Just when we needed them least

Let me guess: Neither Cam'ron nor Jim Jones could put a solo album out now if they wanted to, so they decided to get the group back together.

I heard about it just now in the world's most useless video, from MTV News (natch). They caught up with Cam and Jimmy at what looks like it may have been a celebrity basketball tournament that Jim Jones actually played in: he's got on a white tee, but not for fashion purposes like they do in the ghetto - it's normal-sized, and it's got a v-neck, not unlike the one I'm wearing as we "speak" (nullus); he's got a towel around his neck, and he looks kinda sweaty, like he just got done fucking. Though I suppose he could just be high on cocaine. Why MTV couldn't have had someone introduce the footage and explain what was going on I'm not sure. Maybe they're trying to conserve bandwidth by keeping the videos as brief as possible.

Cam'ron wasn't dressed to play basketball, nor was he sweaty, despite the fact that a) Cam'ron used to play basketball; and b) Cam'ron seems to be high at all times. But he could just be crazy. Since Cam came out with that song detailing his struggle with irritable bowel syndrome (did I just type that?), I heard about IBS on NPR or some shit, and they were saying that it's not really caused by eating bad food, or drinking too much. Otherwise, I would have been had that shit. I doubt those things help matters, but they were saying it's primarily psychological in nature, not unlike back pain. In fact, they were saying that a lot of people who end up with IBS are people who were molested as children, and they never properly dealt with it, or got over it. But keep in mind, I'm pretty sure you can get IBS without having been tampered with. I would never want to suggest that about someone, without knowing for certain that it's true.

Notice how Cam'ron always seems kinda aloof. The guy from MTV asks him about the new Diplomats album, and he's like, "Yeah, we're working on it. You know, trying to get the business together." Then he hands it off to Jim Jones, who's all crazy and animated. If anything, Cam'ron could use Jim Jones around, just to have someone to say something interesting in interviews. No wonder there didn't seem to be very much press surrounding the release of Crime Pays. Similarly, Cam'ron has a tendency to disappear for months, if not years at a time, when you think he might have given up on rap music, then he pops up all of a sudden with several mixtapes worth of new music. Crazy people are always disappearing like that. I remember Rivers Cuomo pulled some shit like that after Pinkerton came out. He was supposedly at Harvard for like, the entire time I was in both high school and college, i.e. damn near 10 years, but I heard he really just barricaded himself in his bedroom, put sheets up over the windows, grew his beard out and fapped to weird Asian pr0n. (Oxymoron?)

While Cam'ron and Jim Jones respective strengths and personalities do seem to compliment one another (no homo), who knows whether or not that will translate into commercial success for a new Diplomats album. Was the fact that the last Cam'ron album did Little Brother numbers really attributable to the fact that it was missing Jim Jones, and vice versa? Or could it be that people are just plain done with Cam'ron and Jim Jones, in any configuration? I suspect that it might be the latter, based on the fact that no one seemed to give a shit about Crime Pays, which was the shit, for a Cam'ron album. I enjoyed it about as much as I did Purple Haze, despite the shittier production. Maybe it was so good it was hard for white people to appreciate ironically, and that's why they've since moved on to Gucci Mane. Cam and Jimmy may have missed their window.