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(Aug 25, 2004)
The Opie Hicks page
Well, it was bound to happen sooner or later, and it happened sooner than I had hoped. The time came for Big Lou to do his first review of a hiphop album. I don't know the technical difference between hiphop and rap. Perhaps if it's a rap song and it makes you feel like hipping and hopping then it's hiphop, otherwise it's simply rap. In any case, it's made me have to pay a visit to the philosopher's stone of CD reviewers, and face one of the fundamental questions that have tormented CD reviewers for centuries: "If you are reviewing music of a genre that is lousy in general, such as rap, do you give it a rating that is relative to the overall quality of the genre, or do you give it an absolute rating?" If the answer is, you give it an absolute rating, then Public Enemy would get one star from me and most other rap would get a 0. If, on the other hand, you try to carefully measure the gradations of lousiness, then I would have to say that Opie Hicks and the Elements are somewhat less lousy than some rap I've been forcefed while sitting at stoplights and filling up my SUV at the corner station.
The CD is entitled Diffrent and it starts out with a somewhat hopeful opening track, which consists of Opie telling you how different their music is. Opie is fine on his delivery, and the rest of the group sounds pretty tight, but the lyrics are just the same old tired rap garbage: My genitalia are larger than yours, and I have the microphone, and I can outrap you sucker so you better back off, and I drive my Mercedes down the street with a big bag of dope in the back seat, and I perform sex acts on your wife much to her shrieking delight, and I don't condone any of this but hey it's what I am. Etc. Different from what? Even if - no, especially if - I loved hiphop, I would take objection to anyone calling this CD "different." It's the same old same old.
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