Boston's Bezino on the Remix Project LP! Purchase Redemption - Benzino's new joint!

    Well, it was bound to happen sooner or later.  Somebody finally made a serious attempt to get in Eminem’s ass (insert Elton John joke here).  Yeah, yeah, Everlast tried, Canibus sort of tried, and Evidence from Dilated Peoples made an alright run at the guy, but nobody had really inspired Slim to get down with a proper, full on, Hip Hop Beef.

            This was what everybody was waiting for, for an established artist to come after Em.  Unfortunately what we got was Ray “Benzino” Scott, formerly of the Boston group Almighty RSO and currently of the Made Men crew (check The Source each month for another four page spread).

            It started when Benzo got down with a freestyle taking a few jabs at Em: “The only M&M I know is Made Men/and by the way he ain’t never gonna play me/ I’ll show this b@#$h what it is to be shady/ I don’t care how much records you sold/ you can’t walk through the hood without the men in black/ Disrespect your moms b@#$h you deserve a smack/ Its not a black or white thing, that s#$t’s in the past/ I got some white boys in Boston that’ll bust yo ass”.

            If any of you have actually heard Benz’s lil freestyle, you know, it sounds whack.  Really, really whack (or is that “wack,” or “wak,” or is it “wac?”  I guess it really doesn’t matter, it all means the same thing… “Benzino”).

            I guess Benz felt he wasn’t getting enough response so he recorded a track called “Pull Up Your Skirt.”  Again, if you’ve heard it, you know the story…it was trash.  Benz’s flow is weaker than decaf and he’s got the breath control of a 12-year-old girl.  The lyrics alone should have gotten his homies to lock him in a room and write “I will not make wack records” one hundred times on the blackboard.

            When Em finally got around to responding to him he, how can I put this, he verbally pimp slapped Benzo like hoe that got out of pocket.  It wasn’t pretty.  If you can find the tracks floating around the internet, they’re worth the trouble.  “Nail in the Coffin” and “The Sauce” are the kind of tracks that can destroy a career (although if you’ve seen Benzo’s SoundScan numbers, you know there wasn’t much to destroy).

            And so, after a couple radio interviews and appearances by Em, and a few more diss tracks by Benz, which were, admittedly, a step up from his previous stuff, but still nothing too impressive, Benzo is determined to keep the whole the whole thing going.  Pick up the new issue of the Source and you’ll see, Benzo is pimpin’ that rag like a $2 hoe (he owns half of it, how’s that for a journalistic conflict of interest?).

            But at the end of the day, to anyone who doesn’t hate Eminem, or who doesn’t think Benzo is God (I’m sure there are a couple of guys in the basement of their mom’s house in Boston who do), the opinion is that Em whooped Benzino so bad Mike Tyson said “Damn.”

            Benzo lost in so many ways its hard to count.  First, and most obvious, is that Eminem is a lyrical monster.  Dude rides a beat with rhymes that leave most of us scratching our heads, wondering where he comes up with this stuff.  You can’t even compare the two.  Its like a Ferrari and your mom’s beat up Honda.

            Then take a look at some of the disses Benzo tossed at Em, and you gotta wonder, “What was Ray Ray thinkin’?”  He goes after Em’s baby momma, but after everything Em’s said about her, anything Benzo can say sounds like a compliment in comparison.  Benzo calls her a hoe and says she’s sleepin’ around.  So what? Em already killed her and locked her in the trunk.

            Of course Benzo’s main beef, despite what he said in the freestyle, is that Em is stealing the culture, that Em is, to quote Die Another Day “…the rap David Duke, the rap Hitler.”  Benzo keeps saying that Em is ruining the rap game cause he’s white, cause he’s part of the “machine.”  When he got on Hot 97 with Angie Martinez it seemed like every fifth word that came out of his mouth was “cracker.”

            Well, Ray Ray, not only are you a making yourself look like a jackass for pulling the race card after claiming in interview after interview that this wasn’t about race, not to mention the fact that if you have to resort to race you’re a garbage MC, but face two facts: 1) the Source, arguably one of the biggest parts of the “machine” in Hip Hop and something you’re half owner of, was started by and is half owned by *gasp* white people, 2) and second Ray, you’re half white (Ray Ray likes to brag that his dad was Italian and a Mafia man).  And don’t anybody start yapping about how Italians aren’t white, I don’t have the column space to list all the times folks in hip hop have referred to arch Italian white boy Rudy Giulliani as cracker or devil.  If you do start this, I hope all you get for Christmas next year is Benzino’s new album.  You’ll deserve it.

