Does Seminary Go Ham?

Or, more importantly, would we want East Oakland to go as ham as Atlanta appears to go? I raise the question, because Philthy Rich's latest video "Dope Boy" came out the same week as this video, "Trap Goin Ham" by a rapper named Pill (hey!), that has managed to really get the attention/scare the shit out of a whole lot of music bloggers. See for yourself:



Compare that with Philthy's newest video:



Now, I'm not saying Pill made a better video. He certainly didn't have Mitchy Slick in his video (side note: Mitchy appears to be having trouble adjusting to the Bay Area climate. What is up with that crewneck?). But, they did, more or less, make the same video. And Pill's is far more shocking; by comparison Philthy's is kinda boring. Even his dopefiends are less convincing.

But, this brings me back to what makes me most uncomfortable about Pill's video. It is a well-produced piece of work; this isn't some flip-cam nonsense. So, when you see some fat, old alcoholic woman dancing around like a fool, you know she didn't just walk on set, she was most likely invited on set, and encouraged to act like an idiot. I'm not trying to suggest that Atlanta doesn't go that ham, I'm just saying that it's no coincidence it was going so ham when the cameras were rolling. And, further, that Pill more or less humiliated a bunch of elderly addicts in order to benefit his career, which is essentially what the whole enterprise of drug dealing consists of anyway. Guess the rap game is a lot like the crack game, after all.

Philthy showed greater restraint, but he was also limited - as I have pointed out numerous times - by the higher quality of Oakland's housing stock. Sorry, West Coast rappers, you probably can't make a video this shocking. I guess that's the price we pay for being able to speak English with virtually no accent. Sorry, South. You are hard to understand sometimes.