Posse On Trendwatch: Odd Collaborations

Whether you like it or not, both 50 Cent and Soulja Boy have been able to retain a middling sense of relevancy, despite being years past their prime, if for all the wrong reasons. Long removed from running the streets and airwaves respectively, both Curtis and DeAndre have accumulated a shitload of backlash from fans and musical peers alike, dwindling record sales other such collapses. It has even seemed as if they’ve been in the news for the wrong reasons to boot, with Fiddy reduced to (allegedly) burning down one of his homes to force his baby mother out of it and picking on Shyne during a conference call and Soulja being labeled as hip hop’s pariah faster than you can even spell “Superman” and (allegedly) being exposed as a coke sniffer by Kat Stacks of all people.

So it would only make sense that the two of them would make a song, right? The end result of said pairing, “Mean Mug,” features the young pup dropping the bubblegum raps in exchange for an unexpected barrage of goon talk, obviously at 50’s behest. I’ll refrain from sharing my opinions on the song, but it would have easily been my pick for the “weirdest collaboration of the year” had Talib Kweli beaten them to that, trading in longtime partner and fellow Black Star Mos Def for Atlanta bamma Gucci Mane with “Poltergeist” a few months back.

Most of us are still struggling to understand that particular tag team, even after Talib defended himself on it.

Artists from entirely different spectrums of music coming together isn’t really new, as Run DMC made it trendy to do so before anybody on “Walk This Way” with Aerosmith. Assuming that either the artists truly have some form of respect for one another, or that they simply need a means to keep up on their mortgage payments, rap music ends up taking the brunt of this experiments, resulting in audio catastrophes such as “N 2 Gether Now,” Limp Bizkit’s bizarre match up with Method Man and DJ Premier, and “Life Is Good,” that mess of a song from Brownsville madmen M.O.P. and decidedly un-hard, pop-hop trio the Lyte Funky Ones.

I’m still trying to figure out who the hell green lit the latter.

Like it or not, circus freak-style collaborations in rap will forever remain to confuse the masses in an attempt to bridge a so-called gap between the dichotomy of rapsters. Unfortunately, the rest of the world has to suffer through the shit more often than we deserve to.