RIFF MARKET

A Riff About the Diplomats

Download: "Dipset Symphony"

2005 I remember being pretty amped about this tape, a year later it's hard to know why exactly. Cam's "Get 'Em Daddy" was on there, so was Jim Jones's "Summer Wit Miami," so was the Juelz "My Clip" jack on "The Whisper Song." I don't think I really liked any of these that much.

In my Camp Nama of a bedroom I have stacks of Dipset mixtapes and probably seven or eight copies of Hell Rell's Hell on Earth--I'm not really at "what the fuck was I thinking?" so much as "why am I not as excited about the more-than-music movement anymore?" and even "I can't walk in my room without stepping on J.R. Writer's face five times." That's where I'm at with these guys.

I watched Juelz not put "Pick It Up" on his full-length even though it was the best track on the Fiend Out mixtape; I saw Cam'Ron make a complete ass of himself on that Jay-Z diss; I bought a thousand more Dipset mixtapes and I don't think Rell, Writer, Jim Jones, Purple City, 40 Cal and whoever have gotten any better at rapping in a year and that's disconcerting; I saw Killa Season and dared to give that "Italian dudes chopping off that guy's bird" scene the benefit of the doubt; I heard Killa Season the album and think all the brilliant wordplays and down&out sentiment that exonerated Purple Haze's reprehensible character and often malevolent spirit--sorry, I'm still a wee bit pussy about this--ain't there. I keep waiting for these guys to deliver on whatever promise they've been promising.

Which is something Bob Christgau didn't make mention of in his mixtape piece a few weeks ago--the constant disappointment with mixtapes. Especially with the various artist/Big Mike style tapes, it's like opening a pack of baseball cards--maybe you'll get the card with Jose Canseco giving you the finger, but 99 times out of a 100 every card will be Agallah showing you his balls.

I'm not bailing on Dipset--my fantasy baseball team's pretty much gone to shit and there's something to be said about following something--and I like the idea of New York trying to reclaim hip-hop off the South, true heads or whatever. This is my reasoning: Papoose has put out probably 30-35 mixtapes in the last year. Of those 30-35 mixtapes, he has two good tracks. That means all we have to do is get through 200 more Papoose mixtapes until he can put out a full-length with decent material, all the good instrumentals gone, and he's not a great rapper in the end anyway. See you there.