Unemployment is a battlefield

What is it with bum rappers and "Love Is a Battlefield" by Pat Benatar?

Is it because "Love Is a Battlefield" has such a sweet video, and bum rappers have the kind of free time where they can spend days at a time sitting around watching VH1 Classic, waiting to catch it and other great early to mid '80s-era videos, like I did back in the late '90s?

VH1 Classic is still a channel, right? I don't have it, but then I've got this special deal with DirecTV where I pay literally more than the mortgage on my house (if you don't count the escrow for property tax, insurance and what have you) for more or less every channel they offer, but then I go to other people's houses, who probably don't pay near what I pay, and they've got a shedload of channels that I don't have. But the only channels I have that they don't have is a block of like 20 religious channels and shit like RFID.

(In case you're wondering, of course I didn't sign up for this bullshit. My little brother did, while I was out of town. He wanted that special deal where you pay out the ass to be able to watch every football game, but then you just end up watching the game on ESPN just like everyone else. Needless to say, he's really into sports.)

A channel like VH1 Classic would seem pointless these days, when you could use sites like YouTube to watch any old video you want, on demand, rather than sitting through hours and hours of videos people didn't even like back in the '80s. Chicago videos with the guy who replaced Peter Cetera, and what have you. To think, how much of my life I wasted sitting around watching music videos. If you would have told me, back in the mid '90s, that people could give a rat's ass about them by the time I was an adult, I wouldn't have believed you. But now I won't even bother to watch most web videos for more than half a minute or so, unless I think there's gonna be nudity.

You can probably tell from my physique that I remained planted in front of a TV, from about the time I could sit up straight until the time I went away to college. But those first seven or eight years I can't remember as well, because I was too young. Which is why a channel like VH1 Channel was once so fascinating. From the time I was about 8 until I was about 18, I figured the woman who sang "Never Say Never" by Romeo Void must have been the most smoking hot woman evar, but come to find out she was literally the opposite. I've never seen such an ugly woman. It's no wonder they didn't have any more hits.

Bum rappers' fascination with "Love Is a Battlefield" could also have to do with the fact that they spend a lot of time stroking it to Fast Times at Ridgemont High, which has a subplot involving several of the girls at that school cultivating a Pat Benatar look. What was the other look the girls were going for? Was it Olivia Newton John? I might need to rifle through a few boxes for my copy of Ridgemont on DVD. I'm not gonna lie - ever since a segment on Stern in which the guy from Mr. Skin named it the best nude scene evar I've been meaning to have a look. It's just, you know how black men struggle to get things done.

Which brings me back to bum rappers. Could it be that "Love Is a Battlefield" is a Philadelphia thing? I'll have Jay-Z know I got dissed by a bum rapper from Philly rapping over Pat Benatar back before it was all trendy. A few years ago, Dice Raw, the kid who spit a hot verse on one of those early Roots album, put out a mixtape that included a song where he went in on yours truly over "Battlefield." No bullshit. Why, I'm not sure. Like everyone else in hip-hop, I hadn't so much as thought of Dice Raw since the 1990s.

I found a picture of the present day Dice Raw, via the Google, and it looks like he's spent the interim gorging himself on Church's chicken. Who wants to bet he can't pop a rod anymore? Nullus. As far as his problem with me, the only thing I can think is that this was a matter of fat man on fat man crime. He saw where I was doing something with my life, while he was stuck combing ?uestlove's goatee for a living, so he decided to pause his Fast Times DVD for a few minutes and take shots at the kid.

I'd suggest that Freeway's new "Love Is a Battlefield" is yet another example of Jay-Z trying to copy my "swag." Like, maybe he finally ran out of good Biggie lines to rip off, so he went and found another color struck fat guy. (Light skinted women >) Already, he's going to Grizzly Bear concerts and rapping about his prodigious wine consumption. If this nigga starts wearing khakis with the pleats in them (he does turn 40 this week), I might need to seek legal representation.

Only thing is, it's not like he told Freeway to make "Love Is a Battlefield." As we've discussed, you'd have to be from Philadelphia and have a ridonkulous amount of free time to come up with such a bad idea. It could be that the Illuminati somehow put Freeway up to it, but I haven't figured out how that would work, or what purpose it would serve. Holler at your boy, if you have any ideas.