presenting...the Bestickered Concrete Pylon of Excellence!

[this was originally published in my other blog on november 30, 2007.]

the delmar loop is a strange place in parts. the main drag is all student entertainment district: shiny bars, shiny restaurants, and overpriced shops. the western fringe is where the loop bleeds into suburbia, that stretch of university city where all the streets are named after prestigious universities. the eastern fringe is where student apartments and hangouts start to mingle with the vacant lots, vandalism, and various urban decay so common a few blocks north and east of the loop.



i was walking past one of these eastern corners toward my apartment a few days ago, when i saw a very strange promotional bumper sticker affixed on a squat, useless concrete pylon.



i've heard of some very strange and unflattering stage names that rappers go by. i mean, a guy even went by "old dirty bastard." i've heard names that are dubious, but never enough to truly wonder what possessed them to choose a name. i've always chalked it up to macho posturing, or at least the desire to sound as hip as possible.

but...da baby daddy? sure, being a "baby daddy" implies some level of sexual prowess...if by "prowess" we mean fertility and promiscuity, with a side of disrespect for any and all women he may have impregnated. "baby daddy" implies deadbeat. "baby daddy" implies nondescript, replaceable...as if it could have been any sneaky, uncaring man in the world who could have impregnated the mother and then skipped away merrily into the sunset, never to return again. a baby daddy is only called that because he's too immature or disrespectful to perform the responsibilities of a father.

call me a feminazi, call me out of touch with the hip-hop world of today, but with all that baggage attached to the term i really can't see why anyone in any culture would want their public moniker or image to be that of "baby daddy." there's nothing cool, hip, with-it, or bad-ass about that image.

i should have left well enough alone. i should have looked at the bumpersticker, boggled for a minute or two about who would actually want to be known as "da baby daddy," and moved along with my life. however, my car-crash curiosity got the best of me, and i decided to pull up kingwingo.com, the website for this aspiring local rapper.

a gaudy picture greeted me, accompanied by a sample of his song "money talks." there's nothing special about the music: it's garden-variety gritty rap over a poorly-produced beat. however, the lyrics are what really grabbed me. as you'd expect from "da baby daddy," however, they didn't grab me in a good way.¹ in his artist bio he claims that "[h]is lyrics have a conjunction of humor and seriousness with a flow that is different and versatile on all his recordings."

his claims of humour come closer than anything else...please, dear readers. tell me if you could keep a straight face if you open up a website and these are the first words coming out of your speakers:

"yeah, this is baby daddy!
a.k.a. king wing!
and i'm gonna tell you, you need to listen to your money sometimes.
money can buy you anything or anybody.
money lets you know if you can afford that shit or not!
you know what i'm sayin'?"

i sure couldn't keep a straight face....and then the lyrics continued on a similarly absurd yet hackneyed vein, with king wing da baby daddy ranting about how "money told me i could buy that lexus/house on the hill way down in texas." this song made two things extremely clear:

• money never said anything to da baby daddy that he couldn't have just told himself.
  
• there is nothing new or clever you can say if you're trying to brag about your money, so don't even try it.

i wondered if these lyrics were a fluke, or if our hero had the capacity to come up with equally insightful lyrics in his other songs. luckily, finding the answer was easy. elsewhere on his website, he features samples of more of his music. i soon found his musings about other topics to be just as interesting and incisive as his musings about money. observe:

• from the song "drink wit me": "smoke wit me/drink wit me, smoke wit me/drink wit me, smoke with me/drink, smoke, drink, smoke, drink wit me/drink with me, burn somethin' that stink with me"
• hey, at least he eventually found a metaphor for smoking.
• from the song "shit starter": "if you don't start no shit/there won't be no shit"
• thank you, captain obvious.
• also from the song "shit starter": "when you see me cutting rocks on the table/or trying to steal cable/what you talking 'bout/you iced up a jury/where you from/you can't wear that shit in missouri"
• there you go. doing coke and stealing cable makes you so cool. just keep telling yourself that. that makes you about as cool as calling yourself "da baby daddy," but you've already done that. and, furthermore, is he really singing about intimidating a court by wearing bling-bling?
  
• from the song "cars/tha clothes": "cars or the clothes/rims or the hoes/what could it be/to make 'em hate on me yeah/what's wrong with you, boo boo/you mad 'cause i wear fubu?/mad because these hoes hang around me like flies on doo doo?"
• that's one way to say that women like you, although i doubt the quality of these women if they stay anywhere near you after an analogy like that.
  

so, congratulations mr. baby daddy. not only do you have the worst rapper name ever, but you also have some of the cheesiest song lyrics in existence. i hereby award you the Bestickered Concrete Pylon of Excellence. i'm too lazy to bring it to you, though, so you'll have to retrieve the trophy yourself. it's sitting in a parking lot at the corner of delmar and eastgate.


***
¹ i'm trying to resist making the obvious joke about da baby daddy's lyrics grabbing me inappropriately.