Princeton the Great One: The Worst Rapper in the Bay Area?

First and foremost, allow me to thank Nation-friend Floydy "F." Sanchez for pointing these out to me, via twitter (which, if you haven't heard of it, is a micro-blogging service).

Princeton the Great One hails from Fresno, CA, a part of California that has latched itself onto the Bay Area, musically. So I think it's fair to label a Fresno rapper a Bay Area rapper. After all, First Degree the DE pointed out, Sacramento "ain't not the Bay". The same should apply to Fresno. They're only a stone's throw apart as far as I'm concerned.

Now that I have successfully convinced you that Princeton the Great One (to his friends: P the G) is, in fact a Bay Area Rapper, please enjoy his latest single, "Still Here", where P the G reassures his trusting fans that he has not stopped rapping.



It's almost hard to set aside time to mock a guy for making a rap song about going to Community College, and actually filmed part of the video at the Community College along with his buddies, who all seem to be perfectly nice, if not a little weird. But, I must. This song is so fucking bad.

It's baffling to me that in a world where we are all so inundated with media, something like this could even exist. If want to become a rapper and want to hear what rap sounds like, all you need to do is log onto the internet, or turn on the radio. What you will hear is rhythmic speech in rhyming verse over a beat that probably resembles contemporary pop music, in its various forms. It is not hard to imitate. Madonna has done it; some broad named Ke$ha has done it; Drake has done it. Approximations of good rap abound in the early 21st century.

And yet, this song seems to fail at every aspect on my imaginary "Is-This-Actually-a-Rap-Song?" checklist, despite clearly attempting to (Side note: It kind of reminds me of that one Saafir verse off of Hell's Kitchen, if you know what I mean). How someone could be so inundated with pop culture and rap and not know how to put out something better?

I suppose this speaks to the newer development in our ongoing overexposure to media. I am of course speaking of user-generated content. People will put the darndest things on the internet. But with someone like Princeton the Great One, who isn't filming his cat fight a laser pointer's projection, it is a bit more troubling when something that is supposed to be - or at least resemble - a finished piece of art turns out so unintentionally hilarious.

How did no one involved in this not send it back to the drawing board? With lines like "I feel like King Kong and the world is the white bitch", P The G has the potential to make rap that is at least entertaining. But statistically speaking, all of the dudes in the background are likely to be better at rapping than Princeton. He's that bad. Still, none of them said anything to stop this video from hitting the internet. And here it is, to be lambasted by some jerk-off sitting at his computer halfway across the world.

Perhaps the upside to this - and you can consider this my decade wrap-up essay - is that Princeton the Great One's body of work, no matter how bad it is, reflects the bottom-end of an overall democratization of production and consumption of music in this last decade. At the beginning of the 00's, I was an 8th grader using Napster to download songs I had heard on KMEL (no more taping the radio!), and it took 20-30 minutes to download them. I had always been a fan of Bay Area rap that I heard on the radio E-40, Too $hort, Mac Mall, Rappin 4-Tay, etc, but my taste in music was still very much determined by what was popular on KMEL, BET, MTV, whatever.

Now, fast-forward ten years, and I'm on a micro-blogging service clicking links to rap videos by guys from Fresno who can't even rap. Aside from Ke$ha - who I am only aware of because I check Byron Crawford multiple times a day - I have no clue what people listen to on the radio, MTV, etc. If you still read this blog, I'm willing to bet you're the same way. That's somewhat remarkable.

What I'm trying to say is that people P The G have to exist to make room for all the other great bottom-up pop cultural movements that have taken place this past decade. It's just that he's the dregs of this democratization, in my opinion. You could probably say the same about this blog, but here I am, four years deep.

If you've read this far, you get to watch my favorite P The G video: "Cheeseburgers"