RIFF MARKET

Cam'Ron: "I.B.S."

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Wherein the snake-, titties-, fart-, and now poop-obsessed Riff Market becomes self-parodic. Granted "I.B.S." doesn't have many snakes or titties in it, but it has lots of small intestines, which are a something of a snake/titty hybrid. Take this from somebody who thought "Popozao" was single of the year: "I.B.S." is single of the year.

This is personal. I've been following the I.B.S. game for a while now. My dad was in permanent asshole mode my first sixteen because he had a particularly badass form of I.B.S. called Crohn's Disease. No offense to Cam'Ron's son but if "I.B.S." is "a true story right here" well then my dad's intestines are way more fucked up than his dad's. The way Crohn's works, something (nobody knows what for sure) tricks the immune system into rehabbing a patch of digestive tissue, in my dad's case the small intestines. The repairs don't stop is the thing, so what is usually the SI's quarter-size diameter fissures into a small, almost impassable hole the size of a bed bug. Food gets stuck there and hurts like a mother, and that's when my dad would yell at my sisters to turn on Martin just so he could scream "what did I tell you?! NO MARTIN AT DINNER" or punch a hole through his fishtank or whatever. You don't know what sadness is until you've seen a discus fish flapping on your kitchen floor and heard your mom say to flush it down the toilet--"before it's too late."

Eventually dad got A+R work--Anastomosis and Resection--which is when a doc cuts out the diseased tissue and sews the good guts back together, and he's since moved on from freshwater to saltwater tanks. But goddamn could Cam's opener "ulcers hurt my salary, alter my personality" been the away message of his lifetime. Exactly how people with a real case of the shits think about the condition--it's so bad it affects your salary. "Ripping off my undershirts" was also something dad did, but I think that was less stomach-related, more a "I'm gonna do the Hulk Hogan thing in front of my entire family" thing.

The hustler/stay on your hustle/can't stay on my hustle when I gotta poop stuff rings true too. When not playing drums in Philly's hottest bar mitzvah bands, my dad drives one of those lunch trucks that go to construction sites and bring food/happiness/bowel trouble to all the workers. It's pretty much exactly like dealing drugs or prostituting women--so much so that my friend Danny has been known to refer to his favorite prostitutes as "sex lunch trucks."

Hey drug users: Do you shit a lot? I'm wondering why Cam so anxiously asserts "true story" as much as he says "please don't relate me to drugs," and why of all the tracks on the new album, this song, about shitting and throwing up, is the true story. The condition totally runs you, dictates what you can and can't do and most times that means needing a bathroom within a few yards of you at all times. But unless Cam's actually eating gourmet quaalude burgers or whatever I don't know why he thinks people think he has I.B.S. over drug use. That or my dad has a lot of explaining to do.