oh hip hop...

by the way: been staying in hotels lately, and hotels have cable, and cable has BET, and i love a big ass as much as anyone, so of course i've been watching, but after tuning in recently for about five minutes, i must officially declare a moratorium on ignorance. sombbody (anybody!) has got to stop nelly. his latest offering is a video about "grills". not the kind you cook meat on, but the diamond and platinum fronts that so many of the rappers are wearing these days. sample lyrics:

got a bill in my mouth/like i'm hilary clinton

smile for me daddy/let me see ya grill/ i wanna see ya grill

how'd you get your grill that way? / how much you have to pay?

and then there was a lyric that i was too stunned to write down but said something like: wearing diamond and platinum teeth is how one shows the world that one is wealthy.

but even beyond the lyrics, the images of grin'n, coon'n, tom toe'n rappers with butlers handing them selections of grills on silver trays was just grotesque....have more to say on this, but am being called to perform...more later...cbell