[UPDATE: Bun B quit yer bitchin']

Pseudo intelligent music critics, who make their living patronizing certain elements in the black community, like to claim that backpackers are the most annoying group of fans in hip-hop. I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that the true most annoying group of fans in hip-hop (other than, of course, women) are fans of southern hip-hop.

The knock against backpackers seems to be that they're boring and negative. They spend too much time telling you what they're against rather than actually telling you what they're for. Many of them even have the sheer balls to suggest hip-hop is not nearly as good as it used to be.

For business purposes, hip-hop can't appear any better or worse during any given year, at least until the TIs find something to replace it. Reggaeton, perhaps?

Southern rap fans, meanwhile, make it a point to draw no distinction between the best and the worst their particular segment of the hip-hop community has to offer. They may not actually pretend to like "Laffy Taffy," but they'll be quick to call your ass a bigot if you suggest that it's arguably history's greatest abortion in musical form.

And they all rallied around Pimp C as if he was Leonard Peltier or somebody, but come to find out he can hardly rap. Is everybody aware that he was locked up for pulling out a gun on a woman in a mall? Personally, I don't find his release fair to all the rest of us men who have resisted the urge to commit an act of violence against a woman.

As far as I'm concerned, his ass should go back to jail. Where's the hip-hop feminism community when you need them? Wait, does this constitute snitching, or would it have to be your sister or something? I generally advocate staying out of another couple's business, even if it is in a public place such as a mall.

I can understand that this is the first time their communities have produced anything the critical establishment even pretended to like since the heyday of Blind Melon and Better than Ezra (UGK fans, do your homework), but I'm not going to sit here and pretend to like something I don't really like, especially if I have no financial stake in the matter.

The truth of the matter is that the southern rap of today, both in its style of rappin' and especially its beats, bears very little relation to the hip-hop most of us grew up listening to. In that sense, it's not unlike disco was to rock music in the late '70s. Interestingly enough, disco artists also tried to cry racism when rock fans burned disco albums on the field at Chicago's Comiskey Park.

In 2006, southern rap is the style of rap music that the tall Israelis who run the music industry have decided to promote, to the detriment of all other styles of rap music. Therefore, not unlike the Mexicans who think they're retaking America's Southwest, fans of southern rap no longer have any legitimate claim that they're being discriminated against.

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