            As far as the culture issue goes, can Em ever be Black? Of course not, Vanilla Ice and every white kid in Lincoln, Nebraska have already tried.  But can Em take part in and be a part of a culture he grew up immersed in, particularly if he works to show the proper respect and gives props to those who made it possible?  Can he contribute to and further the culture itself? If he can’t, then dammit, black people can’t play hockey, cause that’s the whitest sport I can think of.  Not that I’m all that sure Black people in America wanna spend any serious amount of time around a bunch of white people in masks with sticks, but still…

            And if Em is the rap Hitler, etc., what does that make Dr.Dre, the guy who gave him his break and his credibility?  The rap Satan? 

Another thing that makes Benzo look like the ignorant, thugged out jackass stereotype that white folks want to believe about everybody involved in hip hop, is what seems to be his criteria for being “real”: “What do you know about pumpin’ on a block till you freeze/what you know about cuttin’ up rocks, duckin’ D’s/ what you know about facin’ a grand jury indictment?”          

            Let’s see, what you’re saying is unless you’re a drug dealer, pumping poison into your neighborhoods, risking felony prison time for helping turn the projects into the free fire, drug warzones that you’re so eager to escape you can’t do Hip Hop, that you’re not “real?’ Hold on real quick, I’ve got to write a letter to Chuck D, A Tribe Called Quest, The Roots, Busta Rhymes, LL Cool J and De La Soul to inform them that they’re ruining the game and to stop making hip hop records. 

That’s right, unless you’re willing to take part in everything that’s killing your hood, unless you decide to risk pissing your life away getting screwed by the “justice” system, you can’t do Hip Hop.  Apparently “Keepin’ it real” means you better be ready to do time.  And thank God Benzo is here to regulate, cause that’s exactly the kind of attitude Black America needs to survive.

            Maybe the funniest part was Ray Ray callin’ everybody who’s worked with Em a sellout when he got on Hot 97.  Let’s see, Jay-Z, Nas, 50, Dre, Snoop, Nate Dogg, Xhibit, Royce, Redman, oh geez the list goes on.  At least when Benzo sticks his foot in his mouth he gets the whole thing in there.        

I could go on and on, so many stupid things came out of Benzo’s mouth, I could write a short book.  But I won’t.  This horse has been beat to death and then some.  But I will leave everyone with one last laugh.  On the “Die Another Day” track, Benzo goes after everybody on Em’s label, calling them house n####s.  Well, everybody except 50 Cent, who he sort of sidesteps and tells to holler at him.  I guess Ray Ray didn’t want to start with the guy who’s as likely to beat him down or put a bullet in him as he is to make diss record. 

This wasn’t a rap beef.  This was like the vegetarian substitute for beef, sure it sort of looked like beef, and it might have smelled like beef, but in the end, Benzo killed himself.

Special to Seaspot.com

– The Bear
editorial@nwyachting.com

More about The Bear:

Realizing from an early age that he wasn’t fit for a real job or polite company, Bear (real name Keith C. Ancker), decided the only thing to do was become a writer. Somewhere along the way a childhood friend bought him a copy of Doug E. Fresh’s & The Get Fresh Crew’s first album and after hearing “The Show,” he was hooked on Hip Hop.
He attended Washington State University, where he eventually graduated with a double major in Political Science and English. While there he spent three years in the basement offices of the school paper as both a writer and an editor. He also was a founding member of the University’s literary journal LandEscapes, and spent time reading bad poetry at local open mic nights.
After college he moved to Seattle and spent his time freelancing for a few Internet sites, most of which folded before they paid him, and trying to find a job. He is currently employed as the editorial assistant of the largest yachting magazine in the Northwest (a bougsie job, but one that pays salary, lets him pick his hours and gives him anywhere from a week to two weeks a month off).
Having covered and written extensively on everything from politics and society to entertainment and culture, he has managed to piss off his editors, the local cops, local politicians, the clergy, liberals and conservatives alike, and good number of his friends (most of whom still don’t agree that Redman’s “Dare is a Darkside” is one of the dopest albums ever recorded, by anyone, in any genre).