A Year of Blind Spots: Word of Mouf

Word of Mouf

Ludacris

2001

I blame people like Jann Wenner. I was thinking about my relationship with music back when I was a teenager, and how integral a publication like Rolling Stone happened to be around that time, and I was thinking about how "good music," as it was presented to me then, came with inherent biases. Those thoughts came into sharp focus a couple weeks ago when Wenner made some racist and sexist comments about some lame ass book he's promoting, something along the lines of "only white dudes were articulate enough to be in my book." Which is small-minded at best, and really shitty for a dude who ostensibly helped shaped what "rock 'n' roll" is conceived to be, through his co-founding of Rolling Stone and co-founding the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

There's so much I could say about this, but my point today, in this short write-up about a hip hop album I was not familiar with prior to this week, is that my entry into music was through Rolling Stone, and thus through Jann Wenner, and thus through a myopic, intolerant point of view. I believed Rolling Stone when it claimed that these albums were the best of all time, and I was naive enough to think that this was it, this was the canon, this is what I need to "know" good music. For a long time, I didn't notice how many voices were missing from that conversation, and it's taking me an even longer time to undo some of those preconceived notions that were instilled in my, ignorantly or even maliciously.

Had I found a more broad-minded source of musical knowledge at that young age, maybe I would have found an album like Word of Mouf a lot sooner. Listening to an album like this makes me regret past mistakes, and makes me angry at all the time wasted without it. 

Even now, maybe I and others more knowledgeable than I would not necessarily classify Ludacris' Word of Mouf as one of the best albums of all time, nor even an "important" album in terms of what we are doing here with hip hop in this blog column that only a couple people read. You can note that Luda does not show up on RS's newest and more inclusive 500 Greatest Albums All Time list (in general, that publication has done a really fucking great job widening their scope and including more voices in the seven years since Wenner stepped away). He doesn't even show up on their even more recent Top 200 Hip Hop Albums All Time list. But "importance" is only half the story. The other half is: is it enjoyable? HELL YEAH.

Somewhat of a sidenote, but you might even be able to stretch the term "important" and make the case that this is the first instance of "Southern Hip Hop" we've come across this year. And that's true, even if we already covered the Southern hip hop group last year (before I started to feel comfortable subgenre-ing rap for myself), and even if Ludacris technically cut his teeth in Illinois before moving to Atlanta before sophomore year. We could use this space to talk about what makes this sound "Southern hip hop," and say that its an emphasis on bass (like East Coast) and on synthesizers (like West Coast), plus a tendency to focus on "party music" with "simple lyrics heavily laden with regional dialect. If I had to name one example where I can hear it, it might be "Go 2 Sleep," which sounds almost proto-Crunk in how "Southern" it is. But maybe we can return to these ideas if we ever check out another Southern Hip Hop icon on this blog.

The focus today should be how much I appreciated the talent and charisma of Ludacris this week. The dude spins gold with every line he drops. Every word hit spits lands like a punch. Everything you need to know is on the first song, "Coming 2 America." It starts off with a terrible joke, somehow connects Danny DeVito and Ringo Starr, makes the phrase "more bullets than yo' billboard singles" sound like actual bullets (and accidentally predicts "Sugar, We're Going Down"), then caps it off by doubling the tempo of the beat and keeping up with aplomb. There's over an hour of this! It's fun!

Of course, I would've known about this way earlier if I was paying attention and not giving too much credence to what the old white dudes were saying. I was familiar with "Rollout" and "Move Bitch," because I was alive at the turn of the century. Two legitimately catchy songs that make me yearn for the days when hip-pop radio was fun like this. As it stands now, I can make the connection between hip hop stardom in the the early '00s and Ludacris' current role as comedic relief in a multi-billion-dollar action movie franchise. The talent and charisma are transferrable.

The one thing that gives me pause is the... cartoon aesthetics, I guess? I don't know how to describe it, and maybe I don't want to, because something about it is too uncanny-valley for me to look at. The cover of the album is extremely off-putting, and it almost reminds me of the animation from those insipid and ugly Trolls movies. Which probably means that I hate cartoon imagery like this, but it might mean that Trolls is modeled after the cover of Ludacris' Word of Mouf, and I don't know which reality would be worse. I also can't stand the "Rollout" video, with the big head and the sped-up arm movements. I find it horrifying in ways that I sincerely don't know how to articulate. I'm sorry.

But that's an easily ignorable piece of this music, and so ignore it I will. I can always just listen to "Area Codes," and sleep well at night knowing that Ludacris has hos in the Philadelphia area (2-1-5 represent!).

I think that maybe Word of Mouf can represent a new chapter of Year of Blind Spots. It's the point when we move from "every rap album needs to be important" to "maybe we can just enjoy some good rap." I am comfortable where I am at right now. I am well on the road to being able to legitimately claim that I "get" it. And now I can just sit back and enjoy someone like Ludacris—not capital-I Important music, but fun and worthy music all the same.

But shit... talking like that makes me seem like Jann Wenner. He's not the main character in music, and neither am I. Ludacris is the main character today. I just wish he could've been a main character for me before now. Ah well... the skit "Greatest Hits" on this album is well-deserved, to say the least.