b.o.b - biter on blast

give him 15 minutes and a bag of bud and i bet he busts. now, i'm sure that does not sound appealing to you ladies out there but to me it sounds a little bit like love - or at least a really strong like. as is my nature, i've found yet another slightly eccentric, lean, mean, rhyming machine (heavy emphasis on the lean) to crush on after feeling his flow. this is starting to sound more sexual than i'd hoped sooo i'm just going to cut to the chase: b.o.b, bobby ray - the boy's got some talent and dare i say he's showing some serious promise. you've probably heard "beautiful girls" and "airplanes" rotating regularly on your local annoying ass radio station but the proof isn't in that chocolate part of the pudding ('cause the chocolate half of those little pudding packages is gross and unnecessary), it's in that vanilla deliciousness that is the rest of his latest album, "the adventures of bobby ray."

last week, my brother and i were sitting around one afternoon enjoying our breakfast (yes, it makes sense when you're unemployed and sleep until 2pm) when he asked me if i'd heard of "that dude b.o.b" and insisted that i listened to the entire album right then. with nothing to do and nowhere to go, i figured i'd give it a chance. my brother prefaced the listening party with the opinions he'd shaped from previous private listenings: basically, he said "the dude's a straight up flow biter. he thinks he's andre 3000 - he named himself after an outkast song, he's from georgia, he wears those strange straw hat things and he grew his goatee out a little longer than normal. he even sounds like andre. i thought i was listening to rough cuts of the new outkast cd when i heard this album." ouch. but it was kind of true - i heard the andre 3000 in b.o.b's flow, i heard the outkast-esque big band in the background of some of the tracks, hell, i even thought he was ludacris on one song. but my brother continued with a rather contradicitng conclusion: "but he's actually nice. definitely not on outkast's level, but i mean, he writes his own music, produces a lot of it, he plays several musical instruments and if he chooses to take a bite out of 3000's style then he's definitely thinking right. i like his music."

our impromptu intense musical critique/jam session made something very clear to me about artists and originality: being a "biter" isn't all that bad if you do it the right way. yeah, b.o.b clearly seems to be taking some serious notes on certain rappers' styles, and yes, it's obvious enough to be recognized sometimes, but the kid still has a little something about him that's all his own. and let's be real, he seems to know a lot more about music as an artform and as a practice, which is much more than could be said about a lot of rappers these days who treat music like a market. this shirt my cousin wore the other day said it all so simply: "bad artists copy, good artists steal." bobby ray, you do your thing, baby - i ain't even mad.

give him his 15 minutes - i bet he'll bust.