I recently spent some time in LA. To be honest I actually spent more time in Pasadena — the whole city is super clean and actual bakeries are closed on Sundays which makes no sense to me. What’s a better time to go to a bakery than Sunday morning? Anyway. I was working out there, but only insomuch as “working” from a place you don’t normally work allows. Publicists asked me about promos I hadn’t listened to yet and I told them that I would respond if they could just wait a couple more days. And then I would do my work in a vacuum, when I was done, I was done. Nothing carried to the next day.
Pasadena is a ridiculously unhip place, didn’t realize until I was there how I still put so much weight on the concept of a “cool” place or a “cool” album. Doesn’t matter if I decide that it’s cool and no one else does. Some things, like Pasadena, are so uncool that you lose the compass, the instinct to know when some shit is going to hit a lot of the right people in the right way. It didn’t matter though, I spent the larger part of the week compensating for the shitty weather by taking tequila shots, eating carne asada and even standing on a beach without my coat. It wasn’t that warm, but the principle mattered: I was going to feel the ocean, I was going to crawl in a really small cave and almost get washed out by the tide. I was going to have a week devoid of the usual NY hang-ups if it killed me.
(However boring Pasadena might seem, I don't want to come off as That Big City Dude. The guy that talks about how you don't get New York until you really actually no playing around LIVE here, because this is a city like anywhere else and there is a lot of crazy shit in it, but mostly we don't see it because we go from home to work and there is nothing crazy about that, and also everywhere is good. Live anywhere and you can find wild and cool stuff going on.)
Cam’ron recently started releasing music again, but for real this time. Before he would release a song, sometimes a freestyle over, like, a commercial jingle, and we’d all exclaim CAM IS BACK! CAM IS BACK! And then he would disappear again. But he’s back now, and the rap landscape is totally different — good luck getting a push when you don’t have the ability to release a song a day for the next year dude. But maybe it’ll work. Even though we wish he still was, Cam’ron is now uncool. No one cares about New York rap really, no one cares about the south anymore either. It’s down to the big ballers and the internet rappers, no middle ground sympathy from the majors. But maybe this is why Cam’ron will succeed, he’s lived in a vacuum. Since he’s been gone Jim Jones got unpopular and then popular again and Juelz might be suffering the worst case of writers block any rapper has ever had. That’s not even mentioning the beef/not beef going on between all these dudes.
And Skull Gang.
And Dipset Christmas album Round 2.
And Jim Jones’ incredibly smart last minute appropriation of “Pop Champagne.”
Cam was never about that shit, he didn’t make hits, he just made weird-ass songs with hot producers that became hits. Every time he got too self-conscious he failed, and now he’s back and he’s so self-conscious that it’s somehow starting to work. Like when Jeezy started rapping about his own adlibs and everyone flipped out because we had been talking about his adlibs too, Cam knows he needs to be what the people who still care want, and the people that still care are music industry people.
More related than you think: When does Gucci Mane get out of jail?
