then you ask this nigga “do he got any of them motherfuckers he talkin bout?” And all he got is now’n’laters. What the fuck you in the ice cream truck for then Hector?!?!
I like the outro of this best of all, mostly because I think Game is more intelligent and sentimental than he’d dare let on in his West Coast gangsterisms and Dr. Dre idolatry, but the beat here is incredible and there’s a pretty flawless balance of pathos and alpha-dog-internalized-torment.
