The MMA Post: 50 Cent vs. Revolting Cocks

Like most MMA fans, I've spent a good deal of time wishing I was one of those modern day gladiators we call fighters. Now, I don't really want to be an MMA fighter. My cardio is shit, and more importantly, I don't relish the idea of getting my head kicked in on television.

Mostly, I just want to walk down the ramp to the octagon with crowd cheering me on. I've thought a lot about how that walk would go. I've really thought about my entrance music. I think I have it down to two songs.

So in honour of this weekend's Elite XC fight, here are my would-be MMA entrance themes.

The Main Event

In the blue corner, from Queens, New York, the man who took his rap money and invested in a delicious sports drink, FIDDY CENT!

Everybody knows Fiddy's story by this point, so there's no reason for me to get redundant.

In fact, I'm not going to write anything at all. This song makes me insane. It's so good. I love how intentionally obnoxious it is.

Two lines for you to think on:

"Have a baby by me, baby/be a millionaire/I'll write the cheque before the baby comes/who the fuck cares?"

and

"Get a tan?/I'm already black/Rich?/I'm already that."

Wow.



The Competition

In the red corner, from Chicago, Texas, Belgium and various other places, THE REVOLTING COCKS!

The Revolting Cocks are basically just Al Jourgensen from Ministry and a rotating cast of other musicians. Rumour has it the band was named by an angry bartender. Jourgensen and some of his buddies were being tossed from a bar in the early '80s. As the bartender ejected them, he called them "a bunch of revolting cocks."

I have an odd relationship with Ministry. I never got as into them as most of my friends did, but I love all of Jourgensen's non-Ministry side projects (The Cocks, 1,000 Homo DJs). It's just his main band I'm sort of indifferent to.

This is The Revolting Cocks cover of Rod Stewart's "Do Ya' Think I'm Sexy." I have a feeling like there's a fighter who's already used this as entrance music, but I could be wrong. I know Jenna Jameseon used to strip to it when she feature danced. (I read that in her autobiography.)



As always, you should comment to vote, votes are due by midnight on Friday.

Apparently Korea is more "down" than Germany, Sniper beats Sido

Hey all,

I'm busting this thing off real quick-like from the office.

Sniper beat Sido a convincing four votes to two, although the Sido camp made a view solid arguments.

Anyway, here's Sniper's victory video, "Koreans." No really, that's what it's called.

This is how we kick it in ESL class: Sido vs. MC Sniper

It struck me that it'd been a while since I did a post featuring video in other languages, so I decided to remedy that situation. Here it is, all hip-hop, all foreign.

The Battle

In the red corner, from Berlin. Germany, the German demon spawn of Necro, Eminem and MF Doom, SIDO!

German hip-hop got it's start in the mid-1980s when kids in Hamburg and Stuttgart starting aping the American rap they heard on the American Forces Network, the radio station produced by the US Military for forces stationed overseas.

For years, the biggest German hip-hop groups, most notably Die Fantastichen Vier, were all pretty much on some "throw your hands in the air," Fresh Prince-type party rhymes. Deep, heavy subject matter was off the table.

This started to change in the '90s when a group called Advanced Chemistry released a track called "Fremd in eigenem Land" ("Foreign in your own country"), the first German hip-hop song to seriously talk about racism and immigrant bashing in post-unification Germany.

At the turn of the last millennium, a separate, much angrier hip-hop scene started to develop in primarily Turkish housing projects of Berlin. The Berliners weren't interested in directing their rage at the system like the groups of the '90s. They just wanted to fuck shit up.

The leader of the pack is Sido, who isn't just a rapper, he's also the CEO of Aggro-Berlin Records, the label that helped fuel much of the fury.

Here's some fun facts about Sido:

He usually wears a gold skull mask.

He once talked shit about fellow Berlin rapper Azad's mother in a TV interview. He later apologized.

He had the good taste to tell Mike Shinoda that Fort Minor sucks, and that Linkin Park sucks more, live on MTV Germany's version of TRL.

Here's the clip for "Strassenjunge" ("Streetkid") off of 2006's Eine Hand wäscht die andere (One Hand Washes the Other).




The Competition

In the blue corner, from Seoul, South Korea, MC SNIPER!

