- Hip-hop and rap aren’t my area of the musical landscape. I listen to most every kind of rock you can list, but the number of rappers on my iPod can be counted on one hand. However, one hip-hop artist I always have time to listen and pay attention to is Jay-Z. For lack of a better term, his music always seems to be about something more than the usual themes of how tough a rapper is, how many women he’s screwed and how much bling he has. And although he’s retired and un-retired in a fashion that would make most boxers proud, I always make sure to get his new albums soon after they come out. So it is that Jay’s new disc, American Gangster, has been released and I’m taking time to talk about it. The album is gritty, real and pointed, just as you’d expect. It takes pointed shots at critics who wanted to use the racist remarks of radio talking head Don Imus as an indictment of the hip hop culture and its often liberal usage of the n-word or in its negative portrayals of women. The album’s title is a salute to the new movie of the same title starring Russell Crowe and Denzel Washington, and the movie was actually a large inspiration for Jay-Z as he recorded. The album centers around a Brooklyn teen getting into the drug dealing world and then getting stuck there, all told in character by the rapper and running like a series of narratives. The musical backdrops come from hip-hop cognoscenti like Jermaine Dupree, Kanye West and Diddy. The standout songs include American Dreamin’, a track that lays out Jay’s hopes, dreams and fears over a sample from Marvin Gaye’s Soon I’ll Be Loving You Again. The backing by Gaye gives the song a soul vibe, but the hard-hitting raps of H.O.V.A. drive the point home. Jay’s one-time rival Nas makes an appearance on Success, showing that rap wars can come to an end and amends can be made. The album wraps (pun not intended) on Roc Boys, a loud, braggadocious song that calls back to Jay’s early days as an up and comer in the hip-hop world. The album succeeds in getting its message across and in being above the pathetic, bubble-gum rap of T.I., Soulja Boy and Fabolous. Once again, Jay-Z is on a different level when it comes to hip-hop, and any time he wants to come out of retirement, it’s cool by me.
- Now not only soccer games are causing riots in Europe, but incidents between soccer fans and police over soccer games are causing riots as well. Soccer fan was in all his glory over the weekend, Gabriele Sandri, a DJ from Rome and a huge fan of the city’s Lazio soccer club, traveled to the northern city of Milan for his favorite team’s game against rival AC Milan. He was stopped at a rest area along the Al Autostrada highway near the town of Arezzo on his way home from the match when a fight broke out between Sandri and the residents of two other cars also stopped at the rest stop. Police came on the scene after hearing the sound of the brawl from across the highway and ordered the participants to stop. They then fired warning shots into the air (good call, Italian police, you always want to start discharging firearms in tense situations as your first resort) and one of the shots caught Sandri in the neck. All three cars then left and headed out onto the highway, including Sandri, freshly wounded and on his way to seek medical help. Unfortunately, an ambulance crew was unable to revive him and his death sparked a riot that would make even the most hardcore soccer fan proud. Hundreds of fans descended on a police station near Rome’s Olympic Stadium, storming the yard at the station, throwing rocks at passing police cars and smashing windows at the nearby Italian Olympic headquarters, with at least 10 police officers and one TV cameraman injured in the melee. What the I.O.C. did, I don’t know, just wrong place, wrong time, I guess. But that’s the beauty of soccer fan. He doesn’t bother to discriminate or make designations as to who actually deserves retribution or who was actually involved in a situation, or even if any actual wrong was perpetrated. Soccer fan becomes angry and he’s looking to riot, period. He will smash anything in his path, set anything on fire that will burn and throw whatever heavy object he can find at anything in his immediate vicinity. You either get out of his way or you’re gonna get hurt, period. Soccer fan just loves to riot and any reason at all will suffice when he’s itching to cause trouble. Great job on going soccer fan, Italian soccer fans, you all are beautiful.
- Virginia: Vain morons live here. Sorry, Va., but I didn’t say it, statistics showing that your state leads the nation in most vanity license plates issued did. Approximately 930,000 vanity plates are currently on vehicles in Virginia, which works out to about 1 of every 10 vanity plates issued in the entire country. Statistics provided by the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators (known for their crazy keggers and raves, from everything I hear) reveal that about 1 in 6 Virginians have a vanity plate on their car. Clearly, the state has a whole lot of people with too much money and too few IQ points, because vanity plates are one of the most moronic things you can buy. You don’t even see them yourself when you’re in your car, you can’t wear them, watch them, eat them, drink them, use them to go online, make calls with them or cook dinner with them. Think about it; most days you don’t even really look at your license plates, yet you feel it’s important enough to pay $75 extra or so to have plates that spell out some stupid message in a hackneyed language because the word(s) you really want to spell are too many letters? Excellent choice, vanity plate owners, excellent choice…..
- In some respects, you have to admire Hugo Chavez, because clearly this dude has a brass pair and he’s just charging full bore ahead no matter how many people hate him and how little people think of him. After King Juan Carlos of Spain told him to shut up during a summit of Latin leaders in Chile last week, Chavez fired back at the king, saying Carlos knew in advance of a 2002 coup that briefly knocked our boy Hugo from power. He went on to say that the king backed interim president Pedro Carmona and appeared at Venezuela’s presidential palace during the two-day coup. Accompanying those accusations were demands for the Carlos to reveal how much he had been involved in the coup, but all of Chavez points were rebuffed by the Spanish leader. Chavez’s challenge is part arrogance (he believes he’s supremely powerful and above reproach), part indifference (he doesn’t care who he offends), part insanity (he’s clearly a little off mentally, with that dangerous, crazy ex-girlfriend vibe at times) and he’s got all the political tact of a drunken Mel Gibson. However, above all he’s a despotic tyrant who rules with terror over his country and tramples on the rights of his citizens, so I’ll continue to side with King Juan Carlos on this one. I hope he was involved in that coup and I hope he’s busy organizing another one.
- Hey Russian oil tanker crew, the Black Sea isn’t called the Black Sea because has tens of thousands of gallons of oil pour into it. You all are now a part of one of the worst environmental disasters in the region in years, with 560,000 gallons of fuel spilling into the sea after a massive storm with ginormous waves split the tanker wide open. What the ship was doing out in a storm with 18-foot waves I don’t know, but it doesn’t strike me as a very environmentally responsible way to operate, putting a ship that could damage the environment that badly with its cargo out in stormy, dangerous seas like that. Officials are already projecting that it could take years to clean up the area affected by this spill, and you can be sure that pictures of oil-drenched wildlife and sea creatures are on their way. With the ship stranded several miles from shore by the storm, things turned bad, then ugly, then disastrous. The lingering effects of the storm also prevented cleanup crews from collecting the spilled oil that was sinking to the sea floor. All in all, a thoroughly awful day for the environment, all thanks to one sunken Russian oil tanker.
- It was a flip-flop weekend at the box office just as it was for college football. American Gangster, last weekend’s top earner with a $42 million haul, finished second this weekend to last weekend’s No. 2, Bee Movie, the brainchild of Jerry Seinfeld. After that, the latest lame comedy from Vince Vaughn, Fred Claus, checks in as the third-highest earner, with the Insane One, Tom Cruise, opening at fourth with his new film, Why I Jump on Couches and Brainwashed Katie Holmes Into Marrying Me. Actually, that will be the title for the impending autobiographical film about Cruise’s life. His current movie, also starring Meryl Streep, is called Lions for Lambs. No word on whether the couch-jumping scenes were just cut out of the movie in the editing room or if they were written out of the script, but maybe you can find them in the deleted scenes when the movie comes out on DVD…..
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