This Is Why I'm (Insert Pun Here)
Mims' new album is called Music is My Savior (Sidebar: I thought Pitbull would have copyrighted turning proper nouns into bad acronymic rap album titles by now). I haven't heard it and I don't plan on hearing it. What's got me all twisted up is just the name itself. Not the who, what, where or when (although those also); I'm more concerned with the why.
"This Is Why I'm Hot" is pretty standard fare in terms of what we've been getting from debut rap singles recently. I'm basically referring to "It's Goin' Down" and "Shoulder Lean" here, and both are enduringly great songs that will be inextricably tied to each other, in my mind at least. More than anything about those songs, I was always curious about the empty threats and empty boasting (I guess "braggadocio" if you will), not because I was offended personally about their possible (and probable) inauthenticity, but because I was intrigued as to why Joc/Dro thought they could get away with this audacious type of braggadocio without someone calling bullshit.
Both Joc/Dro gave off this air that they had already beaten the game at it's own game, that they were just using rap or at the very least passing through it for the quick(er) bucks. This doesn't really surprise me— Clipse and Jeezy make no qualms about this rich before rap type of thing— and it's obviously the culture rap lives in now, so I assumed Mims in the same light as those guys in terms of what I thought he was trying to portray himself as.
Thing with calling his album Music is My Savior is that it makes him infintely more human than those guys, in the sense that if I also happened to stumble upon the number one single in country, music would indeed also be my savior. I don't care about my rappers being relatable, human, real or any of that crap, but I was totally thrown for a loop by Mims flipping the script and painting himself as a slave to the music when "This Is Why I'm Hot" would seem to try and do otherwise.
I never thought I'd say that I completely have no handle on who Mims is as a person, or who he's trying to portray himself as in this rap game, but I don't. This whole "savior" deal has made him in my eyes one of the most compelling personalities of this short year, joining the likes of Gilbert Arenas (R.I.P.) and (pause) Donald Trump. (In the name of all that is holy).
Labels: heat, mims, rappers who aren't fat joe
posted by Jordan @ 7:00 PM
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