This weekend, for some reason that will forever be a mystery, the human race was given a video of a shirtless Shia LaBeouf freestyle rapping in... a swamp? There are many questions. Is the freestyle good? It could be worse! Were parts of it stolen from other rappers? Yes. Should that be a surprise? No.
Everyone's got a hidden talent. Some of those hidden talents are extremely useless, others are surprisingly useful. But it's not every day that someone has an extremely useless hidden talent that is surprisingly superior to all the useful ones.
Here's Nelly Furtado's second attempt to launch her The Spirit Indestructible album (due in September) following the flop of its first single, "Big Hoops (The Bigger the Better)." You don't win friends with freestyle and her voice sounds accordingly unwieldy and shrill. That said, nothing says freestyle quite like balmy summer days, and for that reason alone, this one is doing it for me.
Company B's weird freestyle/house hybrid "Fascinated" (from 1986) contains my second-favorite first line in pop music: "I want to play with you tonight." Really into the direct approach here. (The last line of the first verse is hilarious, too: "Maybe we could play tonight." I get the feeling that maybe this lady really wants to play?) And don't even get me started on the "love toy" part. This song is a national treasure.
Clever turns of phrase and slang-filled insults in freestyle rap battles are simply too much for white people to comprehend. What we need is a translator to just give us the facts.
