Critical Beatdown

Critical Beatdown

Smashwords Edition

BYRON CRAWFORD

Copyright © 2018 Byron Crawford

All rights reserved.

www.byroncrawford.com

Cover by Theotis Jones

In loving memory of Harambe

She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted.—Mitch McConnell

Table of Contents

1) Two Brothers With Checks

2) Poppa Large

3) Extravagant Traveler

4) Backstage Passes

5) Sex Style

6) Funk Your Head Up

7) Cold Peein' On 'Em

8) Bald-Headed Girl

9) No Awareness

10) F-U M.F.

11) Spankmaster

12) I Don't Believe You

13) Ego Trippin'

14) Smack My Bitch Up

15) Big Time

16) Master Of The Game

17) The Industry Is Wack

18) Mad Man Departure

About The Author

1

Two Brothers With Checks

What's 1,000 x 5? What, 500,000? 50,000?

—Troy Ave

Troy Ave looks like an eight-year-old boy who drinks a lot of beer.

He's more or less average in height, with skinny-fat arms like an Asian girl and, at about 30 years old, the prodigious gut of a middle-aged man.

He's got an anachronistic, Cameo-style haircut, like something your mom would have given you before bringing you to a Sears Portrait Studio in 1989, and he's always got a pouty expression on his face like a petulant child, like maybe he's just as unsatisfied with his haircut as everyone else is.

His manager, a guy named Hovain, is much fatter than he is, and I suspect that this is the source of much of Troy Ave's otherwise unwarranted self-confidence. It's important, for the sake of your self-esteem, to surround yourself with people who are doing worse than you are.

Once, while researching an unrelated matter, I took a look at Troy Ave's Instagram. I saw a lot of pictures of him and his manager eating in fancy-looking restaurants. Either one or maybe both of them must be drug dealers. No dry snitch. I don't think they make very much money from rap music.

Admittedly, it made me jealous to see them gorging themselves on crab meats like that. That's what I want to do with my life, I thought to myself.

In addition to eating seafood, Troy Ave made it his life's mission to bring New York back, after controversial remarks made by Trinidad James at a fake rap concert sponsored by Converse.

Trinidad James is a one-hit wonder from circa 2012, who was known for dressing like a minstrel performer version of the character Jerome from the TV show Martin. His one hit song, All Gold Everything, was positively ubiquitous there for a minute and sparked a lot of debate about the images of black people presented in the media, the state of hip-hop and what have you.

At the fake rap concert, seemingly apropos of nothing, Trinidad James announced to the crowd that Atlanta rappers run New York. He may have been surprised to see that so many people were willing to pay to see him perform, in a city that was once filled with so many great rappers.

The thing is, the crowd was made up of young-ish white people who don't know from rap music. It could have doubled as a Vice magazine office party. If it had been a legit rap concert, someone might have rushed the stage.

In 2014, iLoveMakonnen was yanked from the stage and coldcocked (nullus), on a Tuesday no less, by Troy Ave's weed carrier Ronald Banga McPhatter . . . allegedly, and iLoveMakonnen had no illusions of being superior to New York rappers, other than maybe Troy Ave.

In the wake of the incident at the fake rap concert, someone in Atlanta, who must have already robbed Trinidad James, called Maino and offered to give him a chain that had once belonged to the All Gold Everything rapper. Or maybe Trinidad James traded the chain for drugs. Who knows?

Much was made of the fact that Maino, an obscure New York rapper who's known to beat people up, could come into possession of Trinidad James' chain, though it's not like he had to do anything to get it. I suppose he could have used the chain to set up a meeting at which he would have slapped the shit out of James, and hopefully recorded himself doing so.

In an interview with Vibe magazine, which at that point may have just been a website, Troy Ave once famously called Kendrick Lamar a weirdo, in part because the To Pimp a Butterfly rapper wears shorts that are cut above the knee. He's not very tall, so you have to wonder where he'd even find such a pair of shorts.

