What The Hell Just Happened in Music This Week?

Image via Complex Original

Date: September 9

Miley Cyrus has an acting background. This is instructive to remember when considering the video for her new song "Wrecking Ball" because it explains how she does such a convincing job of depciting emotional devastation during the close-ups on her face, but also: it's possible that she asked at one point, out of true actorly responsibility, exactly what her motivation was for licking a sledgehammer. It is certainly a relevant question. As far as shots of licking a sledgehammer go, the ones in the "Wrecking Ball" video are a breakthrough for the form. Ditto for ones of someone in the nude licking a giant chain. In addition for breaking the VEVO record for most views in 24 hours (more than 19 million) and breaking the fake concrete walls of its cheap-looking studio setting, "Wrecking Ball" has broken new boundaries in licking chains in the nude, mostly by being the first case of someone thinking to do so.

Look, I'll be the first to call bullshit on all the prurient critiques of Miley's increasingly sexualized recent performances. Let Miley live. Even if riding around naked on a wrecking ball seems like a really fucking dumb concept, I'm not against seeing a little bit of Miley sideboob, and I'll happily acknowledge that she looks pretty babely. But seriously, licking a sledgehammer? Does this strike some people as an alluring thing? Does director Terry Richardson just see inanimate objects and think "that could use a hot girl licking it?" Would watching someone hump a shovel turn him on? Also, was that sledgehammer sanitized beforehand? Not to kill the fun, but licking tools does not seem hygienic. Is the "Wrecking Ball" video good? Not particularly. Should you watch it? Absolutely. Is Miley Cyrus pretty hot in it? Sure. Is licking a sledgehammer a behavior we should encourage? Hell no, Terry Richardson, what's wrong with you? —Kyle Kramer

RELATED: Video: Miley Cyrus "Wrecking Ball"

Date: September 9

"Life's too short to not go for broke," says Eminem on "Berzerk." And he should know. The Motor City MC has pushed his pedal to the metal his entire life—and managed to beat the odds again and again. At this point he's got enough money to sit back and count chips for the rest of his life. But it's clear that's not what he wants to do. Instead, he's challenging himself to top what many consider his best piece work. "Berzerk" is the first video from Marshal Mathers LP 2, an album whose title makes it very obvious that Em is not interested in playing it safe.

The mere suggestion of a sequel to the album that came stacked with classics like "The Real Slim Shady," "The Way I Am," and "Stan" is a bold statement. But all you need to do is listen to his bars on "Berzerk" to understand that he's more than equal to the task. The video is packed with fond references to a life lived for and through hip-hop. Rap is the love of Marshall Mathers' life—the one addiction he will never be able to kick. When he says, "Let's take it back to straight hip-hop and start it from scratch," he's not just talking about this song, he's talking about his existence on planet earth, and the art form that has made it bearable. —Rob Kenner 

RELATED: Video: Eminem "Berzerk"

Date: September 9

No one but Gucci Mane could offer an explanation for the week that Gucci Mane just had. Unconventional punctuation made it hard enough to understand the hundreds of tweets he sent out between Monday and Wednesday. What touched off such an angry, vulgar stream of words, exposing, if they're true, all sorts of skeletons in the closets of all sorts of rap stars, is a mystery of a whole 'nother category. Even after it ended, after Gucci shut it down and deleted his accout, he stayed making headlines for nearly getting into a fight at the Lenox Square Mall in Atlanta.

We may never know what prompted the three-day Twitter outburst: whether it was chemical imbalance or a well-crafted publicity stunt to generate attention for Diary of a Trap God. But what we do know is that even after being dropped by his major label sponsors at Atlantic Records, Gucci remains an intimidating and very significant figure in the rap community

Pretty much every rapper he named in his rant—from Nicki Minaj to Waka Flocka Flame and the other members of Gucci's Brick Squad crew to T.I.—tweeted a response to the allegations. Even French Montana, one of the guys Gucci has been disrespecting for awhile now, even chimed in to say that Gucci's claims regarding Brick Squad's financial issues were correct.

One of the more interesting aspects of the controversy is how it shines a light on what it means to be "authentic" in hip-hop in the age of Twitter. Tweeting about street drama tends to be frowned upon. (For starters, it has the potential to be incriminating.) When Rick Ross, who was mentioned insultingly despite having a long and friendly relationship with Gucci, was asked about the comments in an interview on Hot 97, he said, "I don't move with that Twitter talk. Real dudes, they link up."

