Monday, November 2, 2009

This Guy Lives In My City



I've never heard someone with absolutely no skills at all. When people say this or that rapper is boring/crap/the worst evah, they usually mean he's substandard compared to Ghostface or Q-Tip. At a local battle or spitting over a borrowed beat, he'd probably do just fine. This guy, however, has a flow like none I've ever heard before. He doesn't really observe the traditional rules of rhyme or even rhythm - that's how far past your petty notions of good taste and convention he is. He's out there. He doesn't even have to make sense. He's walking into a crowd and firing a gun. Or posting a video of the same act on youtube, which is much the same thing in our age of remove.

In fact, I'm going to come right out and say I've never seen anything like this before. Ever. I've seen hip-hop clips bogged down by too much inadvertent self-parody to stand up straight. I've seen some truly odious local hip-hop. I've seen youtube would-be fame before. But nothing even close to this. It's like a fever dream of power and talent, stripped of pretense and drowning in a sea of rock bottom production values and delusion. I can't stop watching. I think it's a work of genius.

Rae To The Motherfucken D Y'all...

P.S. If you fail to find this is rib-tickling as I do, I sincerely apologize for wasting just under seven minutes of your time.

5 comments:

  1. I have written the name Raed Melki in my notebook. I can't see him lingering in the do-it-yourself backwaters of youtube for much longer. And it isn't just the music - near lisping efffs only ever-so-slightly undercutting a raw street sound as potent as anything from Miami, California (sic), it's the urban realism of the introductory narrative that really caught my eye.

    A crueler man might suggest that Melki and Billcock watch Video Hits with the sound down, but I'd prefer to commend Melki for referring to the women in the clip as "girls" rather than "hos" (which it now occurs to me may have scanned better). Because that is progress. Ever so slight, but progress none the less.

    Hilarious.

    Regards,

    John.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Raed rejects standard misogynist nomenclature John. He's too fucking original for that. He's a romantic to the Motherfucken C, and if that don't vibe with your standard patriachal position, you can keep rollin' bitch.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I remember in, like, year 7, being impressed with Snow's "Informer". You had no idea what the guy was saying, but everyone else seemed to like it, & there was something cool about not being able to understand a word. Hey, it was catchy.

    But this guy? Fuck. He takes it to a whole new level, then turns it up a notch (or something like that).


    And I love how in almost every shot he looks at the cameraman..."is that thing on?...are you getting all this?...cos I aint gonna do it again ya hear?...what's that red light mean?...is it recording?"

    ReplyDelete
  4. Mark - his constant nervous off-camera looks killed me too. It's the filmmaking version of that Chappellle skit about Fisticuffs, the rapper who was shot seven times in his left ear. Every song is just him screaming "Turn up my headphones!".

    Google it - it's funnier than it sounds.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Susan: I am deaf to flow, unless it is a river. But even I can tell that this guy doesn't have it.
    Would it expose me as a pop hoe if I said I don't mind the casio backing track?

    ReplyDelete