Turn me off

The last time a track from Detox leaked to the Internets, I could believe that the white guy from 2dopeboyz hacked into someone's email, found something that might not have ever been released, because it wasn't good enough, and liberated for our listening "pleasure."

Dr. Dre, like all artists, probably comes up with all sorts of things that aren't quite good enough to be released. The main difference between Dr. Dre and most artists these days being that instead of firing off an email to Nah Right, Dr. Dre leaves his throwaways sitting on a hard drive somewhere, where they can't do any (more) damage to his "brand." And god bless him for it.

"Under Pressure" sounded to me like Jimmy Iovine called him up and told him that if he could come up with a song that sounds like some shit Lady Gaga would sing over, he could get Lady Gaga to appear on it, "on the arm," as they say in ethnic white neighborhoods. Which would be an especially good idea, because Lady Gaga is inexplicably popular right now. She might be the most popular artist out right now, right up there with Justin Bieber, despite the fact that as many times as I've heard her songs I couldn't tell you how any of them go. She seems to have a decent singing voice, but clearly that's beyond the point. The production is so overwrought that you could replace her with any ol' white chick, and it'd be hard to tell the difference.

One thing I will say is that, even though Lady Gaga isn't the most conventionally attractive woman (which is actually one of the things I look for in a white chick), she seems to keep her body in pretty good shape, even though she's supposedly dying of Lupus or some shit, and I'm pretty sure I read somewhere once that she's on cocaine. (That's probably how she got cool with Kanye and Kid Cudi.) There's a lot of really good pictures of her wearing next to nothing at all. I'm sure some of it is Photoshop, but there's only so much Photoshop can do. Case in point, her ass. Pretty much all of the pictures of her ass are unfortunate to say the least. But for some reason that hasn't stopped her from having her ass photographed more than anyone other than maybe Kim Kardashian. I don't understand why that is. It's almost as if she's just fucking with us. Take for example that Rolling Stone cover from a few weeks ago. Very few white women could be photographed at that angle and come off well, and unfortunately none of them are famous singers. That's just not how their bodies are constructed.

But I digress.

Dr. Dre probably came up with "Under Pressure" with the thought that Lady Gaga could sing on it, but then it didn't turn out very well (at all), and he decided against it. Jimmy Iovine may have even put the kibosh on it. I'm sure he's making a lot more from Lady Gaga these days than he's made from Dr. Dre in a long, long time. He can't be having her put out some ol' bullshit (even more so than usual) just because Dre needs to get his career back in order. Forbes just released its annual list of hip-hop's cash kings, and I noticed motherfucking Akon (Lady Gaga is signed to Akon's vanity label) was third on the list, right behind Jay-Z and Diddy, in what could be the first year in a good half a decade that I haven't so much as heard Akon's voice on the radio. If he's putting out music at all these days, it must only be popular in his native Africa, like Milli Vanilli, after it was revealed that it was really a couple of 50 year-old guys and a chick singing on those records. I'm sure whatever Akon gets per Lady Gaga album sold hardly compares to what the TIs get.

The dead giveaway lies in the fact that a completed "Under Pressure" never did hit the Internets. Remember when Dre, probably at some event to promote Monster Cables, was talking about how he wasn't pissed that the white guy from 2dopeboyz hacked into his email, Lupe-style, he was mostly just disappointed that people didn't get to hear the finished version of the song, which he was working on and which should be available in a few weeks. I'm pretty sure that was more than a few weeks ago. The summer is more or less over. Kids are already back in school. I can tell, because my neighborhood feels safer. (How come kids get all summer off anyway?) Dr. Dre seemed all excited about "Under Pressure" at that Red Sox game, but I haven't heard so much as a peep from him about it ever since.

The plan at this point must be to ditch "Under Pressure" in favor of this song "Turn Me On," which must have hit the Internets at some point last night. Or maybe the plan is to "leak" a series of songs that could be from Detox, to see if any of them receive a positive reaction. You can tell that, unlike with "Under Pressure," this latest leak is TI-orchestrated, because it fades out after one verse, as if that's the way people record songs. They must not have wanted the entire version out there, in case this is something they can get away with selling. Maybe Jay-Z, who sounds like the ghostwriter here, has something special planned for the second verse, like a weird sexual reference involving Dr. Dre's steroid use. And I'm assuming that's why the sound quality isn't the best in the world, even though all of the other elements seem to be in place. He can't claim that this one doesn't have a chorus yet - unless the one we hear here is a placeholder, to be replaced by Justin Bieber. He did say something on Twitter about being in the studio with Dr. Dre, who taught him a few things about producing. He may have even done this beat.