The Label’s Trying to Kill Me: Wale, Freddie Gibbs, Pill, Poochie, and Other Totally Outrageous Paradigms (Part II)
November 17th, 2009Lost 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.
