Curren$y on Wiz, Pharrell and The Stoned Immaculate

Saying Curren$y's back seems wrong because he never goes away. The Stoned Immaculate is his second Warner Brothers release, and like Weekend at Burnie's, it presents Spitta at his most accessible. The beats are still luxurious and he still obviously enjoys his own languorous flow, but it's all slightly more precise, 15 percent less weedy (except for "Showdown" - he's post-verbal by the end of the track). As usual, he's chasing paper and smoking as much as breathing, but while the isolation that's implied in his rhymes is touched on here ("Privacy Glass"), guest spots by Estelle and Marsha Ambrosius particularly counter that remote vibe as women enter his musical world.

Unlike former runnin' pardner Lil Wayne, his major label releases don't seem like the things that the mixtapes were building to. Tha Carter II and III pulled together all of Weezy's musical and conceptual obsessions, while The Stoned Immaculate and Weekend at Burnie's feel like ads one more gambit in the Jets Life branding effort, and the truest expression of Jets Life comes on the mixtapes.

Check out The Stoned Immaculate on Spotify.

    

Manufactured Beef?

It's hard to feel the reality in the Young Money Cash Money/G.O.O.D. Records beef. The story trickles along, but almost everybody involved is trying to back away from it, offering endorsements of their side without taking hard swings at the other.

The flashpoint seems to be Drake's lines, "Good ain't good enough / yo hood aint hood enough” in "Amen," the Meek Mill track with guest verses by Drake and Jeremih. "Good" has been heard as a reference to Kanye West's G.O.O.D. Records imprint, and it prompted G.O.O.D. recording artist Pusha T to respond with "Exodus 23:1"



Pusha T fired back not at Drake but at the top of the Young Money Cash Money roster - Lil Wayne. "Throw your flag up / you're hot shit / taking half of everything you get," Pusha says. "Contract all fucked up / I guess that means you're all fucked up / you signed one n***a that's signed to another n***a that's signed to three n***as / that's bad luck."

Lil Wayne responded with the menacingly titled "Ghoulish," which starts, "Fuck Pusha T and anybody that love him."




Beefs often bring out the best of their combatants, and the 1:30 running time for the song is wittier and less forced than most of Tha Carter IV. Still, it's hard to feel like his heart's in the feud. After the aggressive first line, Lil Wayne fights fire with weirdness. Besides, it looks like he had other priorities because only days later he dropped "My Homies Still" with Big Sean from his upcoming album, I Am Not a Human Being 2. Young Money exec Mack Maine also tried to downplay the beef, but he couldn't do with without taking a backhanded swipe himself:

if a gnat or a fly keep flyin' around you, eventually you gonna swing and swat it and just get it out the way," Mack said, using an analogy in which Pusha would play the insect. "Sometimes you swat it and the gnat dies; sometimes it just go away. ... You can keep flyin', just fly somewhere else, though. We chillin'.


Big Sean has done his part to dismiss the conflict. He is on G.O.O.D. "I feel like we need to come together and put all that aside," he said. "Because I work too hard!" Elsewhere, he said:

I think beef is weak. Crack is wack. I don't encourage that. Yeah, I'm cool with Pusha T, I'm cool with everybody. The thing is, people gotta understand that we got no point in beefing. We got families to take care of, we got moms to take care of. I ain't about to be over here arguing with nobody. We all on the same team. We all young men, black men, black, white, it doesn't matter, but just entrepreneurs trying to get it.

Pusha T hasn't made peace, but he hasn't stoked the fires either. Last night he was asked about the beef at the Hot 97 Summer Jam in New Jersey, where he didn't talk about it in interviews or onstage.

Behind the scenes, it's hard to imagine that there isn't a long-standing sense of rivalry, but someone's going to have to feed this thing if it's going to get musically interesting.

More Girl Trouble and a WTF

At the Grammys, Whitney Houston remains sad and pathetic. A bad wig, bad plastic surgery, and bad brain.

... and seriously - is the only way New Orleans musicians can get on the Grammys is as Katrina victims? Lil Wayne had the top selling album of the year and won Grammys for "Lollipop" and "A Milli," but instead he performs the middling, Katrina-themed "Tie My Hands" as part of a medley with Allen Toussaint and the Dirty Dozen with Terence Blanchard. As it went on, the backdrop showed pictures of flooding, as if the waters just receded and we're still just drying out. We're not Jerry's Kids, and the implication that we're only of interest as the survivors of a catastrophe is really insulting. And if they're going to treat us as poor, wounded souls, show our actual damage as it exists today.

Lil Wayne

My essay dealing with Lil Wayne's contradictions appeared yesterday in the San Diego Union-Tribune.

A Trend?

A few months back, Down's publicist pitched review tickets to the writers and editors in the cities the band would be playing, only to withdraw the offer a day or so before the show. The same thing just happened yesterday; I was told by the publicist that Lil Wayne's management had pulled publicity tickets in New Orleans, and that the tickets I had been offered by the publicist weren't available anymore. In this case, the matter was made worse by the fact that they weren't all pulled; the writer for The Times-Picayune was hooked up by the publicist who told me i was shut out. On the other hand, photo pit passes were available. Draw your own conclusions.