in his latest Status Ain't Hood Tom Breihan notes:

"We Fly High" [by jim jones] is a truly awful song, and it's only managed to become a success because there aren't a whole lot of great rap singles out now"

aha! well i have not been paying a whole lot of attention to rap this year, but these last weeks I have found myself clicking onto BET a bit more than for a while, and watched those "viewers' choice rap videos of the moment" top 10 countdown things that MTV2 does, and just been stunned by how utterly bereft the genre seems. a palpable sense that nobody can be bothered to do anything exceptional or different, make the slightest attempt to raise the collective game; a real half-hearted, going-through-the-motions, same-old-same-old vibe, from the rhyme-content to the production to the video imagery. still a bit of lingering-way-past-its-freshness-point techno element in some tunes (e.g. that new single with eminem and lloyd banks and the rest), but it's like bad techno, the kind of stuff they used to play at the Tunnel...

snoop dogg is looking really haggard these days isn't he