Important Moments in June 18 History

"On the playground was where they spent most of their days, chillin' out maxin', relaxin' all cool, shooting some revolutionaries outside the school, when a couple yankees who were up to no good, started making trouble in..."

Our initial thought was that Mac Miller was going to be Napoleon in this situation, but as it turns out, Mac Miller is 5'9—one inch taller than Kanye. (Isn't that strange? Don't you picture Mac as being like, 5'2?) Also, Kanye has been conquering the rap game for upwards of a decade now, a direct parallel with Napoleon Bonaparte's continental dominance in the early 19th century. Although Kanye's by far the favorite to win this sales battle, can there be any doubt that Mac Miller—an unrelenting, ambitious, and combative rapper if ever there was one—is hoping that June 18 will be Kanye West's Waterloo? The routing of Yeezus' forces will no doubt be a game-changer for Mac "The Duke of Wellington" Miller.

J. Cole is a sensitive dude, and before releasing a song about his internal debate over loving and leaving or just loving a girl, he decided that for karmic balance it would help if he were to celebrate women everywhere by releasing his album in the lead-up to the anniversary of Susan B. Anthony being fined $100 for trying to vote in a Presidential Election in the pre-suffrage era. His concern sufficiently soothed, he left the girl, felt bad about it, and wrote "Land of the Snakes."

You can call Kanye hubristic for calling himself "Yeezus," but his initial reason for releasing his album of the same name on June 18 was because he very seriously considered himself on par with the invention of the Checker Taxi—which is even more blasphemous if you really think about it. The Checker Taxi revolutionized the game. 'Ye could only really bring it back home to Chicago if he had Chief Keef and King Louie rapping over a loop of the theme from "Taxi" a la Souls of Mischief.

808s and Heartbreak was about the loss of a woman that Kanye West knew personally. Yeezus's release date pays tribute to a famous lost woman of the past. On June 18, 1928, Amelia Earhart became the first woman to fly an airplane across the Atlantic Ocean. Years later, she would attempt a circumnaviation of the entire planet that would end less well. Although recent research indicates we may be closer than ever to discovering her whereabouts.

What better way for Kanye to celebrate his most recent musical triumph than in tribute to his classic rock forefather Paul McCartney? We've said it before and we'll say it again: "No one Ram should have all that power."

Kanye West has decided to extend his "put that pussy in a sarcophogus" line to an ambitious album-length plot involving mummies, Egyptian revolutionaries, a camel race through the desert, and the establishment of the Egyptian Republic. How King Louie figures into this plotline is anyone's guest, but someone has to rap from the perspective of the zombie Tutankhamun.

It's been almost twenty years since Kris Kross released "Da Bomb" back in 1994 (random Wikipedia fact of the day: "The line 'I drop bombs like Hiroshima' was edited out of the song for the album's Japanese release"), but the hip-hop cold war has clearly reached a boiling point. Hopefully, on the 34th anniversary of the Salt II treaty, all three sides can come together and disarm without J. Cole launching a pre-emptive attack on Blue Slide Park, as he has threatened to do.

The stealth bomber in this instance is a reference to Statik Selektah, whose album Extended Play could, theoretically, upset expectations by outselling Mac Miller, J. Cole and Kanye West combined—as hordes of true-school heads rush to purchase the album, and the world reaches a utopian state of "Eternal Real Hip-Hop." Graf writing covers every surface, families breakdance around the dinner table, and the church reorients around lesser-known saints like Pudgee the Fat Bastard and Kurious. "Wutchu Want Nine" becomes the American national anthem, while boom-bap beats are force-fed to every schoolchild.

Every time Mac Miller dons a hoodie and sunglasses, he's paying homage to the original white dude in a hoodie and sunglasses, a true American trendsetter and counter-cultural anti-hero. Now, by releasing his album on the date of his hero's indictment, Miller is joining a tradition of political protest dating back to Tupac's shout out to political prisoners at the end of "White Man'z World."