So here we have a man whose claims of a criminal past have been subject to a great amount of skepticism comply with the code that "real G's move in silence." While on the other end, Gucci, obviously more than comfortable spewing out information on Twitter, is someone whose authenticity in this regard has never been questioned—for better or for worse, his rapsheet has always done the talking for him.

And that leads us to the sad denouement of this affair. Late Friday night, Gucci was arrested for possession of drugs and a gun and disorderly conduct and taken, in police custody, to an Atlanta hospital. —Dharmic X

RELATED: Gucci Mane Arrested For Carrying A Gun

RELATED: Twitter Reacts to Gucci Mane's Insane Rant

Date: September 10

From the beginning of Riff Raff's rise, the press has been fascinated by the rapper's mysterious backstory. After all, it's a history ingrained in the very fabric of hip-hop, where authenticity plays a vital, and often misunderstood, role. Critics often deride hip-hop's authenticity fetish as irrelevent, an artifact of a time. But for a marginalized community, authenticity serves an important function for the genre: When you profit from the stories you tell, so the logic goes, you should "actually" have experienced or represent for the communities you talk about. In the 1990s, two major white rappers represented opposing poles of this dynamic: at the end of the decade, Eminem received a Dr. Dre cosign, spoke from a place of honesty about his hardscrabble past, and proved himself a truly talented artist. At the beginning of the decade, Vanilla Ice was on his way to becoming a pop superstar, setting new sales records and prompting fears that white co-option of hip-hop wasn't far behind. Then he lied about his background, attempting to make himself appear more "hood" than he really was. When he was exposed, his career bottomed out almost immediately.

Ben Westhoff's incredibly well-researched expose on the back story of white Texan rapper Riff Raff frames the entire piece around Vanilla Ice, a comparison Riff Raff has never shied away from. Westhoff goes in-depth, interviewing members of Riff Raff's family, old friends, and roomates, creating an extensive timeline that determines exactly when and how a white kid from the suburbs named Horst Simco became the outrageous hip-hop character (and charicature) we know as Riff Raff. It's an impressive piece, and stitches together a story of...

Well, what exactly? If you were expecting Riff Raff's history to reveal that he grew up in the projects dealing crack from a young age—which is not something, for what it's worth, that he's ever really rapped about, to this writer's knowledge—you might be left thinking that he was a fraud. At a certain point, it's revealed that he had what his family described a "middle class" existence. (The Cleaveresque* family picture included in the article was a screenshot from Riff Raff's own Instagram account, and was not hidden.) Yes. So do lots of rappers. And it's not like Riff Raff didn't go "through some things" in real life, either. His dad describes a period of the rapper's life where, "He had guns pointed at his head, that kind of thing. I told him I didn't want to go to my own son's funeral." What do all these descriptions determine? 1) A not completely impoverished background. 2) Some hard, dangerous times growing up. 3) The eventual development of a hip-hop persona. Do we feel like we've figured him out? Can he be definitively described as a minstrel, since he wasn't born this way? Or could it be argued that black culture simply helped him to self-actualize, into the character he was always destined to be? Westhoff, to his credit, leaves us with the question.

The ultimate answer, in this writer's opinion, is: Who cares. The uncovering of his backstory, which is the same as literally hundreds of other rappers, made for an interesting, compelling read. But it hasn't really revealed anything new, or really helped explain anything. Riff Raff's had a few funny songs with lyrical nonsequiters that rank somewhere in between Ghostface's 78th best song and Kool Keith's 43rd. But for the most part, especially recently, his output has been pretty damn spotty. Once you know his schtick, there's not much more to it. Beats like the one Dame Grease made him for "Peppermint Tint" would be better served by a rapper still interested in rapping. Riff Raff fits in with a tradition of artists who aren't so focused on writing, but instead go off of "vibe." Which is fine to a degree; but Riff Raff is a fairly limited talent in that realm. The less sense his "jokes" make, the harder he is to listen to.

