A Weekend About Everything

I feel like it was close to a year ago when Rich dropped a cadre of mixtapes onto my laptop over a series of night. One of them was from Erykah Badu's artist, Jay Electronic. One was from producer Waajeed. And the last was from Wale, whom Rich excitedly explained to me from was from Chocolate City, my hometown.

Currently extended family of The Roots crew, Wale is in many ways the kind of MC to come out of 202/301 a good decade back. Highly go-go influenced and lyrically charged by more local vernacular than nationally-accepted slang, he is the front man of go-go band rhyming over a diverse set of beats. I was checking out his "Mixtape About Nothing", a Seinfeld themed event (He actually got Julia Louise Dreyfus to do a drop for him on it) on my way to a meeting yesterday. The verdict: dope. The worry: That he'll be ignored by a musical marketplace that's never been completely warm about welcoming the DC rhyme-style into the mix. I know that naysayers might immediately make comment about the work of Nonchalant and Questionmark Asylum, but I'll always do my best to defend the fort. So I won't be the dude tearing it down. You can download
Wale's mixtape here.

I should've known better than to ask a woman in a leopard-print dress a size or two too small for her about anything that had to do with aesthetics. But there I was being curious again. I personally think that when we look back on this excessively tattooed era of ours (this doesn't mean that I'm not still getting one), when the elaborate designs that once looked so cute have stretched and sagged and faded, will we regret the choices we tagged to our flesh for life? I've noticed over the years that so many women get butterflies. And this woman was no different. When I asked her what I thought was a legit question she just stared at me. Then she said that she didn't know. Then she said that she guessed that it was about her being "in bloom". Then she rolled her eyes and started talking to her homegirl. When I explained what had happened to my homeboy Tra, he, though almost a decade younger than I, said the same thing. "Why would you ask a woman wearing that dress anything at all?" And then he bought me a shot of Jameson. 13 more and I would've been the new Jimmy McNulty.
But instead I ran into Deka twice, devoured the delicious culinary stylings of a super hero in the making and came up with the dopest high-concept idea in my screenwriting career. Not a bad weekend. Not bad at all.