"Who Dat Say They Gonna Beat Lil Wayne? My name ain't Bic but I keep that flame"

Lil' Wayne, new blogger for ESPN The Magazine. Check out his first blogpost.

People are pissed he didn't mention the Saints once!!!

Having Text?

Drunk-dialing? A thing of the past. Phone sex? Who needs it. Young people today are leading a textual revolution. Now seduction is at your finger-tips, in the palm of your hand. Forget monogamy. In this post-modern age, you can have as many partners as there are names in your contact list. Hell, you can be monogamous, but text your ex-boyfriends, brand-new crushes, oldies-but-goodies, last-ditch efforts, and friends' sexy little brothers all you want. I mean, who's going to indict you for "texting around?"

Now I've indulged in my fair share of "heavy texting," (thanks Mel) but there are some folks out there who just understand having text on a higher level. Like, the kama sutra manual, and shit.

So, I consulted my textiest friends, and asked them for their best sexy-texting stories:

1. Sascha--As a visitor to New Orleans, Sascha had a night with a strapping young fellow that she enjoyed so much, the next day she texted him "Fuck me like a prom queen."
He did not respond.

Back in college, Sascha had been engaging in mutual flirtations with a man who she saw at the campus bar from time to time. Shockingly, he was a malnourished hipster type with a coke problem. They frequently made eyes, talked too close and too long over too many drinks, etc. She had heard rumors of his having a "girlfriend," but this bitch never seemed to show her face. Well, one night, when he left the bar, Sascha decided to send him on his way with a little message:

Sascha: "So, are we going to fuck or what?"
Boy:"I have a girlfriend..."
Sascha: "What? Since when."
Boy: "It's been official for like two days."
Sascha: "Ever heard of cheating?"
Boy: "Baby, you got the wrong guy."
Sascha: "Wait, who is this?"

Moving on...

2. Miss Make-it-Rain-on-Them-Hos

So, Miss Make-it-Rain is a sexy-texting expert because of her amazing ability to text up to nine guys at once. Via cell, she is able to string along guys from past, present, and future. It's called multi-texting. I interviewed her about her style.

Kate: So, Miss Make-it-Rain, who are you texting these days?
Miss MIR: How many drinks have I had?
Kate: Good point. Next question. What is your texting m.o.?
Miss MIR: "I don't care who you fuck, as long as it's me, when I wanna."
Kate: I see. Ok, can one catch a textually-transmitted disease?
Miss MIR: Yes, but they're all mental.
Kate: Umm, that's not funny enough.
Miss MIR: That's not supposed to be funny, that's true.
Kate: What advice would you give to a young texter?
Miss MIR: "Better wear a la-tex, 'cuz you don't want that late text, that 'i think i'm late' text. (a ha ha)." So practice safe text.

Some tips and warnings:

1. Texting while driving is very dangerous. ("Much more dangerous than fellatio while driving," says Make-it-Rain.)

2. Being textually active is healthy and normal for young people these days. Moderate sexy texting is known to release endorphins, functioning as well as most low-dosage s.s.r.i's.

3. Do not have a Make-it-Rain text-a-thon unless you are her. Because you will fuck it up. For example, a young, green lad, actually, a sexy little brother, once texted me that he had had a dream about me. When I wrote back something benign like "oh that's sweet, I miss you" he responded, "Are you naked or Christina? Because that could affect when I come up." Looks like the little one was really working the freshman dorm.

4. I know Weezy did it, but look, no texting Mr. or Mrs. Occifer. 911 is for emergencies only.

Happy Texting! Please post your stories below:

Lil' Wayne at the VMAs

Oops, video no longer available. We're running into some serious copyright blocks. I hope you saw him at the VMA's! Lil' Wayne is the bomb!

Westbank Crush

(Check it out, for y'all who don't know: the land south of the Mississippi river, labeled "Westwego, Marrero, Harvey, Gretna, Algiers" constitutes the Westbank.)

The time has come for me to blog about Ballzack and Odoms, Westbank heart-throbs. If you've gotten all my allusions thus far, then you're up to speed. I got ahead of myself, but now I'm gamin'. Usually they're in italics to give you a heads up and so I don't get accused of plagiarism or something. Can bloggers get accused of plagiarism? By rappers?

