Where’s the beef?

First of all, bear with me guys.  The look of the site is a work in progress.

Secondly, I should probably point out the video in this post has mean words.

Now.  Today I’d like to talk about something I must confess I know very little about: beef.

I’m not talking about a cheeseburger’s most crucial ingredient here.  I’m talking about very wealthy people who are into the hip hop calling each other out for delivering fairly weak insults.  I have to confess, it makes no sense to me.  I like to think that if I was worth tens of millions of dollars and somebody said I was ‘ruining hip hop’, I’d either ignore it or inform my critic I respected his or her opinion and continue the search for an engineer willing to build me a functioning jet ski made of solid gold.

Not so for Soulja Boy, who to be fair is about twelve years old.  I hadn’t realized that.  When rap legend (and coolest thing to happen to Law and Order, maybe ever) Ice-T made it known he felt modern classics like “Crank That (Soulja Boy)” weren’t necessarily moving hip hop along a particularly artistic direction, the young man responded with this:

Note the morons either side of him.  Also note: the closest I ever came to any cultural experience, or even knowledge, of gangster rap was Sonic Youth’s “Kool Thing”.  Even I know who Ice-T is.  This kid goes to wikipedia, and still misses the point completely.  Being old is apparently also the funniest thing, ever.

All of this is making me realize I’ve made a huge mistake in my life ignoring hip hop.  I don’t like rap music, but I’ve been missing the coolest soap opera going.  This stuff happened months ago and I’ve only heard about it now.  I don’t have it in me to post Ice-T’s response to the video, but suffice to say that Ice-T is ‘caked up’, Soulja Boy will suffer ‘ramifications’, though I can’t be clear on whether Ice means he’s going to be shot or just get bad looks at hip hop parties, and Ice-T felt so bad about insulting such a young man that he apologized and then got his sixteen year old son to repeat the insult.  How awesome is that? Do you know what I would have given to see Chris Cornell call out Eddie Vedder for some meaningless jibe?

I’m just a bit depressed that Soulja Boy is a moron.  Deep down I wanted to believe he was reading Kafka in between ‘writing’ the worst song since “Who Let the Dogs Out” (sorry Soulja, your song being dirtier doesn’t make it any cooler), but then maybe this really is all part of the act.

… It’s not, is it?