Before Boring You To Death
I changed my mind...

Now I realize that I may have been getting a little too redundant.

Seriously though, I was going to mention something about hip hop.

To me, hip hop has become as faceless as techno was a few years ago. It's not that it's bad, or that there's nothing worth listening to. It's just that the shining stars tend to get swallowed up in the sea of mediocrity.

Turn on any hip hop station. Listen to it for a while.

I swear to God, unless you follow the stuff religiously, you will begin to have a tough time distinguishing one tune from the next, or who the artist is. It's all pretty listenable and usually has at least a little more personality than modern r&b music, but there's just very little that's distinct anymore.

You know, like when you listen to Miles play the horn, you knew it was Miles. Or Jimi on the guitar, you know it's Jimi. And you tell me when you couldn't tell that it was Barry White singing.

Again, I'm not saying that you can't tell a Jay-Z from a DMX from a Talib Kweli....but...

Ok, take No Limit Records a few years ago. I was working in music stores at the time, so I got to watch this in action. Keep in mind, CD burners and ripping music existed, but not nearly in the widespread fashion that it does today. So this involved buying these discs....buyin' them...at full price.

To start with, I guess I'll have to say that Master P was a marketing genius. He produced a product of a certain quality, and fed rabid fans what they wanted. He continued to hold on even after flooding the market with a steady barrage of titles that no one could really keep up. Personally, his only true fault was that those discs had some of the worst album art ever visited on music. It was an unholy marriage between a bad photographer, cheeseball subject matter, and some drunk guy with Photoshop.

With what I'm about to say next, I don't wanna pick on No Limit, but because of how widespread they were, it made them easiest to spot.

Like I said every week, there would be a handful of new titles by their stable of artists. Everyone one of them featured all the other artists. Kids would seriously come in and ask for a new album by the guy who had just put one out two weeks before. Usually the kids were a little ahead of schedule, but looking at the release chart, sure enough, there'd be one coming out in a couple more weeks.

Now like I said yesterday, kids would buy up every one of them, and in my mind I know that they can't all be good. There's just too much, and it's coming out too fast. Sure enough, we listened to some of it in the store, and there was just no development or difference from one album to the next. Some was ok, some was bad, and it rarely went much above or below whatever standard it set.

The funny thing is, being an avid music buyer, I'd hit the used shops every now and again. Inevitably, last week's No Limit bestsellers would be choking the Rap bin. The next week it be the current week's bestsellers and so on. It was all but disposable.

Not a one of them appeared to be De La Soul's Three Feet and Rising, Public Enemy's Fear of a Black Planet, Wu Tang's Enter the 36th Chamber, or any of the albums that were still strong sellers years after they came out.

What happened? Hip hop was all based in an urban statement. It was supposed to be a new voice. Now it seemed to be throwaway within 7 days of it's release. And this was all before 'the scene' became a huge crossover market amongst kids, clubs, and clothing. Now, it's just as bad, if not worse.

Now you may think The Temptations and Aretha Franklin sing some old tired sh!t, but I'd be willing to bet that in 100 years more people will still be listening to them as compared to Soulja Slim or C-Murder.

And in a weird way, I feel really sorry for anyone that really wants to get into and try to succeed in that music scene. If you don't have any real originatlity, charisma, some good solid business sense, and staying power, your career is gonna have the longevity and worth of a pack of Pokémon cards.

I'm serious.

In fact, that cracked me up not too long ago when reading articles with these @$$holes who planned on financing their kids college with those stupid cards. This one guy, I remember, kept a brief case with all these rare gold-foil cards stashed away in his attic. Looking back, that may have been one of the first instances that clued me in to the general idiocy of people.

It's kind of like ".com" stocks. If you didn't know anything about the internet or internet companies (and most of these companies didn't seem to know anything about business either), then you didnt' have any business investing your hard earned money it. Investing in collectibles is probably even worse.