To me, Rami Sharkey, aka "Ballzack," and Adam Bourgeois, aka "Odoms," are the only New Orleans celebrities out there because I don't know them. I like it that way, it gives me something to hope for when I get out of bed in the morning. No, I'm just playing; really, I live for my blog. And my dog. But Jude knows them, of course, so that means it's only a matter of time before me and Jude are in the same place, I spot them, and I'll be like, "Oh hey, you know Jude?" or rather, Jude will be like, "What up Rami, Adam; you know Kate?" And then we'll know each other. I'll still bump Yeah, Indeed every day in my silver Mazda Protege, and I'll still try to convince Odoms to go out with me, but they will have descended down from Marrero to East Bank New Ahyens, where God has yet to show us a rainbow because he's still punishing us with flood.

(here they are in the video for track one, "Rainbow in Marrero," off Yeah, Indeed)

Angus Lind just wrote today on the subject of celebrities in New Orleans stepping down from the pedestal and scooting up the bar stool to mingle with the locals.  Yeah.

So, Ballzack and Odoms are kind of a big deal.  Times Picayune music critic Keith Spera recently featured the duo on nola.com as publicity for their July 12 One Eyed Jack's CD release party (I was there), and Gambit's Noah Bonaparte Pais wrote a cover story about them and Lil Doogie (who we'll get to later). Briana Prevost  interviewed Ballzack on nola.com's The Perfect 10. According to up-and-coming New York rapper Sleek, a New Orleans ex-pat, they "haven't made it to New York yet"...but I mean, who really wants to?

Why are they so great?  Think DJ Jubilee meets Cake.  Composed in the New Orleans bounce style, Ballzack's songs feature call-and-response choruses and goofy-ass rhyme schemes set to beats created by simple drum machines.  Self-proclaimed "tongue-in-cheek," Ballzack writes lyrics that are ridiculous, embarrassing, and ingenious.  His catchy choruses and local jokes make for great driving, sing-along music.  However, the shout-outs that make local listeners grin don't exclude outsiders, but instead create a setting in which to ground Ballzack and his subject matter.  How does a rapper define himself, if not by where he's from?  If Lyrics Born raps about crossing "that Oakland Bay Bridge;" Big Boi name-drops "College Park, East Pointe and Decatur they got my back,/So We gon' keep on jammin and stabbin off in the track;" Lil' Wayne both alludes to Outkast and sets himself  apart with the line "I'm a red and yellow thang old school Atlanta hawk/Like I'm from College Park/But I'm from Hollygrove;" then listeners can dig when Ballzack raps "steady bumming joes on Lapalco."  I'm a native, but an Eastbanker, so I had a lot to learn from Ballzack.  He opened me up to the joys of the Westbank (stay tuned, we will be blogging about the next Westbank Thursday)!  Its five boroughs (Gretna, Harvey, Westwego, Terrytown, and Marrero), the delights of pho, indigenous slang, like "shybe," "crustache," "Chalmetairie," etc. (Bonaparte Pais included a Gretnese-to-English dictionary in his article.

As I was saying, the lyrics are chock full of New Orleans nuggets.  Ballzack has fun with New Orleans's coffeehouse culture in the title track, "Yeah, Indeed," in which Ballzack and Odoms, after debating whose mama would drop them off or pick them up at the mall, decide "Let's go to the coffeehouse," and in unison, agree, "Yeahhhh."  Then, Ballzack rhymes "Let me get that iced mocha girl earn that tip/if I like the way it tastes give my boy a sip."  With the line "We drinking bubble teas eating Vietnamese/it's the middle of the winter I'm rocking short-sleeves," he hails the Westbank's culinary attractions.  In "Tadpole," a song about crossing the Mississippi River Bridge to get to the Westbank, Ballzack chants "That toll-booth lady got a new hair-do" three times, and then cries "Please, just let me through!"  And in the hit would-be-single, "Rainbow in Marrero," Ballzack dedicates a whole verse to New Orleans inside jokes:  "I don't go to Metairie unless I really have to/clothes smell of smoke and hands smell of shampoo/don't tell Cox but I'm stealing their cable/I got my name on a Bud's Broiler table."  Good stuff. Check it out!