For what it's worth, a friend of mine used to live next door to an otherwise seemingly normal middle-aged man who wore shorts that barely covered his ballsack, who turned out to be a closet case. Long before there was such a thing as a Caitlyn Jenner, he was fired from his job for showing up one day in a dress. It was all over the news here in St. Louis.

But I digress.

In that same Vibe interview, Troy Ave admitted that Atlanta rap music is dominant in New York, which can easily be proven by listening to Hot 97, which has the sheer balls to call itself the station where hip-hop lives, but he said that Atlanta rappers would get their asses kicked if they came to New York and I guess weren't sufficiently respectful.

He also suggested that All Gold Everything blew up because Hot 97 received payola from Trinidad James' label, Def Jam. Everyone kinda felt that way at the time, if only because why else would they want to play All Gold Everything? It's neither very good nor is it from New York. Certainly, there's something else they could have been playing. Sean Price had an album out that year.

B.Dot from Rap Radar made similar allegations in a YouTube video that went viral. In it, then-Hot 97 program director Ebro threw a colossal bitchfit at the mere suggestion that a radio station as ethical as Hot 97 could be on the take. Former New York Attorney General Elliot Spitzer, a/k/a Client no. 9, he explained, had already conducted an investigation, in which no evidence—like a check made out to Ebro by his cousin Lyor Cohen, with the word payola in the memo field—was found.

This was the same interview in which Ebro said that Sean Price wasn't suitable to be played on Hot 97, because he was a minor league rapper. Price died maybe two years later, at the ripe old age of 43 (same as Andrew Breitbart), maybe because he couldn't get adequate health care, because he didn't make much money, because his songs were never played on the radio.

In a sense, Ebro killed Sean Price.

If there's one thing Hot 97 and Rap Radar could both agree on, it's Troy Ave. The two of them, plus XXL and MTV News, seemed committed to trying to make Troy Ave a thing, almost as if they'd been plied with some of his fat manager's drug money.

XXL's annual Freshman 10 may have been expanded to include Troy Ave. Sometimes they will include a random R&B singer, maybe because they've been forced to by one of the major labels. In 2014, there were 12 artists on the list, including a random R&B singer and Troy Ave, who appeared alongside much more established artists like Chance the Rapper and Rich Homie Quan.

That same year, Troy Ave played the main stage at Hot 97's annual Summer Jam, despite not having a single song anyone ever heard of, rather than the festival stage off in the parking lot, where they stick all of the rest of the minor league rappers, along with obnoxious-ass Peter Rosenberg. And then the following year, he closed out the show as a special guest. Essentially, they let him headline.

As an article in Pitchfork pointed out, a while later, after his album Major without a Deal famously sold only 30 physical copies its first week out, the only other rapper who played Summer Jam in consecutive years recently was 2 Chainz, who had 14 songs in the top 15 of Billboard's rap chart during that span.

As Hot 97 et al. were trying to force Troy Ave on people (which constitutes abuse), Bobby Shmurda became the success Troy Ave would have been if anyone liked his music, albeit temporarily. Shmurda's song Hot Nigga became the Song of the Summer of 2014, the unofficial soundtrack to so many videos of unarmed black men being shot and killed by the police.

Podcast phenom Taxstone tried to put Ebro up on Bobby Shmurda early, but Ebro wasn't fuxxing with it, and then later on he refused to credit Taxstone, after Hot Nigga blew up. This was the origin of a beef that's culminated, so far, in Taxstone revealing that Ebro's wife is a lesbian, and Ebro calling MTV to have Taxstone suspended from the show Uncommon Sense, on which he was a recurring guest.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Ebro seems to have cultivated a rapport with New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, a frequent guest on the Hot 97 morning show. In the late '70s, de Blasio's (black) wife wrote an article for Essence magazine called I Am a Lesbian.

