AudioShocker

I don't exactly follow the fast paced hiphop sector of the blogosphere, but I do consider myself an informed hiphop head. I also listen to a lot of Top 40 in my car. So, after being bombarded with The Dream's Rockin' That Thang for the last month, I was open to the idea of a remix. Really, anything had to be better than the original.

The Track: While I always dug the beat, the Dream's crappy falsetto is just earthshatteringly annoying. I am so glad he reached out and brought in some of the game's best lyricists. Juelz, Luda, and Fab are masters of the punchline -- and getting all three of them on the same track is major. They really redeemed this otherwise wasted beat.

Fab spends half his verse referring to JayZ and Crime Mob before he pulls out something funny:

Let me drop a jewel on ya, put a rock in ear
Can I call you nana? cause you got that rockin' chair

Luda's verse is heavy on 'lovey dovy' crap instead of double entendre punchlines, but he makes an attempt:

The thought is sensational, it's perfect bliss
I'm ready to take the milky way to your hershey's kiss
You know my tongue's got batteries in it
The bedroom, we lose calories in it & start families in it

Ricky Ross' verse is short and terrible. It is all forced gov/president references, and they all fall flat.

But Juelz Santana cold shuts it down:

Call me Mr. Shoe- shine, baby I'm a polish ya
And I leave ya spit clean, I don't use no polisher

So get another shot of ciroc in ya
Cause I'm gon' be rockin' ya
Treat you like my first lady
I'll put my Barack in ya

The Video: What we have here is a hot tranny mess of style jockin'. This video is a less creative version of Kanye's Golddigger -- which of course involves the whole "couple guys and some models" treatment. The difference is it's the guys who are on the magazine covers, and not pinup girls. And whose idea was it to outfit Fab AND Juelz in  LouisV gear? That is way too much product placement! Oh, and is it just me or does The Dream looks exactly like Chris Breezy from the Freeze video?

And you know what? 'Rockin that thang' amounts to 2-stepping for pretty girls. Even Crime Mob threw in some poppin' and dippin'. This is about as involved as the dancing in a Shwayze video. Is it just me, or is club-style hiphop dancing getting really lazy? I mean Lean With It Rock With It,  The Stanky Leg, The Arab Money Dance... I think I might be onto something.

Finally, a general query for all of you out there in the blogosphere: is there a website/repository that lists video girls and what videos they have been in? I'm thinking of something like iMDB for music videos. It would give me another dimension for these posts.

The Bottom Line: I suppose that sometimes, guest spots can polish up a turd.