But who cares about that, you ask? He's just an entertainer. And that's fair. Although personally, I struggle to understand what is so entertaining about him. Frankly, while I'm sympathetic to arguments that he's mocking black culture, the real sin here lies in the hands of the writers and editors who continually keep this guy's name in headlines. The most spectacular part of Riff Raff's story is that it's basically the same as any other rapper's, give or a take the few who really did come from the bottom. He's just white. And while that apparently still fascinates publication after publication after Harmony Korine, it hasn't been enough to give him any charting hits. Spring Breakers didn't even perform that well in theaters. Riff Raff has inspired think piece after think piece. (Here you are, if you've gotten this far, reading another one!) But the attention feels less and less justified. —David Drake

(*As in, "Ward and June." As opposed to Eldridge.)

RELATED: Becoming Riff Raff: How a White Suburban Kid Morphed Into Today's Most Enigmatic Rapper

Date: September 10

"Niggas say they want beef," said Meek Mill on his 2012 cut "Burn." "Well where the fuck is my burger at?"

Last week, Meek whipped up a Whopper called "Ooh Kill Em," a song with which he responded to Kendrick's filet mignon of a verse on Big Sean's "Control." (Which came out way back in August.) This week, Kendrick hit the stage in New York for the first time since he called himself the King of New York. A crowd 6,000-fans-deep showed up, which is pretty impressive. Yet, remarkably, Kendrick didn't even bother to perform his summer-defining verse from "Control." But he did have some choice words for the competition. "There's one that need to know there's really levels to this shit," he said, referencing Meek's most recent hit, "Levels."

This latest round of fallout to "Control" has once again proven that we as rap fans, much like fans of professional wrestling, live in a state of unreality. (A term coined by wrestling writer The Masked Man). For years, the idea of rap being "just like wrestling" has existed, but with guys like Kendrick making grand gestures of throwing down the gauntlet—not in order to prove any sort of physical dominance, but just to raise the stakes*—the idea of "beef" has become a lot like the beef we actually eat: corn-fed, growth-hormone injected, and very much unlike the beef previous generations consumed. Yet, there's still an underlying tension to all this. One built on jealousy, competition, and a real desire to be acclaimed and respected as the very best at the art of rapping. And that's good.

Soon as Kendrick left NYC and landed home in L.A., TMZ was waiting at the airport to ask him some questions. Kendrick didn't respond when they asked him about Meek's response, but he did take the time to brush off all the other responses saying, "Try harder." We couldn't agree more. —Insanul Ahmed

(*the "steaks!")

RELATED: Kendrick Lamar Disses Meek Mill Onstage In New York City

Date: September 10

Last week, Kanye West released the Yeezus tour dates, getting ready for his first solo road show in five years. The album it will support is one of his least musically form-fitting, one that doesn't naturally lend itself to the club, let alone your typical idea of a rap show. And given the performances we've seen of Yeezus material on television so far—"New Slaves," "Black Skinheads," and "Blood on the Leaves"—more than a little bit of work will have to be done in order to enhance the experience of hearing the album live, as opposed to just seeing it performed. (And if we know one thing, it's that Kanye is always very interested in that kind of enhancement. The visuals for a Kanye concert are reliably amazing).

All of this might explain why we saw Kanye showing up to perform on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon on Tuesday. He kind of appeared out of nowhere, the performance coming at the beginning of a week that ended with a performance by Drake, and he showed up to perform one of the slower-tempo tracks on the album, "Bound 2." Without any accompanying light show.

What 'Ye did show up with, though, was a knockout musical arrangement, including a chorus of kids singing the sampled-hook, and a beebop-scatting Charlie Wilson improvising though his own part. The performance demonstrated that Kanye can still be an energetic, magnetic performer even when his songs aren't blaring, rage-filled, techno-drubbed anthems dressed in overwhelming stage craft. In other words, it indicated that—just like Yeezus, the album—Yeezus the tour will be different from every other live tour in rap, and that we're all likely to be that much better for it. —Foster Kamer

RELATED: Kanye West Performs "Bound 2" With Charlie Wilson and The Roots on "Late Night With Jimmy Fallon"

Date: September 12

Everyone, everyone, even some of the Wu-Tang Clan, is really upset about Drake calling his latest single off of Nothing Was The Same, "Wu-Tang Forever." Why, you ask? Well, because it sounds more Drake featuring Drake than anything Wu-Tang Clan might have ever recorded.

Uhh, logical. Of course isn't not what you wanted to hear. But it's still really good. And chances are if Drizzy was straight spitting like he was in "5 AM in Toronto" over some crazy gritty beat, you still wouldn't be happy.