As Troy Ave was gearing up to play that first Summer Jam, getting his dance routines together and what have you, Vice magazine's music blog Noisey ran an article called Troy Ave: Rap Game George W. Bush, written by Drew Millard.

In it, Millard calls Elliott Wilson, whose Rap Radar has 31 pages of articles on Troy Ave, a professional sycophant, and he points out that Rob Markman, who wrote almost all of MTV News' articles on Troy Ave, has the same manager, presumably that same fat guy from Instagram. Who ever heard of a music writer having the same manager as an artist—or a manager at all period, for that matter?

Millard brings up many a good point, but he also comes off as salty on a level that goes above and beyond him not liking Troy Ave's music or finding the amount of coverage he receives suspicious, possibly having to do with an incident—mentioned in the article—in which Troy Ave pulled out a gun during an interview, years before.

In an interview conducted post-Summer Jam, at one of those street basketball tournaments like in the movie Above the Rim, Troy Ave explained that the real reason Millard was upset with him is because he fucked Millard's girlfriend. He said that, in an article published a few years before, pre-cuckolding, Millard was on his dick, to use the parlance of our time.

Word on the street was that Troy Ave put a shoe on Millard backstage at Summer Jam. It was all over Twitter that weekend. Millard didn't confirm or deny, that I'm aware of, which only added to the speculation.

Rob Markman said that his homeboys, who can't stand to see his journalistic credibility called into question, begged for him to give them the green light to attack Millard, but he refrained. Instead, according to Markman, one of Troy Ave's weed carriers smacked Millard and broke his jaw. I wonder if it was the same guy who beat later beat up iLoveMakonnen, Ronald Banga McPhatter.

I consulted the Google re: Troy Ave, just now, and come to find out, there really is an article, written two years before, in which Millard is on Troy Ave's dick. It's hardly different from something Rob Markman would have written.

I first became familiar with Rob Markman back in the late '00s, when he randomly appeared in the blogs section of the old XXL website singing the praises of 50 Cent. He claimed to be an editor with the dead tree version of the magazine, but no one in the comments section had heard of him, and there was speculation that shenanigans were at play, because 50 Cent, who was then well on his way to being dropped by Interscope, had recently released a mixtape, and none of the other bloggers planned to write about it. I wonder if they didn't just pull him in off the street.

I first became familiar with Drew Millard maybe a year before his Troy Ave takedown, when Noisey published an interview with Combat Jack in which the kid who conducted the interview suggested that white people make the best hip-hop journalists.

I missed this controversy when it happened, laid up recovering from either my fourth or fifth eye surgery, and later I mistakenly came to believe that Millard conducted the interview. I goofed on him for doing so in an early edition of my free, weekly email newsletter, Life in a Shanty Town.

Come to find out, he merely presided over Noisey, as an editor, when the interview was published. And the thing is, as the editor of a music blog, let alone a Vice publication, it's quite possible that he hadn't so much as read the interview before it was published. So uh, my bad.

The interview was later updated to clarify that what the author meant is that white hip-hop journalists write lengthier articles, while black hip-hop journalists mostly just post links to contraband mp3 files, photos and YouTube videos. If black hip-hop journalists did write lengthier articles, he's sure they'd be fantastic.

You know white people, always reading works by black authors—and not just Ta-Nehisi Coates either.

Troy Ave doesn't fuxwit Combat Jack, because at one point, years into Troy Ave's career, Combat appeared in a year-end roundtable discussion YouTube video for Complex and didn't vote for Troy Ave as Rookie of the Year. (If this was subsequent to him appearing on the cover of XXL's Freshman issue, that would help explain why he felt entitled to such an award at that point in his career.)

This beef came to light when Troy Ave accidentally sent Combat Jack a text message, thinking he was sending it to Charlamagne Tha God, talking about what a sucker Combat Jack is. Combat Jack texted back, You know this is Combat Jack, right? To which Troy Ave responded, Yeah, I know who this is. I should have said it to your face. The next day, Combat posted a pic on Instagram of himself and Troy Ave, Combat in a Troy Ave t-shirt, with the caption, Troy Ave and I a year ago, before he started calling me a sucker, or something to that effect.

