Tag Archives: Big Sean
Ignored 55: Billionaires
Ignored 22: Revelations 2013
A selections of revelations revealed vis-à-vis CompletelyIgnored.com in 2013. Enjoy!
1. A person’s understanding (and by understanding, I don’t mean appreciation) of music is going to be predicated on whether they “lived through it”. (#ignored1).
2. The segment of the world population that TRULY “experienced” Kraftwerk is very small. (#ignored1)
3. If they were positioned differently, the Replacements could have had Bon Jovi’s career. (#ignored2)
4. The five-minute feud between Wale and the Toronto Raptors’ play-by-play team wasn’t anything. (#ignored3)
5. The iPod has morphed all “guilty pleasures” into simply “pleasures”. (#ignored4)
6. The MuchDance CD series is the Nuggets of (underrated) Top 40 Europop. (#ignored4)
7. Coachella Festival speculation is the fantasy baseball of music fandom. (#ignored7)
8. The Columbia Record and Tape Club preyed upon the lazy and dim-witted. (#ignored8)
9. I listened to the Jesus and Mary Chain’s Psychocandy in a speeding motorboat. (#ignored8)
10. Being vague and/or absent is a good technique for bands to use to become more beloved. (#ignored9)
11. Adult moshing levels are a strong means of measuring the room energy of a live music performance. (#ignored10)
12. The Wikipedia definition of “headbanging” is amazing. (#ignored10)
13. SIANspheric were superior to 90 per cent of the original shoegaze bands. (#ignored12)
14. The Breeders would be remembered completely differently if they used different album art and weren’t signed to 4AD. (#ignored12)
15. The Cure’s “Friday I’m in Love” and R.E.M.’s “Shiny Happy People” were both good-to-great songs. (#ignored13)
16. Big Sean’s “Control” is not a diss track, (#ignored14)
17. People create fake LinkedIn profiles for their (assumedly) favourite musicians. (#ignored15)
18. Mating 1980s modern rock with 1990s Canadian beer advertising was a thing. (#ignored17)
19. Lou Reed spent his life conflicted between being Lou Reed and “Lou Reed”. (#ignored18)
20. “They’re awesome live!!” can be either a help or a hindrance in music marketing circles. (#ignored19)
21. Hipsters wrongly assume that R. Kelly is self-aware. (#ignored20)
22. Limblifter deserve a career achievement in the “random lip ring” category. (#ignored21)
Ignored 14: What diss?
Twitter kinda freaked today with the release of “Control”. This choppy, droning Big Sean original is most notable for its Kendrick Lamar check-in that calls out 11 of hip-hop’s top “young lions” with K-Dot suggesting that he’d REALLY like to murder them. Metaphorically speaking.
Time will tell but “Control” may very well have fuelled the largest reaction to a(n alleged) diss track since Nas’ “Ether” and yet when examined more carefully, is “Control” REALLY a diss track at all?
It doesn’t appear so.
Kendrick’s words are HEAVILY quantified in the following manner…
1. After he spews out his bulleted list of targets (and with all due respect… Meek Mill?… really?!?), he quickly states that “I’ve got love for you all…”. It’s a nice moment.
2. A few verses earlier, he namedrops Jay-Z and some other older dudes, essentially stating that he identifies more with the “old school” than the “new school”. We kind of already knew this. I mean, “Compton”?? This was not new information.
3. He finishes by commenting that he is “tryna raise the bar high” and then goes into a difficult airplane analogy that wraps with the suggestion of using a latex condom as a parachute, which I doubt would work so not sure what he’s getting it here. It’s wordplay of some sort.
So to paraphrase…
1. “Hello. I have much respect for all my recent contemporaries in hip-hop circles.”
2. “In general, I tend to identify more with some of the artists that came before me.”
3. “I am always trying to improve and please be advised, this is one of my primary ambitions in the music business. A key goal would be to set a new performance standard for my fellow (ahem) ‘ballers’.”
No doubt, “Control” is full of swagger and is fairly ballsy but to suggest it belongs in the same breathe as “Ether”, “No Vaseline” or even “Range Life” is wrong and maybe ridiculous.
What “Control” is is a marketing tool. Big Sean’s Hall of Fame full-length drops on August 27th. K.Dot may very well be the biggest MC in the game by year’s end. ETC.
Good timing. But yeah. We’ve seen this “hey, let’s start a fake fight” approach used a million times before. Why do consumers keep falling for this and more importantly, why do we even WANT our favourite rappers feuding? Seriously. Did “We’re All in the Same Gang” not teach us a damn thing?!?
At most, “Control” is a good-natured tickle on the tummy to K.Dot’s contemporaries and essentially a call-toiarms to collectively raise the bar.
It’s a lyrical reality check.
It’s a pep rally.
Just don’t try to position this as a warning shot. It’s clearly not.
Completely Ignored 
