Purple Haze, Joe

A List of Subjects I Hope That Other People Discuss in Their Reviews of Cam'ron's 2004 Hip Hop Album Purple Haze, Even Though for the Most Part I Personally Don't Feel Like Talking About Them:

• The ballsiness of beginning your album by claiming that this is old material: is this a flex (that even tossed-off shit written three years ago occasionally sounds like gold) or an indictment (that it's been three years since you've written anything worthy of publication)?
• All the references I don't get, and Genius.com refuses to help with: Kurt Cobain in "More Gansta Music"; the Flinstones reference in "Killa Cam"; and so on.
• Favorite references: mine is the "Feed me Seymour" bit in "Leave Me Alone, Pt. 2" (TIL who the top execs of Roc-a-fella and Def Jam were in 2004), but what are yours?
• Favorite instance of good "flow": How Cam raps the line "Stuck, killed, mugged, milled, tone, flint, sticks, bo, Chub's milk," to mirror the same syncopated piano rhythm in "Harlem Streets" (also: see the bullet point describing "references I don't get"), but what are yours?
• Related: how Cam'ron makes it pretty clear that he is from Harlem: how important hometown pride is to many artists in this genre, and how artists in other genres could learn from this.
• How the album lives or dies based on which sample serves as the bedrock to each song: i.m.o., the older or weirder the sample is, the better the rapping sounds juxtaposed to it.
• Favorite sample: I'm tempted to mention "Harlem Streets" again, which samples the Hill Street Blues theme (both because of the aforementioned juxtaposition of rapping over a canned-symphony-type piece of music, and the intended irony of a rapper with a noted anti-police stance rapping over the theme to a famous cop TV show), but I would probably instead go with "Girls," which does a lot more to shape an already famous song (the Cyndi Lauper thing) into Cam'ron's own image (also might be especially helpful to me to hear this after hearing the shitty Trolls 2 version of this song a thousand times in the past few months), but what is yours?
• How cool it is to be exposed to so many disparate types of music via these samples, e.g. enjoying the guitars on "Bubble Music" and then going on YouTube and listening to the sample source, Steel Pulse's "Blue Dance Raid." (Or: how it feels like raiding someone's vinyl collection in a musty basement.)
  
• Or—if we're gonna combine two previous points—how "More Reasons" samples "Reasons" by Earth, Wind & Fire, and how it might be the best juxtaposition of a prim-and-proper '60s sound with a very low-brow '00s sense of humor—like, this shit is legitimately funny, with references to boogers and Caddyshack and cheap shoes, all in the first verse.
• How Cam'ron is a pretty good rapper, but the guests are hit or miss: Dipset member Juelz Santana is pretty embarrassing in "More Gangsta Music" (totally lacking any of the wordplay finesse that Cam'ron possesses in spades), but Twista threatens to steal the show in "Adrenaline."
• The Kanye of it all—very weird to hear him from back in 2004, right when he was launching his own solo career (also, how his actions in the past few years might color one's perception of his supporting role here).
  
• How cool it is to pour over some of the denser lyrics all over this—and I bring it up in the context of the Kanye thing, because it's at the beginning of his featured song "Down and Out" that has a good example: Cam says "Kanye, this that 1970s Heron flow?" which is actually a double entendre: the sample here is "Strung Out" by William Bell and Mavis Staples—"strung out" being a term for a heroin hangover—but also Gil Scott-Heron asks in his 1971 song "Lady Day and John Coltrane" whether you are "down and out." Is this something that you are interested in doing too?
• How the title of the album works on multiple levels too: it's simultaneously a drug reference, a reference to the importance of color and style and costume for Cam'ron, and a reference to another classic song by a black artist, one that I'm truly surprised wasn't sampled on this album.
  
• How "Dipset" was a known entity before this but I assumed it was a person, not a rap group: though maybe I'm getting it mixed up with "Diplo," who is definitely one person (I think).
• How some of the references seem a little dated: the Kerry/Bush thing, as well as Hiltons and Olsens, definitively date this as a mid-'00s production.
• How some of it didn't age well due to more serious reasons: I dunno, the vaguely racist sentiments in "Hey Lady" kind of rubbed me the wrong way, but maybe I'm just being sensitive?
• How sonically it occasionally sounds ahead of its time: maybe I'm just being ignorant of rap's history, but the sped-up vocals on "Soap Opera" (Smokey Robinson at a higher speed) and especially the pipsqueak vocals on "Shake" remind me of some of the hyperpop that is only just now seeping its way into mainstream pop (PC Music through 100 gecs through Charli XCX); which is something that at least one critic called "weird" in 2004 but these days sounds pretty normal (I mean, as far as you could call 100 gecs "normal" in any sense of the word).
• How there is a bona fide sequel to this album called Purple Haze 2, released less than two years ago!
• How this album is just too fucking long, and you're for real worn out by like track 18: I personally felt like I went deep into this album this week, and right now I am more exhausted than I have ever been at the end of a Record Club week, but was this something that anyone else felt?
• How it's really just a matter of doing a little bit of pruning here and there: it felt like Purple Haze had like three different endings; was all of that necessary?
  
