Elliott C. Back: In Aere Aedificare

According to a recent article in Time Magazine, Hip-hop’s Down Beat, Hip Hop and Rap are becoming outmoded and unpopular:

According to the music trade publication Billboard, rap sales have dropped 44% since 2000 and declined from 13% of all music sales to 10%. Artists who were once the tent poles at rap labels are posting disappointing numbers. Jay-Z’s return album, Kingdom Come, for instance, sold a gaudy 680,000 units in its first week, according to Billboard. But by the second week, its sales had declined some 80%. This year rap sales are down 33% so far.

This can be directly attributed to the painful, rehashed crap coming out of the hip hop / rap music industry. For example, let’s take a look at these newcomers to the rap scene, and some of their lyrics:

Mims: Music Is My Savior
	I’m hot cause I’m fly You ain’t cause you’re not This is why This is why I’m hot
Sean Kingston
	They say we’re too young To get ourselves sprung Oh we didn’t care We made it very clear
T-Pain
	Teddy paine was born to flirt now u can’t down that Now i’m flirt with her whether i’m in or out of town That’s why they call me teddy bend her ass down
Soulja Boy
	Super Fresh, Now Watch Me Jock Jocking On Them Haterz Man When I Do Dat Soulja Boy I Lean To The Left And Crank Dat Dance
Yung Berg
	Oh, and damn right baby girl’s a diva but everytime she out with me she blowing reefa in the coupe looking better than mona lisa tuning into my songs thinkin ’bout features

The lack of clever or constructive lyrics pervades not just the newcomers rapping about women, money, drugs, women, and cash in a thoroughly tired and worn-out way, but also some of hip hop and rap’s greatest artists who think releasing new “music” as fast as possible is the key to success:

50 Cent / Justin Timberlake
	She always ready, when you want it she want it Like a nympho, the info, I show you where to meet her On the late night, till daylight the club jumpin’
Akon
	I’m sorry that it took so long to speak But I was on tour with Gwen Stefani
will.i.am
	Baby where’d you get your body from? Tell me where’d you get your body from? I got it from my mama I got it from my mama
Timbaland
	When timbo is in the party everbody put up their hands I get a half a mill for my beats you get a couple grand never gonna see the day that I ain’t got the upper hand
Fat Joe
	Yeah im in this business of terror Got a handful of stacks better grab an umbrella I make it rain on them hoes

If you’re depressed, there’s still some good hip hop left. Some of the stuff coming from Talib Kweli, Young Buck, Chamillionaire, and Lil’ Wayne is quite good. The real gold is Kanye West, especially his song Can’t tell me nothing and it’s brilliant alternate video. Who do you think is still good in hip hop?

This super-cool japanese shirt company has made a shirt with two small electric fans. I love the billowing fashion!

You always wonder when you’re writing code if the undocumented part of the API which produces a bizarre side effect is a carefully thought out feature, or a bug. Well, now thanks to this lovely photo by Dratz you know:

It was a feature all along.

If you’re using Firefox, go grab $140 of free website monitoring via Pingdom, free for Firefox users. (Disclaimer: I love pingdom)

Comment 8749602 accompanying A real picture of what NY City Street used to be like before cars is probably the most insightful and funny digg comment I’ve ever seen:

Please, trade in your car for a horse. Do you realize the environmental impact of the entire nation or world owning horses. They shit 9 tons of manure each year, that’s about 50 pounds a day. You also have to stockpile their shit and you can’t have it close to any water sources, so anyone living in rural areas with a well wouldn’t have a place for that, if the water source comes near the stockpile, all local water sources will be contaminated. Then you have to worry about feeding your shitting horse, which requires approximately 25-30 pounds of dry food per day and we have to clear out significantly more land for farms to accomodate for our 300 million new horses (there are approximately 5.5 million horses in the United States) which in turn will destroy the environment and ecosystem as it is. Not only that, but your dumbass shitting horse can only go about 9 mph for 25 miles before having to break, it would take me over 3 hours to get to work which is 30 miles away from where I live instead of the 30 minutes it takes right now. So instead of an hour of driving every day, I’d have 6 hours of riding and 2 hours of shit stockpiling and 2 hours of feeding my shit factory. Not only this but I have to build an accomodation so it can shit all day, and buy a ridiculous amount of feed and have more land… but I guess I wouldn’t care about money at this point since I spend 10 hours of my non-working day taking care of my crappy horse.

We have technology for a reason and the environmental impact of 300 million horses, and 300 million horse pens and 2.7 billion tons of horse shit every year would be absurd…

It makes an excellent point about the environmental scalability of automobiles versus horses. And just wait until we have electric, nuclear, hydrogen, wind, or solar powered vehicles and homes, in which case emissions will fall to what, zero?