The second taster track from their forthcoming This Is All Yours album plays with that geeky white boy rap-rock that Beck mastered back in the late 90s, and the bombastic, bar-brawling elements of Jack White's new work.
But only the first of three "sad boy raps" (with its giddy rhyming of "phoenix", "Kleenex" and "v-necks") registers as comedy; the later two are downbeat verging on desolate.
BEN RATLIFF YUNG JOC "Hustlenomic$" (Bad Boy South) When it first surfaced on mixtapes, "Coffee Shop," the cheerful single by Yung Joc, seemed like a goofy but effective twist on dope-boy rap.
City College's eclectic faculty then included Joseph Heller, William Burroughs and Israel Horovitz -- the father of Adam Horovitz, whose white-boy rap group, the Beastie Boys, Mr. Toback put on the soundtrack of his 1987 movie, "The Pick-Up Artist".
Empire's action starts when street criminal-turned-hip-hop superstar-turned-smooth, cravat-swathed record company mogul Lucious Lyon (Terrence Howard) announces that he intends to bequeath his CEO position to one of his three sons: business-brained, bipolar Andre; unassuming, gay musical genius Jamal; or bad-boy rap starlet Hakeem.
The second-to-last song on the disk, "High 5 (Rock the Catskills)," goes a step further: just past the one-minute mark, Beck's edgy white-boy rap abruptly dissolves into a foreign sound that turns out to be, of all things, Schubert's "Unfinished" Symphony.
So why the "bad boys" rap? "I don't know," says Slash. "Because we drink and do whatever, and we're just basically real people to the point that I think it almost offends other people".
bad-boy rap superstar Eminem, is another prominent self-perceived child victim of the label-and-medicate momentum.
Sharp laughter, sharper comments, news of the boys rapped out with some exultation.
"You know, it's really funny how time flies," one of the boys rapped: Three years and now it's time for my goodbyes.
