You ever just randomly stumble across a song, one that you're pretty sure next to none of your peers have heard of, yet it's a song that you just can't get out of your mind, whether that be for positive or negative reasons? Follow up question: you ever see a music critic's best/worst list for a certain year based off of that year's Billboard year-end chart, look at what they said about similar songs in the one you're thinking about's vein, and wonder "wow, how did this person not put that song on the list?" Well, there are two things you need to know about me. The first is that I follow and keep up with the blog postings of one B-HOP Da Maestro. I briefly mentioned him in my 1995 best list I posted on my birthday six months ago, but let me just say that this man is an excellent reviewer as well as, from my experience following him on Twitter, an excellent person. This man can articulate why he likes/doesn't like/feels ambivalent towards a song in ways I could only dream of. He is very detailed, descriptive, and thorough in what elements of a song either make him smile in delight or revolt and quiver in disgust. He and I may not always see eye to eye on certain songs, but I do see where he is coming from at least most of the time. Another thing you need to know about me is that usually when I go through a particular year in music's Billboard year-end chart, I watch, for reference, videos on YouTube where snippets of the songs from that year-end chart are played in order backwards from 100 to 1 before listening to the songs that really stand out to me, whether for better or worse, in full to form some sort of opinion on them. One year that I keep coming back to, if only for the fact that it keeps popping up time after time in my "recommended videos" section, is 1990, and the second song from that list, at position #99, I keep hearing and have not been able to stop thinking about for nearly a year and a half is Mentirosa by Mellow Man Ace, a Cuban rapper from Los Angeles California who used to be a member of hip hop group DVX before leaving to pursue a solo career in 1988 before the group would become Cypress Hill the following year. Recently, B-Hop finished up a project that he had been working on for months titled BACK TO THE 90s, a project in which he went through each individual year of the 1990s, did an in-depth worst list on each year from 1990 to 1999 (with his best list added at the end), and concluded with an in-depth, two-part look at his 100 favorite songs of that entire decade. I remember seeing him announce this on Twitter last year and being stoked as you have no idea how much of a sucker for retro lists like this I am, and given that he has expressed his disdain for douchey Hip Hop/R&B songs that involve cheating and being an all out bag of dicks for no good reason and/or no reason at all, such examples including Loyal and Post To Be as well as later thrashing I Got A Man by Positive K on the 1993 worst list and My Baby Daddy by B-Rock & Da Bizz on the 1997 worst list, I thought for sure that this song would be a shoe-in for his 1990 worst list given what I heard in the short, 25 second snippet of the song in this video. Alas, it got not even a dishonorable mention, and if I'm being perfectly honest, I don't really have a clue why because oh dear god, I am ready to say it: I consider this song to be the absolute worst hit song of 1990. Yes, even worse than the two Michael Bolton songs I used to give that title to (those being How Am I Supposed To Live Without You? and When I'm Back On My Feet Again, for those wondering) despite that man being the cancer of soft rock.
Where to even begin with this song? Oh, I know, how about with the godawful production? This song manages to take the guitar line from Santana's Evil Ways and make it sound so limp and pathetic that it quite literally sounds like the guitar is dying. It also tacks on a line from another Santana song, No One To Depend On, and chops it up and makes it stutter more than Jimmy from South Park because.........horse on a rainbow, hell if I know. Then there's the percussion consisting mainly of an annoying jumping sound from an old SNES game. And don't even get me started on the record scratching, oh my god, the fucking record scratching. Look, having the record scratch sound effect once or twice in a song isn't really that big of a deal for me, but when you have them out the ass like this song does, holy shit, it is un-fucking-bearable.
Then we have Mellow Man Ace himself, and I'll be straight up with you guys, this guy flat out sucks as an emcee. This dude has no flow whatsoever. His flow is so lethargic and lifeless. I'm surprised MC Hammer didn't sue for jacking his flow. On top of that, there's the mixing of the English language with Spanish to try and make the song a little more interesting, which I would be fine with if it wasn't so goddamn embarrassing. For something like that to work, you either have to be high energy and charismatic, or you have to be able to pull off a smooth, cool guy attitude. Say what you want about Gerardo's performance on Rico Suave, he at least had the former going for him. Mellow Man Ace tries to pull off the latter, but he is failing hard, and it just makes me want to punch this guy in the dick.
Of course, if the delivery didn't make me want to punch this asshole's penis off, then the lyrics would because now we come to the thing that pisses me off most about the song, the content. In this song, the narrator finds out that his girl is cheating because he received information that she went to a party instead of to her uncle's house like she said she was going to, unaware of the fact that he and the bartender are friends. Now, I will admit that the girl cheating in this scenario is most definitely in the wrong for cheating and lying to her boyfriend like that. However, the way this guy handles it is beyond childish. Dude, she may have been in the wrong, but the way you tar and feather her doesn't exactly paint you in a positive light either, ya feel me? He then goes on to say she's nothing short of a liar, a "straight mentirosa" as he calls her, who will say one thing one day and says something else the next, which calls into question why the hell he's with this woman if he seems to have this must distrust for her in the first place. The part that really tips this song into outright offensive territory for me, though, is that in the second half of the song, he outright slutshames her and makes her out to not be a worthy girlfriend because of how many guys she's slept with. Look, I don't care if this woman cheats on you a million times, steals your car, and steals your credit card and puts thousands of dollars worth of clothes, jewelry, and other expensive things on there. You do not ever, EVER say that a woman is unworthy of being with someone due to how sexually promiscuous she is or how many partners she may have had in the past. That is the sort of regressive, misogynistic attitude that damn near everyone hates, and to see this guy basically saying "come get her, boys, she's a whore anyway, so do what you want with her" is just blood-boilingly reprehensible in every single since of the word.
There you have it: Mentirosa by Mellow Man Ace: my pick for the worst hit song of 1990. A terribly produced, immature, childish piece of garbage that makes me want to shove scissors in my ear whenever I hear it. B-Hop, how in the nine realms of Asgard did this miss your worst list? Glad I got that off my chest. See you guys next time.
No comments:
Post a Comment