New York Strait Talk

Don’t you hate when New Yorkers try to discredit Rap music from other regions like “we don’t listen to that here”? California and Tennessee must have been devastated that the city who bought multiple albums by Das EFX and Drag-On didn’t give any play to Suga Free’s Street Gospel and Project Pat’s Ghetty Green. Ironically, New Yorkers tend to have terrible taste in their own Rap music let alone Rap music from other regions. Lest we forget that New Yorkers prefered Fat Joe to the rest of D.I.T.C and anointed Mos Def as the savior of Real Hip-Hop™. Lest we also forget that New Yorkers put their industry weight behind the likes of Mims and Maino when Max B was hiding in plain sight. And these are the authoritarians whose taste we’re supposed to defer to? LMFAO.

In hindsight, it was obvious that New Yorkers were unreliable authorities on their own Rap music when they ignored Whodini’s I’m A Ho and The Showboys Drag Rap and left it to California and New Orleans to recognise the brilliance of both songs. If we can pinpoint the moment when New York’s superiority complex became a worldwide laughing stock it was 2012 when the city decided A$AP Ferg made music which was remotely listenable. After that, Rap fans only looked to New York to see what was poppin’ there and then ran in the opposite direction. I bet that makes New Yorkers real mad, don’t it? But I bet New Yorkers can’t find a single lie in this post.

BTW, no shotz @ Maino. He wasn’t competition when him and Max B were contemporaries in the late noughties, but he did have three undeniable jams back then: Role Model shoulda been the Broken Language of 2008, Hi Hater transformed Money (Dollar Bill Y’all) into some post-Jigginess, and Rumors is the G.O.A.T Dead Perez gossip song of that era. “I was readin’ the daily news where they said they had flicks of Lloyd Banks havin’ sex with a hairy dude” is a helluva lyric.

Maino – Rumors
(From Real Recognize Real mixtape/DVD; 2005)


Pity nobody has ever identified the sample on Rumors because it sounds like it comes from the nastiest Spaghetti Western ever.