Rust Battle

With my Pittsburgh roots, Cleveland is my sworn enemy, and as a Pensylvanian, I have a long-standing beef with the entire state of Ohio.  I tell the “trees in Pennsylvania point east because Ohio blows” joke every time I’m drunk and, after having a pretty awful fall-out with a girl from Cincinnati in college, I wrote a song called “I Hate Ohio” for the emo band I was drumming for at the time.  I wrecked my car pulling into the parking lot for Scribble Jam in 2003. So it’s notable that I’ve been listening to this Bitch, I’m From Cleveland! tape all week.

Bitch came out almost a year ago and it’s ostensibly a group effort for Cleveland’s SLAB crew: Fat Al, Chip tha Ripper and Ray Cash.  I’d been checking for all three.  Ray put out my favorite album of 2006 (“Cash On Delivery”) and blew my mind with how much he talked about how selling crack is boring.  Chip kept showing up on random tracks and killing it with one of those super-lyrical southern flows (most notably on that Hi-Tek jam).  And Fat Al’s “I Done Came Down” is one of the great dumb local rap anthems of the last three years.  (PS: according to this article, the track has a TECHNO REMIX somewhere out there.  WHAT?)  Bitch! is pretty great, beyond the sheer absurdity of its name.  It turns out Fat Al can actually rap beyond the retarded sing-song flow from “Came Down.”  Ray’s not as humble as he used to be and talks about being a kingpin more than I’d like, but dude can still rhyme his ass off.  This is the most I’ve heard from Chip at once, but he doesn’t disappoint.

Oddly enough, the sound of the city is a high-quality strain of radio rap.  Everything creeps along at 85 bpm with beats dipped in Jazze Pha’s sine waves.  Dudes talk about flip-flop paint and suicide doors.  Elsewhere, dudes like Young Shank are working with Gucci Mane and Chip shows up in videos with Huey.  I’m not mad at it at all, but why is Cleveland pumping out this shit, while the biggest rapper in Pittsburgh sounds like he’s from East New York?

I watched the Steelers’ comeback win against the Browns this year in a Browns bar in Philly.  And while most of the Cleveland ex-pats in the house were real salty we were there, we did some adversarial bonding with some dudes who bought us beers and gave us the heads up that we were stupid for punting to Joshua Cribbs.  After the game we talked about the rivalry and how it’s not only artificial because the real Browns are in Baltimore, but also because Cleveland and Pittsburgh are in the same, economically challenged, rusted boat.  The cities have so much in common.  You would think the cultures would follow suit.