G-Unit Hoodies and Usher

I bought a G-Unit hoodie a few days ago.

I'll admit, this is a bit of a strange purchase for me, since I'm usually all about the cardigans and flats and I more often than not listen to indie rock (my friend Jessica kindly informed me that I was the whitest person she knew today). However, I have a bit of a hip-hiop/gangster fascination but I don't own anything remotely blingin' so I decided to get the hoodie. It's super cute and says 'G-Unit' all over it in fun colors. Well once I got my belly into the sweater, I wanted to dance. I wanted to saunter and use colloquialisms such as "aight" (this means "alright" and it constantly boggles my mind that high school ballin' kids can take themselves seriously when using it) and I wanted to wear my white sunglasses at night. I did all of these things. I got several strange looks when I was in McDonalds and on the Skytrain, mostly from people who are genuinly more hip-hoppish than I am. This did not bother me because they did not have such a bright and shiny zip-up friend. However, I decided I should make myself more legit. I wanted to be so legit that I could not quit, and so I blasted the Beat in my car, and in my room, and even on my computer. Now, I occasionally listen to the Beat when I have no CDs in my car, but for once I packed away my own music and started groovin' to over-advertized mainstream beatz.

As I was bip-boppin in my car, Usher's new single came on. This song is titled, "Love in the Club," which sounds very cute until the chorus comes on, which features the highly intellectual line: "I wanna make love in this club - ey!" Now, I'm all for the phrase "make love" because it sounds a whole lot nicer, romantic and sincere than "doing it" etc. But seriously, one cannot possibly have sex in a club and consider it nice, romantic, or sincere. It is simple biology at this level: sex. Not love. Even if the couple involved is in love, having sex in a club filled with half-dressed, half-drunk sweaty strangers takes all the lovin' out of the making love, reducing it, once again, to having sex. This was my first big beef with this song: Usher is turning something sincere into something dirty, and I greatly disagree with this tactic which is an obvious make-money sort of song because I'm sure drunk girls are just loving the idea of "making love" being in a song they can shake their booties to.

The next problem I had with this song was every other line in it. These men use great lines such as: "the way you staring miss you got me wantin to give it to you all night" (would any non-inflatable woman really want to be spending her entire night doing this? I think not), "I’ll set you free sexually, mentally, physically, emotionally" (I doubt any man is capable of this sort of freedom. Unless I'm mistaken, most men aren't even capable of calling on time or cleaning the kitchen), and "imma give it to you non stop and I dont care, who's watchin'" (grammar aside, would you want people to be watching? Doubtful).

All in all, this song is probably the stupidest thing I've heard since Fergie's "Fergalicious" (Really, Fergie, really? Anyone who needs to inject their own name into their music to plug it is a little bit on the silly side) which is an enormous statement on my behalf. I would have thought that after so many years in the Industry, Usher would have been able to hire a better team of writers to accomlplish his musical feats. This song made me sad because there are a lot of really talented hip-hop artists and rappers out there (Ludacris is a prime example of a talented writer, and regardless of his morality, Eminem is also pretty talented at weaving together a song that clearly has some significance in his life) who are getting less radio play due to Usher and his lame-ness. I feel disgrace for the industry and for a second, I doubted my judgement on my hip-hop immersement (I quickly realized this was an absurd kind of doubt. Hip-hop will always be cool even if Usher is not). Now, I'm not here to suggest we all boycott this song or anything immature or childish like that. All I'm saying is, I'm going to keep my fingers crossed that a really phenomenal song comes along to phase out "Love in this Club." Until then, I will be listening to my indie CDs while rockin' the G-Unit hoodie.