I Get Money: The Summertime Banger We All Deserve

50-Cent's latest track, "I Get Money," is everywhere. Pretty much every car that I passed in Brooklyn and the L.E.S. this weekend was blasting it and the song is the talk of the Interwebs.

To unfairly generalize, the track has divided the pundits into three camps: those that hate it because it's a rip-off of Cassidy's "I'm A Hustla,"--and make no mistake it is--those that love it in spite of this fact and those that really don't care about Cass nor really know who Audio Two is. They are mostly intrigued by the drums.

Me? Well, I think it really is a bit troubling that the biggest and best song of the summer is the same as the best song of the Fall of 2004 (I think). But the track is hot to death and the Vitamin Water line is an instant classic.

"I take quarter water sold it in bottles for 2 bucks/Coca-Cola came and bought it for billions, what the fuck? "

And to those that are complaining about the ubiquity of the track, well, I see your point. But this is what we get.

Hip-hop is morally, creatively and financially bankrupt (an original point, I know), which makes this track--with a beat blatantly derivative of a hit that came earlier, with a line as blatantly money-grubbing as "I get money," taken from possibly the most-sampled song in hip-hop history, from an artist as blatantly excessive and downright Republican as Fiddy--perfect for this disgusting summer. Add on some eerie, whirring melody that just underscores the fact that 50 may not even enjoy making money, have Flex drop a bomb on that and you've got some serious heat for the NYC's sweaty summer streets.

What could anyone possibly expect? When the headlining acts of a concert designed to save humanity have been around for longer than the best rapper alive has (purportedly) been alive, there's big trouble on the cultural landscape. Compound that with the fact that nobody's buying records, especially of the hip-hop variety, and the climate's perfect for a bloodsucker with old money (by rap standards) living in a convicted rapist's old oversized mansion in Connecticut to swoop in and save the day.

I'm just as guilty as anyone. I can't deny it. I really really like "I Get Money." Watching the video this morning while sipping Vitamin Water, no less, I got chills.

Why? I'm still trying to figure it out.

I'm convinced that 50 is a huge reason for the downfall of hip-hop. I should be boycotting everything he touches. He's capitalizing on everything wrong with the genre and his peoples and he's intelligent enough to know that he's doing it. We hip-hop fans will look back on this era in ten years or so the way Eastern Europeans look at 1946 through roughly 1989. How did we let it get this bad? Was there anything we could've done differently?

In any case, for now, we've lost bad, real bad, and "I Get Money" is our consolation prize. This song is unequivocally the song of "now."