• How you might grapple with the album's idea of "crime being cool" or however you want to phrase it (e.g. the "my crimes are cooler than your crimes" boasts on "Leave Me Alone, Pt. 2"), and whether this is too cliché of a topic to discuss in 2021 in reference to a hip hop album: i.e. should we consider the fact that these characters are fictionalized, and so on.
• And on top of that, how someone who is definitively NOT from this world—e.g. a white kid who was attending a private Catholic high school in 2004—could still appreciate such an album, and how that would affect their understanding and ability to appreciate the subject matter.
  
• Is Mizzle a real person? I purposefully didn't do any research in the hopes that someone else can explain this to me.
• Mizzle, as our humble narrator, explains that "My man Killa's a motherfucker. I mean, he brings out the best in you." Is this something we should take at face value? Is it actually true for the audience as well? Or is it meant to be ironic?
  

In Fact, Let's Turn These Subjects into a Bingo Card, So That You Can Play Along with the Other Reviews:

 

Those Are the Subjects That I Hope Other People Write About This Week, but There Is Only One Subject That I Personally Wish to Write About This Week, and That Is the Skit Called "I'm a Chicken Head":

A transcript of the skit (or my best approximation of it):

Female: And you're right, I am a chicken. I'll be a chicken, 'cause you're a cat, so I need you to go meow at that girl and get me my money passes.

Cam'ron: [???]

Female: Saying hello, and then you hung up the fucking phone, then when I called back, you wasn't answering the fucking phone, I don't understand why you—

Cam'ron: What are you saying? You said you wasn't gonna call me no more anyway, so why are you calling me?

Female: What the fuck you think I fucking wanna say? Asshole! What? You say a lot of fucking things you don't do it, if you wanna get technical.

Cam'ron: Why you call—

Female: Don't you play with me, 'cause I'll come to Manhattan, and I will fucking punch you in your face, 'cause that's how you got me feeling right now. Don't play with me.

Cam'ron: Don't call me no more!

Female: I'll call you when I feel like it. Change your number. I'm a chicken so I'ma act like a chicken: quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, or whatever the fuck sound they make.

Cam'ron: That's a duck! [???] You wanna be a duck or a chicken?

Female: I wanna fucking punch you right in your fucking eye. I swear to god I wanna punch you in your eye. That's what I wanna do, I wanna punch you in your fucking nose. What street are you going to?

Cam'ron: [???]

Female: On 24th?

 

Cam'ron: I wanna see—

Female: 'Cause I will fucking call every fucking studio and I will fucking find you. I will go on my computer right now and I'll get a list, and I swear to god, if I gotta find you on all [???] and I will fucking act crazy. Fight with me. Fight with me. You know I will come down there. Fucking fight with me, you act like you don't know we'd act back in the '97, '98, '99.

Cam'ron: Listen, man—

Female: No, you fucking listen. Don't tell me to fucking listen.

Cam'ron: ...Alright

The tired take here would be to say that this skit, as well as the rest of the skits on Purple Haze, as well as the rest of the skits in the entire history of rap music, as well as any throwaway non-song track on any album that has ever been released (e.g.), is completely unnecessary, and insulting to the listener, who ostensibly is here, right now, listening to an album because s/he wants to listen to music, and this isn't music, and so it's not needed or wanted, etc. etc. forever.

The wired take is that "I'm a Chicken Head" is the most important track on Purple Haze.

This is because it is the best representation of what Cam'ron is attempting to achieve with Purple Haze as a whole. There are many branches to this argument. The first is that the skit is actually funny, which says a lot about Cam'ron's ability to mine humor from unlikely sources. Think about "Get 'Em Girls," at the tail end of this long album, and we're exhausted, and he drops a line like "Want to hit it from the back / she agreed that I'm looney / But proceeded to moon me." That's funny! Unexpectedly funny!

