She likes my tone, my cologne, and the way I roll....Pegritz, you ain't no G.

The new Snoop Dogg record is...good, but frightfully inconsistent. Here're my basic thoughts on it:

Snoop Dogg is not the master wordsmith people portray him as: his rhymes are fairly simple, fairly repetitious (I mean, how many times can you use the phrase "S N Double-O P, D O Double-G" in any context before it starts to get a little hackneyed), and fairly boring--but his delivery and persona are really what makes him stand out. Backing music plays a great role as well, and on this album...well, some tracks are really on one ("Signs" and "Perfect" are total fuckin' booty jams), but some are just execrably boring and often flatout annoying. Take the current hit single, "Drop It Likes It's Hot." Bland drum loop, ANNOYING hissing in the background that might be some kind of weirdly-effected hihats, and just plain tedious production. I don't give a shit what many would say, the Neptunes are the most inconsistent production group I've ever heard. The track they scored for Gwen Stefani's solo album was just BORING. But, at the same time, they can kick out total jams like "Signs." Seems to me they'd best stick with '70s big-band funk stylings rather than stripped-down contemporary hiphop, because when they do the latter they just come across sounding amateurish--I mean, I could bang out that exact same kind of programming ten years ago using MODEdit, a DOS program.

The whole gangsta persona is starting to get a little stale, too. Christ, how many times can a motherfucker rap about givin' no love to the bitches and bustin' caps in the haters? OK, I get it already: bitches ain't shit but hoes and tricks, you're definitely the Big Boss Dogg (that can't be any more obvious), and pussy is better than money. The thing is...Snoop Dogg can be an incredibly amiable fellow. Underneath the gangbangin', bitch-hatin' exterior is a totally likeable guy, who actually comes out to play on the first track "I Love to Give You Light" and the last, "No Thang On Me." It would be totally cool if he'd just set aside the rough-and-tumble street thug exterior for just one album and let himself have fun talking about his friends and his kids--stick the gat back in his belt and drop some more Smoove-B rhymes like "Perfect" or "Ups & Downs." Come on, dude, the gangsta era is over. It died when Dr. Dre and Ice Cube hung up their gunbelts and started acting and/or producing pop records.

Idaknow...lately I've been thinking I need to throw my whiter-than-white stylings into tha game, too. Call myself MC II-Whyte, program some Otto von Schirachish crazy-ass beats, sample the soundtrack to Bram Stoker's Dracula, and bust some rhymes about sleeping a lot, playing Atari, teaching English, and pretending to be a 700-year-old Egyptian vamp...oh, wait, Fred already did that--but you see where I'm going with this.

You've got to be fucking kidding me.

If you live in Kentucky, apparently you can't write short stories about zombies attacking highschools, especially if you're a highschool student, 'cause then you get arrested for making 'terroristic threats.'

1) I'm getting really sick of how overly-paranoid schools throughout the nation--not just in the Moron Belt (a.k.a. the entire southern and midwestern United States)--over-react to ANY perceived "threat" that could indicate another brewing Columbine massacre. Well, here's something you dumbfuck school administrators and guidance counselors apparently just don't get: don't worry about the student who write horror stories about zombies attacking schools, worry about the kids who put up websites in which they clearly state how much they want to slaughter everyone in Phys-Ed class. Don't worry about the handful of trendy loners dressed in black--worry about the mousey, quiet kid who's always the butt of everyone's jokes. Trenchcoats don't hide shotguns as well as blank faces and downtrodden demeanors.

2) Can the populace of the Southern United States POSSIBLY get stupider? There are some states--Florida, Texas, Louisiana--that produce a goodsized crop of decent, intelligent folks as well as slackjawed twang-tongued morons and Bushes, but it seems as though the vast majority of the Bible Belt states are just filled to brimming with the most idiotic inbred excuses for humanity the world has ever produced. My hatred of the South has grown so extreme over the last few years that anymore whenever I meet someone who talks with a backwoods drawl (and that includes many of the folks who live around me, because Fayette County is, for all intents and purposes, just as redneck as the Southern states) I just want to shatter his/her jaw without even thinking about it--which is not a good thing: simple common sense will tell you that just because someone hails from south of the Masey-Dixey Line does not automatically mean they are a chickenfucking, KKK-card-carrying hillbilly. Hell, I've an aunt and an uncle who both come from North Carolina, and they are perfectly intelligent, considerate people. But statistically, chances of meeting blockheaded future-Jerry-Springer guests from under the sweaty waist of the Bible Belt are a billion times more likely, which is why I plan to stay as far north as possible at all times. I might as well just move to Massachusetts and get it over with.