As someone’s grandma once said, you can take the gangbanger out of the ghetto, but you can’t teach him how to use a salad fork…or something like that. This year marks the first time since 2001 that 9/11 falls on a Tuesday, and rappers 50 Cent and Kanye West have chosen the controversial day to play Whose Dick is Bigger? The artists’ third albums (which both leaked online this week) will hit stores simultaneously, which has prompted the two to puff up their chests and claim they’ll come out on top.
Fiddy and Kanye’s egos have been bolstered by huge album sales and huge critical praise, respectively, but Fif takes the cake. His album was originally slated to come out months ago, but the classy MC pushed the release date back and claimed the record wasn’t up to his “standards” after the first few tracks were met with tepid responses and then declared that he would never release another solo album if West outsells him next week (I urge you to pre-order your copy of West’s Graduation today). The artist who should be known as Pocket Change admitted to MTV that he trashed his record label’s offices after learning that his new video had been leaked and said comparing him and West is “like me putting myself against Michael Jackson’s [album-release] date and then acting like, ‘Woah, it’s a battle between 50 Cent and Michael Jackson!,’ when Thriller sold 30 million records and 50 Cent’s biggest album sold 12 [million], you feel what I’m saying?” Not really.
Releasing an album on 9/11 isn’t the only political thing about 50 Cent. In the upcoming issue of Rap-Up magazine, he acknowledges that George W. Bush has one talent: “He has less compassion than a regular human being.” But just when you think Fif isn’t so hateable after all, he goes and says something inane like, “When I took a trip to Iraq—‘cause I went to perform for the soldiers in Iraq—they had the same vehicles that I ride around in New York.” Yes, little boy, it’s called a Hummer. you’re riding around the congested streets of Manhattan in a gas-guzzling war tank with trim, leather interior, stereo radio, and air conditioning. Makes you feel like a big strong man, don’t it?
In other annoying news…T-Pain, the man responsible for the Video Music Award-nominated, Hooked on Phonics-deprived, inexplicably chart-topping “Buy U a Drank (Shawty Snappin’),” recently spoke with MTV about the irritating voice-enhancing technique he employs throughout the song (and others—he even stinks up Kanye’s next single “Good Life”). He uses Auto-Tune, the software that, for the past two decades, has helped bad singers sound decent by pitch-correcting their recorded vocals. The effect is similar to the more retro vocorder, which uses filters and modulators to turn the human voice into something that sounds a lot like a robot and has been used by artists like Kraftwerk for decades. Only, according to T-Pain, to get Auto-Tune to sound funky, “you gotta sing in a key that’s between off-key and on-key,” which is almost exactly the same description French producer Mirwais used back during a 2000 interview when discussing his use of Auto-Tune on a certain pop superstar’s album. And that brings us to the most obnoxious thing about T-Pain’s interview with MTV: He essentially implies that he invented the technique, one that sounded passé when Madonna used it seven years ago. “You gotta ask my permission [to use it], man. That’s me,” he said. Apparently “me” is Cher circa 1999.
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