When Hiphop Artists Take Metadata Too Far.

September 02, 2003, 04:49 pm

I'm not sure if you've noticed, but a lot of hiphop artists are including meta-data in their songs. Hiphop has a long tradition of meta-data, including but not limited to:

Artist Names
With Adrock, M.C.A., and me - Mike D.
I am Wonder Mike and I'd like to say Hello
Group Names
B-E-A-S-T-I-E!

Unfortunately, some artists are unable to stop at that.

An excellent example is the song Shake Your Tailfeather, featured on the Bad Boys 2 soundtrack.

For reasons unknown, P. Diddy proclaims, Bad Boys 2 / the soundtrack. Okay. I guess you have to tell us that so we know what album to steal from Wal-Mart. And the names of each artist is also embedded in the song, Nelly, Diddy, Murphy Lee. Why? I am sure that this meta-data is not intended to make this content more accessible. I think it has everything to do with the fact that Puff Daddy has no talent and needs to leech off new, successul talent to keep his name known.

I'm not surprised. Puff Daddy has a long record of releasing songs that sample a successful work, such as Led Zepplin's Kashmir and The Police's Every Breath You Take, and adding a minute amount of content to it. Seriously, if you counted the distinct number of words in Come With Me and I'll Be Missing You, you'd have fewer than 20 words per song (not that I'm saying a good song has to have greater than 20 words, but I just don't think Puff Daddy has anything to say other than “uh,” “yeah,” and “turn me up”).

In fact, if you look at his contributions to Shake Your Tailfeather, you'll find that he's mostly just repeating what Nelly is saying. Fucking lame.

But the worst part is that it annoyed me enough to look some of this shit up.