this is hip-hop

If I had any--and I mean ANY--ability to make beats, I would make some beats and sample her heavily over the top of them, the beats, and I would make what the kids are almost certainly not calling a club banger out of the beats and her samples and I would become very, very famous and I would buy myself and my awesome girlfriend some plane tickets to exciting and interesting places and I would struggle hard with coming up with a followup club banger and my difficult second album wouldn't sell for shit and we'd be half-broke again and I'd try to return to my roots with the third record and it wouldn't work and it would just be sad sad sad and it would get terrible reviews and eventually I'd give up music and occasionally somebody would wonder hey what happened to that guy and they wouldn't know but I'd be happy, my career reversals notwithstanding.

A couple full-disclosure moments.

• The video link up there came from William Gibson's Twitter feed.
  Gibson is my favorite living writer and, based on his social media and his incredible gentleness with bad questions at a reading in Portland a couple years back, a truly nice guy.
  
  Kind of my life model, except that he's a brilliant writer, very, very smart and a nice guy.
• Speaking of hip-hop: my buddy Abe got me into Aesop Rock a couple years back. The following are three of my alltime favorite pieces of art, followed by a couple great songs. Okay, one great song, on account of my battery is dying and the competition for outlets here at the coffee shop is fierce and tending toward the extinction of me.
• 9-5ers Anthem
• None Shall Pass
  Dig that Alan Parsons Project sample!
• Pigs
  A video of seriously untouchable brilliance and a song that's pretty dope also.
  Can I pull off calling things "dope"? No, not really.
• "one large coffee fuck you please" goes through my head like a lot.
  Fun fact! The first thousand times I heard this song I thought the voice at the end was some awful horrible neo-soul singer chick. Apparently I'm not hip enough to identify a Mountain Goat by voice.