While wondering if the Bert & Ernie bedroom rave-up meme has managed to diffuse the White Fear-injection of M.O.P.’s “Ante Up,” I recalled the Brownsville duo’s “Cold As Ice” video, which will always dilate my sphincter to mason jar-passing dimensions. Even Grover couldn’t lip-dub away its malice.
It seems innocent at first: a pitch-shifted Foreigner sample paired with a distorted bassline too cartoonish to be tough. But Brownsville’s finest arrive armed with mouthfuls of shook-tipped bullets. Billy Danze is vengeance incarnate. He doesn’t want to drop you - he wants to pump you with enough .44 caliber bullets to blow your corpse halfway down the block. And Lil’ Fame wants to anally rape said corpse.
(Or maybe Fame follows “get placed in a body bag” with “with that ass zipped up” to say he’ll put you in a body bag and you won’t be alive to enjoy the experience? Questions like that and “don’t body bags zip up the front?” will only get you shot.)
But as his frequent use of the n-word illustrates, Fame’s anger is not necessarily directed at white people. Everyone is a potential target, particularly bootleggers and MCs of the sucka-ass variety:
“And you’ll be stiff as a log in a suit lookin nice/youse a sinna, nigga/But you ain’t cold enough to freeze hot slugs when they run up in ya/You ain’t in my class, nigga/I’m the last nigga/You gone fuck around and get blast/sucka ass nigga”
That said, it’s the censored version that really fucks me up. Half the vocals are just gone - all I see are strobe flashes of Fame and Danze spitting silent, venomous rage at me as the instrumental menacingly bounces behind them. I don’t know what they’re threatening to do, but I can tell it’s real bad. My mind reels. Worse, every other flash illuminates the saliva-drenched jaws/profile of an attacking pitbull. I can’t even begin to reconcile myself with this fear. It’s no longer imposed, outside me. It’s my own.
This fear drives my interest. It’s why rap is best when it’s about cocaine and AR-15s. This fear renders another world visceral - one beyond the private jets and true soul lovin of other hip-hop genres - a High Plains Drifter-esque desert of the real where Death’s pale horse is a silver Mercedes and he rides both my television’s landscape and the streets outside my door.
