Passion of the Weiss

The Label’s Trying to Kill Me: Wale, Freddie Gibbs, Pill, Poochie, and Other Totally Outrageous Paradigms (Part II)

November 17th, 2009

Lost last week in the 45-post a day, ad impression shuffle was the video for Freddie Gibbs and Pill’s “Womb 2 the Tomb,” an instant-classic from Freddie Gibbs’ instant-classic mixtape, Midwestgangstaboxframecadillacmuzick. Directed by Skee TV go-to-director, Matt Alonzo, the almost five minute clip is a mini tour de force: a gothic, grainy, black and white blur of Gibbs and Pill stalking the badlands peripheral to downtown Los Angeles, shrouded by graffiti and conquered rivers, old aqueducts and faded tombstones. Their backpacks are bloated with drugs, and everything is swarmed by shadows. The clip derives a tremendous power from its solemn simplicity and concrete symbolism, particularly in context to Gibbs and Pill’s funereal ode to the art of hustling. Had it been released in 1994, it would’ve owned Yo! MTV Raps for months, earned terrestrial radio play, sold 250,000 cassingles, and won the duo face time in various rap magazines with a circulation hovering near half a million. It’s the sort of video that makes you remember why you loved hip-hop in the first place.

Instead, it was sandwiched between Teaser #2 for the next 48 Hours with Rick Ross and Triple C and pictures from a Sean Price video shoot, only to disappear from the home page of the major aggregators within the afternoon. Not to imply that Pill and Gibbs are exactly starving for media coverage. The New York Times and the New Yorker have devoted space to both, and I have a forthcoming feature in the LA Weekly on Gibbs. But despite the fourth estate attention, a salient problem persists–namely, how meaning and impact are perpetually blunted by the deafening babble of the Internet (and not in the good “perpetually blunted” way). It feels like very little matters, and when it does, it lasts only a news cycle. With listening patterns more diffuse than ever and even the most tin-foil hatted dissenters allowed a voice, there’s a sense of free-for-all, the atomization that Sasha Frere-Jones spoke of in his New Yorker essay, with rap fans clustering in like-minded hives, content to crown Wacka Flacka or Tanya Morgan the next to blow, depending on your acceptance or aversion to twang.

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The Label’s Trying to Kill Me: Wale, Freddie Gibbs, Pill, Poochie, and Other Totally Outrageous Paradigms (Part I)

November 11th, 2009

167-the-itchy-scratchy-poochie-show.jpg

Bart: Hey, I know it wasn’t great, but what right do you have to complain?
Comic Book Guy: As a loyal viewer, I feel they owe me.

Bart: What? They’re giving you thousands of hours of entertainment for free. What could they possibly owe you? I mean, if anything, you owe them!
Comic Book Guy: Worst. Episode. Ever.

A few years ago, before Lonely Island completely flipped the archetype for rap satire in the post-Weird Al age, several Hollywood executives and agents expressed interest in turning The Passion of the Weiss into an Internet Television show, something akin to The Daily Show but for music–with parodies, interviews and trips to far-flung festivals for drug binges on the corporate dime. Considering the economic crash hadn’t occurred and corporate brass were willing to throw around wads of cash at this new-fangled Internet thing, it seemed like a decent enough idea. Lame, I know, but there was a point to the phrase, “get rich or die trying,” and journalism certainly wasn’t aiding or abetting.

So with apprehension, I took a few meetings, with the goal of getting the money to turn my notion into a concept and later turn it into an idea. At first, the executives filled my head up with all the stereotypical buzz words you’d expect to get a rookie hyped: creative freedom, spontaneity, “wild and off-the wall” humor. Right. I even went ahead and filmed/recorded a few things: an interview with Ghostface where we attempted to get high before UCLA security stymied the plan, a parody rap song, and other scatter-brained ephemera that probably weren’t very funny. Somehow, the meetings progressed to the point where getting money for  a pilot seemed like a reasonable leap.

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