Most people I know who are into collectibles are into it because they've got a vested interest. I've bought, and I own some valuable comics...but I also read comics. I read those comics too. Just because they're worth money doesn't mean I can't enjoy them too. Anyhow, I can invest something in comics because I'm a regular part of the market. I know what accumulates worth and what's forgettable trash (though it may be wildly popular at the moment).

I actually had a funny conversation with director and comics reader Kevin Smith at a comic's shop here in LA. Me, him, and the shop owner were talking about the CGC graded comics and how stupid a concept it is. For those of you who aren't geeky, it's a company that will grade your comics and seal them in a plastic case for all posterity. Hmmmm....Well, comic books open, they have a story and artwork on the inside too. And for any of you that deal in comics, magazines, books, or any collectable paper product know, though the air is damaging, if the stuff never breathes and is suddenly exposed to air....well, it ain't pretty. So that Spider-Man #2 you've got sealed up, well no one'll ever get to read it again without destroying it.

I mean baseball cards I kinda get. Even sealed, you can still see both sides. With a comic, you lose everything of value on the inside. You get the cover, and whatever hokey sh!t they were advertising in 1964.

Anyhow, back to the conversation: We also were talking about how some of these sealed books sell on line for hundreds of dollars. Stuff like Spawn #1. Well, yeah, all sealed up, a popular #1 issue might seem like a good investment. Anyone who collects the stuff though can tell you that there was such a glut on those books, that you can find that #1 by the hundreds in $1 bins all over the country. It's only worth is what the owner ascribes to it. 100 years probably aren't gonna be enough for that thing to acquire enough value to pay for you kid's college. The point we all agreed on is that anyone investing in comics who knew nothing about comics was likely a moron no matter how intelligent they were about the rest of the world.

(I didn't mean to name drop, it's just that it was a good discussion, and Kevin just happened to be spearheading it.)

Thing is, there are a lot of comics that have a great amount of worth, or good potential to gain in worth. They're an established collectable of value, just like baseball cards or movie posters. I can see investing in them if properly educated.

Pokémon...? Well first of all, it's not a baseball card, it's part of a game. Second, didn't anyone notice the fact that it suddenly came out of nowhere, and was suddenly all over the fricking place? We all know what fad means right? Third, I guess in the heady fervor of it all people forgot two important words: Beanie Babies. (There were and are a lot more of this fad bullsh!t type crap, that's just the one I remember as being just before Pokémon.)

I remember watching some mother pay $90 or so for her daughter to get a single Beanie Baby. It was a stupid one two, and I recall thinking, 'That's like a miniature stuffed animal. Down the street there's a dude that'll sell me a teddy bear bigger than me for that price.' There were even stores that popped up to sell these things (I love the fact that I'm saying because there are people who probably weren't old enough to remember these things and it's not even from that long ago.) In a flash, it was all over, no one cared, and suddenly people couldn't get rid of these things.

Now, I'm sure there are some people out there who still have them, and like their cute little collection regardless of its lack of value. Hell, my mother still owns a couple she bought. But I'm also sure there are others who have crates of them, can't get rid of them, and are contemplating burning their house down to get rid of them and get back some of the money they wasted on them.

But seriously, back to my way way original point: Have you ever seen the electronica used bin at a good sized record store? It's fricking huge man! And it's all that faceless dancefloor crap that came and went faster than you can blink. Now the electronic music scene is by no means dead but there were a lot of 2nd-rate, 3rd tier hacks, and hangers on that probably thought they were on the road to riches when the bottom fell out. Now no one would use their sorry sh!t as a beer coaster.

Well, a career in hip hop has become about the same thing in my mind. As soon as something new comes along....the bottom's likely to drop out. Hip hop is here to stay, and I'm glad for that. But with the sh!tty state of the music industry, the times gonna come when everybody's gonna be trimming the fat...hardcore.

Better not be mediocre at harvest time.

Know yourself, know what your talking about.

Cheers.