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advertisement “I guess you can’t smile for those Right Guard commercials if you don’t have any teeth, f*cker!” I’d just beaten Xzibit in 70 seconds. Another one bites the dust. The muscular, blinged-out and battle-hardened virtual me had just handed another rapper a size 13 colonic. Even though I never got around to reviewing Def Jam: Fight for NY due to time constraints, I still managed to play the game over a 3 day period. I’ve been an AKI junkie for the last seven years (WCW vs. nWo, anyone?) and have anxiously awaited every brawler that they’ve produced so that I can voraciously mow through it as quickly as possible. It took me longer to comfortably write the Def Jam Vendetta review (2 days) than it took me to beat the game. I’ve now reached a point at which I’ve accepted that my appetite for their titles is insatiable and that I will never find a happy medium between an adequate challenge (there is none; I beat all of their games within a one week period) and cheap A.I. (which pisses off any rational gamer). Friends have stopped playing me at AKI-programmed games because I can pick them up and quickly immobilize my opponent within 30 seconds. I’m not saying any of this to brag or boast or stroke my own ego- God knows I’ve reached an age where bragging about being good at wrestling games will not win you friends, girls, or influence people. I’m saying this because it’s true. That, and EA kinda f*cked up by not making it online. ;) Having said that, Def Jam: Fight for NY’s appeal for me is completely different than what the game was designed to be. Ultimately, it combines two major themes- commercialization/exploitation of hip-hop and urban culture with no-holds barred, bone-snapping street brawls. Instead of cynically dismissing the game as another corny-ass “yo kid” hip-hop tie-in, I embraced it as having cathartic qualities. Not the kind of angsty catharsis that mutates into weird things like feeling like Linkin Park is speaking to you, suburban white males out there, but the kind of catharsis associated with burning a dummy in effigy. Still with me? Good. Hopefully, some of you reading this were at some point, hip-hop heads. You know, the kind of people who still occasionally put on “The Bridge is Over” and sing it word for word with Kris. The kinds of people who remember when conscious rap was considered the norm rather than “alternative.” The cats who bought old records and downloaded old 60s and 70s tracks to figure out who sampled what. The kinds of heads who remember when hip-hop was just as much about social uplift, education, and community involvement as it was about party jams. The kinds of people who used to get excited when a new issue of The Source would hit the streets. And back when the beats you heard on the radio (if you were lucky enough to live somewhere where they didn’t brag about not playing rap) didn’t suck so f*cking much. Remember Common’s “I Used to Love H.E.R.?” Of course you do. And you used to love H.E.R. too. And you felt what he was talking about because you saw the music starting to take turns in the wrong direction. Def Jam: FFNY is like finally getting the chance to get your hands on the dickhead that made H.E.R. turn against you and putting his ass in the hospital with 95% chances of permanent scarring and debilitating injuries. You’re finally getting to throw a chair at MTV for canceling “Yo! MTV Raps” and assimilating everyone else into their McMold. Through this virtual NYC, you create a fighter who would slightly resemble you if you were 200 pounds of solid muscle, sounded like one of five templates of voices and had an affinity for the most un-Kanye outfits to be graphically rendered as hip-hop fashion. Through this gritty urban terrain, you will encounter a pseudo-street white clothier, Henry Rollins (because everyone respects him and he’s always looked like he could beat your ass by looking at you), Jacob the Jeweler (because everyone bigs him up and gives him business), and a variety of street fighters and rappers. It’s amusing to know that so many artists were willing to allow their virtual selves to be the subject of so much abuse. I’m sure they’re laughing to some bank (I bet they only got hundreds of dollars in royalties considering how many freaking real people there are in the game), but I’d feel weird if some dorky kid came up to me saying, “Dude, I played against you in Def Jam last night. You went out like a bitch!” Yet, it’s great. Through all of the years of listening to hip-hop, I’ve seen men who I looked up to as a teenager as underappreciated icons of the underground go from blossoming and becoming successful and fruitful to seeing that fruit get old and rotten and fall off the tree. So when I see Xzibit selling deodorant and on “Pimp My Ride” grinning ear to ear and think about everything he was kicking back in 1996 on “Paparazzi,” I’m convinced that he foresaw his own falling off the same way that Tupac repeatedly foreshadowed his own demise. I remember Fat Joe rhyming about “the shit is real,” before he was doing crossover songs with studio-augmented girls singing over the hooks. When I remembered seeing Busta Rhymes roaring “like a dungeon dragon” and saw him as a walking cartoon that sells soda, I felt a little let down. There are those who would argue, "Hey man, they're making their money. They should be happy." I agree. They should be happy. They still fell off, though. Their music lacks the hunger and drive and (gasp) artistry that it once had. When I see a culture of 30+ year-olds that act like they’re permanently 19 instead of accepting that they’ve grown up, I feel awfully let down. Until I smash a bottle over their faces and KO them with a roundhouse right. So, I suppose that the promises and optimism that hip-hop used to deliver between 1988 and 1995 have fallen by the wayside. And so I’m left with the ability to take all of this frustration out through a caricatured version of myself taking on a caricatured version of a caricature. And it feels really good to break Crack’s arm and to smash Magic’s head in the car door of his Escalade. Because you remember when they were talking about real life and not regurgitated faux-yuppie materialism. So, for those of you out there javelining your former idol face first into a jukebox, remember: you’re not alone. I'm sure that any genre of music has its former idols who have gotten annoyingly mainstream, but hip-hop culture has managed to captivate the world more than any American cultural movement of the past 25 years. Whether EA realized it or not (and they probably didn’t), their assimilation of hip-hop through their game has given a frustrated generation an outlet for unleashing their demons on a culture that doesn’t speak to them relevantly anymore. It's more utterly brilliant than anyone could have conceived. It still would have been nice to have LL Cool J and Lil’ Jon in the game, though. ;) |
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