Same with "I'm a Chicken Head." At first it's like, ho hum, another hip hop skit featuring a recorded phone conversation with a crazy anonymous person. But then the lady on the other end of the line drops a line like "I'm a chicken so I'ma act like a chicken: quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, or whatever the fuck sound they make." That's comedy gold!

The skit, in other words, in reflective of my desired experience when listening to such an album. I want to be unexpectedly thrilled by cleverness. But there are other things I thought about during "I'm a Chicken Head" that also reflected my general experience with Purple Haze.

For one, "I'm a Chicken Head" is ripe for discussion regarding power dynamics. Who is using whom here? Is it the woman berating a rapper in an attempt to get free shit? Or is it the rapper who secretly recorded the conversation and used it on an album to publicly humiliate the woman? The idea of "using" someone could be applied to me and Purple Haze. Am I truly enjoying Purple Haze? Or am I just using it for discourse about Purple Haze on a blog?

For another, it speaks to my tendency to find poignancy where there probably isn't any to begin with. I'm going deep on an 80-second clip, attempting to make the case that it's more than it appears, but really, it's just a clip of a woman quacking like a chicken. Likewise, thousands of words will be spilled about Purple Haze this week on Puke on Your Birthday, but is this album really more than a collection of soul samples and braggadocio? Tough to say.

Also, should we be concerned about the portrayal of this woman in the context of the skit? It's telling that one of the few women who get a voice on Purple Haze is someone who believes that chickens quack. Not that Cam'ron has an obligation to behave in any particular way, and I don't think that he is explicitly misogynistic at any point on Purple Haze. Implicitly, though? Sure. (Though I did think all week that he says "all girls are whores" on "Girls," before finding out today that he's referencing another song and saying "'Girls All Pause.'") It's kind of like Madea, right? Are we perpetuating "angry black woman" stereotypes here? And is it even my place to say something if he is?

Regardless, I feel bad for this chick, how she is getting so angry about something so petty. I remember one time I was investigating a family because their kids were truant, and after I dropped off a letter with my contact info, the dad called me up and threatened to kill me and bury me if I ever came to the house again. Took me years to understand that anger, about how the motivation was love for his kids, and fear for their future (social services being mislabeled a "threat" in some families). The anger was misplaced, certainly, but also valid. Who knows what's up with our chicken head friend? Maybe she's had a rough life so far, and the only time she ever felt important was when she was pallin' around with Cam'ron in the late '90s, and now she can feel him slipping away, and the future is looking bleak for her, and so she's lashing out. I'm not saying it's right, but I'm saying I can understand the impulse, and ultimately empathize.

 

And this is saying nothing about the immediate embarrassment you feel when you say something stupid in the heat of the moment (i.e. the quacking chicken), and having to live with that moment for the rest of your life. Like, imagine a waiter says "Have a good meal" and you say "you too" and you blush because you immediately know that was a stupid thing to say, and also Sada Baby was sitting at the next table over, and he recorded the whole thing, and it shows up in a skit on Bartier Bounty 3 (and then seventeen years later Record Club reviews it, and some asshole goes deep on the skit as some sort of dumb try-too-hard bit).

 

You know what, though? There's vulnerability in the Cam'ron character here too. It might be the one time all album when Cam'ron sounds defeated. He halfheartedly tries to fight back at first, but by the end of the conversation, he seems to sigh and admit defeat: "...alright." This is how the skit ends. I guess it's possible to read it as "I'm done with this chick," but I'm choosing to read it as "I want to be done with this chick but I know I'm not." Cam'ron sounds tough on Purple Haze, and it's a good look on him, but it's also pretty tiring after 75+ minutes of it. I was glad to see this one instance of a chink in the armor. It was refreshing. It made Cam'ron seem more human. Relax with the flexing, and bring on more of the quacking.

This, more than any other part of "I'm a Chicken Head," is probably most indicative of my overall experience with Purple Haze. Just as Cam'ron is eventually worn down and silenced after getting quacked at, so too was I throughout my many, many hours with Cam'ron this week. At first, I tried to fight it (my email response to Nate when he picked this was basically "77 minutes?! Skits?! Why?!?!"). Eventually, I was broken. I approached Cam'ron and was like "Hey, listen, this isn't really my type of thing," and he said, "No, you fucking listen. Don't tell me to fucking listen." What else could I possible say but "...alright"?

GRADE: 3.5 pukes out of 5