A few days before Summer Jam, Millard was invited to appear, along with Combat, B.Dot and Ernest Baker, on some short-lived Complex video series in which a group of rap music experts debated controversial issues, like a hip-hop McLaughlin Group. Why in the world this only ran a few episodes I'm not sure.

Before they began filming, Millard went up to B.Dot and tried to introduce himself. B.Dot, upset about Millard's remarks about Elliott Wilson in that Troy Ave article, refused to shake Millard's hand and threatened to put a shoe on him, causing Millard to leave the studio.

On Twitter, Millard wrote that B.Dot had him kicked out of the studio, though he later clarified that he left the studio on his own accord. Arguably, B.Dot should have been forced to leave, since he was the one threatening people, and you'd think Complex would have a policy against that sort of thing. Certainly, they wouldn't have allowed someone to threaten a woman.

In the video, they made fun of Millard for being chased out of the studio. Then they debated whether or not you should beat someone up over something they said on Twitter.

Ernest Baker, who seems kinda effeminate (not that there's anything wrong with that), said he's fought people before over things they said on Twitter.

B.Dot said he didn't want anyone to be killed (which was mighty generous of him), but people need to understand that you can't just say anything you want on Twitter without suffering the consequences.

Combat Jack, who analyzes every situation for a potential lawsuit, said that people shouldn't fight each other physically over things said on Twitter; they should only fight with words. He cited an incident in which Peter Rosenberg was forced to issue an apology after threatening to slap the shit out of him in front of his kids. That was more embarrassing to Rosenberg than getting his ass kicked, supposedly.

Later in the video, they debated whether Troy Ave deserved to be featured as often as he was in various media outlets and at Summer Jam, and whether he'd ever achieve significant commercial success.

Ernest Baker said he didn't think Troy Ave would ever be very successful. He said (and I'm paraphrasing) that Troy Ave's music sucks balls, and reiterated many of the points Millard made in the article in Noisey.

B.Dot, on the other hand, felt that Troy Ave had what it takes to make it big. You got the sense that he was just saying that because maybe he knows Troy Ave or his people, or because Troy Ave had been featured so prominently on Rap Radar and he felt it necessary to provide some sort of justification. You could tell, as he was saying it, that he didn't really believe it.

Later on Twitter, Troy Ave issued a thinly veiled threat to Ernest Baker in the form of a subtweet, i.e. a tweet in which Baker wasn't mentioned by name. He said that Baker better watch what he says, unless he's down for whatever. Meaning, presumably, that if Baker continued to go around saying that Troy Ave's music sucks balls, Ave or one of his weed carriers would pop a cap in his ass.

Or maybe Ave would attack Baker physically. That would have been an interesting fight, because neither of them is particularly strong-looking. Baker's a bit taller, but Troy Ave probably weighs more. It would have been one hell of a matchup.

Baker, for his part, didn't seem at all concerned that a supposed violent coke dealer essentially threatened to kill him. In a reply to Troy Ave's tweet, he said that if Troy Ave had a problem with him he should come see about it. Aww dang.

At the time, this seemed like it may have been a matter of a suburbanite black kid not understanding the potential danger he was putting himself in, insulting someone like Troy Ave. No one realized just how crazy he was, though in retrospect you could kinda see it in his eyes in that Complex video.

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2

Poppa Large

The dozer will not clear a path. The driver swears he learned his math.

—Rivers Cuomo

So many places get shot up these days, you'd be forgiven for not remembering an incident that took place here in the STL back in the late '00s. A guy named Cookie Thornton, upset about multiple fines he'd received from the city of Kirkwood, MO, for parking his construction equipment in his front yard, shot up a city council meeting, killing a cop, the mayor and a few city council members and wounding