Why? Because Drake enjoys trolling you, and whether you choose to admit it or not, you kind of like getting trolled by him. He gets on your nerves. But you sort of want him to. He gives you something to complain about. Which is something that everybody needs.

Interestingly enough, when Drake released the trailer for NWTS earlier this week with the OVO motorcade, with horns and drums looped up by Hit-Boy in the background, it occured to some of us that this must be the beat from the song on the album we knew would be called "Wu-Tang Forever." It's triumphant, it's hard, it's Wu-Tang. It turns out we were wrong. But it's nice to know that he's got more in store for us along these lines.

Back to "Wu-Tang Forever," though. Now the members of Wu-Tang have recorded a remix. And Inspectah Deck has voiced his disdain for the original song hours after originally supporting it. Ironically, this is a beautiful Drake song. One with soft, ethereal piano melodies (a sample of a Zodiac track) that juxtoposes nicely against the snippet from Wu-Tang's "It's Yourz" that makes up the chorus. And some very sensitive lyrics that make you think like, "Yeah, sure, Drake, I'll go home with you and fuck you out of spite." And then you start crying over your ex. Plus a "Degrassi High" co-star shoutout! (Mazin Elsadig!) 

Besides the trailer and "Wu-Tang Forever" leak, Drake hit up "Live With Jimmy Fallon" to debut another new song, "Too Much" with Sampha (the London-born singer was previously on "The Motion," and whose own recent EP, Dual, is phenomenal.) The stripped-down piano, played by Sampha, provided Drake yet another opportunity to rap about things that men will relate to and women will envision: "Back rub from my main thing, I've been stressed out/Talkin' to her like back then they didn't want me, I'm blessed now/Talkin' to her like this drop, bet a million copies get pressed out/She tell me, "Take a deep breath, you're too worried about bein' the best out."

He is the best out right now. Get used to it. And anyway, what did you want him to pay tribute to? Two of the biggest influences on his new album, Marvin Gaye and Chardonnay? Because that's already been done. —Lauren Nostro

RELATED: Listen: Drake "Wu-Tang Forever"

Date: September 11

You already know what happened: Hot 97 stalwart DJ and New York rap royalty Mister Cee has been called out, repeatedly, for engaging in various stripes of sexual congress with transgender women. This narrative came to a sharp apex this week, when audio surfaced of him offering money for same. And Cee, who had previously had an inconclusive on-air non-confession about this, was put on their air to talk about it with Hot 97 station manager Ebro Darden. The wrenching, heartbreaking conversation (hold a somewhat hysterical interruption by Funkmaster Flex) involved Ebro trying to talk Cee into coming back to the station after he'd submitted his resignation the day before. And Cee, who still maintains that he isn't gay, admitted to having sex with a transgender prostitute, and said that this is an issue he's sought "help" for. Regardless, Cee promised to come back on later that day, and play his regular timeslot.

Ane did it. And he killed it. He played a set that was indisputably a set of subliminals aimed at anyone listening—at the Power 105 DJs who'd revelled in Cee's problems, at all the assholes on Twitter, songs ranging from "Hi Hater" to "Can't Stop Won't Stop" to Sly and the Family Stone's "You Can Make It Try" and, most movingly, "Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)." It was some of the most compelling and beautiful and insane DJing Hot 97's had on in more than a good while, the kind of monumental music moment that the station used to regularly host, but that's become all-too rare. (Which, it goes without saying, led to theorizing that perhaps Hot 97 had ginned this entire thing up, and were exploiting Cee's problems, his narrative, for publicity sake.)

Even though we know that's not the case, let's just assume for a moment it is. That wouldn't make what happened any less powerful, or any less worthy. Would those means, duplicity, be the most perfect means to an end? Hell no. It'd be devious and crass and even somewhat undermining. But that end, that goal, that moment of pushing homophobia further out of rap by putting to light legendary rap figures whose sexuality doesn't follow the standard rap narrative of straight men having sex with straight women? It's important. Getting there will take everything further, will help it all evolve. At this point, Cee's sexual orientation—whatever it is—is a moot point. The point, more and more, will become that anybody who takes issue with it is an asshole. Cee didn't play a set of subliminals to his New York radio listening audience. He played it to hip-hop.

Or as Cee said, so many times during his broadcast, less an instruction than a meditation, a mantra, but maybe mostly, a prayer: "Just listen to the words." —Foster Kamer 

RELATED: Mister Cee Has Officially Resigned From Hot 97