Track Review ⊙ Daily Ops Home
Mims :: "This Is Why I'm Hot"From Music Is My Savior (EMI; 2007)
The snake eats its tail in a single bite and asks for dessert. Without the pomp of a supernova a black hole is formed, everything drawn toward the yawning maw. Everything is swallowed and becomes the same, and together, samely, everything pulses in quiet nothingly uniformity. Cause and effect twist over one another, coiling, resisting their inevitable synthesis, finally merging: cause becomes effect. I’m not hot because I’m not hot. It is irrefutable. I am toast.
What echoes through this pulsing, glowing black nothingverse is a single ominous Morse bleep, the sound of Mims asserting his solitary identity over the scorched cinders of logical thought. Whereas I have been reduced to less than nothing, defined exclusively by what I lack, Mims holds onto the “this” of the title. He needn’t explain further. He has “this.” I lack “this.” This is why he’s hot. This is also, unfortunately, why I’m not. The song is a ball rolling down an eternal hill; it works forever, no matter how concerted my efforts to slow, to understand. It is the perfectly, completely smelted core of a diss track.
Mims is the anti-everything. Mike Jones is a nobody who tried, through sheer cellphone-wielding force, to become a somebody. Mims is a nobody who defined everybody as not-him, and then metaphysically made that a bad thing. How did Mims get “this”? Is it by simple virtue of being Mims? Or did he fight for “this,” steal “this,” grow into “this”? The track gives no answers, and I’m left where I started: staring toward the unbending, monolithic truth that somewhere, right now, Mims is having, doing, or being “this.” And I’m not.
It is another cold day in the black hole.
Clayton Purdom :: 2 April 2007 |
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