OK, on the real, my internet research has yielded very little information on MC Sniper. I know he's from Korea, he used to run a hip-hop club in Seoul called The South Side, he's had his songs banned from Korea's commercial airwaves, and his blood type is B. No really, that's on a website.

What's really important is that his fourth album, How Bad Do U Want It?, featured an epic posse cut called "Better Than Yesterday." This song has a beat that sounds like crazy Asian superhero music and guest vocals from a dude named Outsider who holds the world record for most syllables-per-minute in a rap song.

Hilarity abounds: tATu wins!

In a tight fought battle, where many of the reading/viewing public claimed to be voting under duress, tATu were dubbed the lesser of two evils winning 4 - 3.

Here's "All the Things She Said" for a victory video.



And because I don't want to alienate any of my dozen or so readers, here's Prodigy (from Mobb Deep, not from England) with "Mac 10 Handle" to apologize for last week.

The Depressing British Band Battle in Bizzaro World: tATu vs. In Extremo

OK, so you may remember a battle a little while back that pitted Sisters of Mercy against The Smiths.

This is a rematch, sort of.

I found really questionable covers of both bands' songs and have decided to put those videos into the ring. Why? Because I couldn't think of a better battle for this week and both videos are fucking hilarious.

The Main Event

In the blue corner, from Berlin, Germany, a band that has produced what may be the most fuckdickulous video in the history of music videos, IN EXTREMO.

In Extremo were founded in 1995 when two separate bands, a Rammstein-esque Krautrock act called Noah invited a group of neo-medieval folk musicians called Corvus Corax on stage for horribly ill-conceived jam session.

After the session, they were so pleased that Noah vocalist Michael Rhein suggested they make it a permanent arrangement, creating the world's first industrial band to feature lutes, bagpipes and something called a schawn. All seven of the band members took on ridiculous pseudonyms, Rhein dubbed himself "The Last Unicorn," and they decided to go by the collective moniker In Extremo. (It's Latin for In the Extreme.)

According to the band's MySpace, they played their first gig as In Extremo on March 29, 1997 in front of 1,000 people at the Leipzig Town Hall Market. Apparently there's not a lot to do in Leipzig in late March.

I really try not to put bands up here just to rip on them, but these guys are ridiculous. On the other hand, they're so ridiculous that they're just a little bit aweseome. I feel like if I went drinking with the members of In Extremo, it would end poorly.

Here's their cover of "This Corrosion." If you thought the video for the original version was silly, which it was, you should probably be sitting down for this one.


The Competition

In the red corner, from Moscow, Russia, everyone's favourite schoolgirl faux-lesbians, TATUUUUU!

I don't really feel like I need to give a backgrounder on tATu to anyone. There's not really much to say.

Back around the turn of the millennium, two 16 year-old-girls from Russia released an album of strange dance music in phonetically sung English. This was fairly unremarkable, in fact, the Romanian group Cheeky Girls did pretty much the exact same thing at the exact same time. What differentiated these two girls, known collectively as tATu and individually as Lena and Yulia, was that they were a lesbian couple.

Several things happened as a result of their declaration of sapphic love.

One, men around the world got erections.

Two, the sold a boatload of records.

Three, the Religious Right got very upset and condemned tATu as part of the gay agenda.

Four, some gay groups pointed out that while there was a lot of hand holding and caressing, it never seemed to go any further, and that it was possible that Lena and Yulia weren't lesbians at all, and that this was all a giant publicity stunt.

As it turned out, the gay naysayers were right. At the height of their fame, Yulia got pregnant. Shockingly, Lena wasn't the father. The girl's were forced to come clean and admit that they weren't lesbians, they hadn't been ostracized by their families due to the love that dare not speak its name, and that the whole thing was thought up by child psychologist-turned-post-Communist Maurice Starr Ivan Shapovalov.

A few interesting facts about tATu.

They represented Russia in the 2003 Eurovision song contest.

The ditched Shapovalov in 2004, saying he was more interested in manufacturing scandal than in helping them pursue their artistic vision.

They still exist, and are apparently continue to sell records in Russia.

Here's their cover of The Smith's "How Soon is Now?" Morrissey called their version of the song "magnificent" in an interview with the UK's Word magazine.



Comment to post, since I'm late getting this thing up. I'll extend the deadline to midnight on Saturday.

Belated winner! De La Di Da!

Wow, that was one sided.

I'm always amazed when I feel like I've put up two really well matched bands and the voting public goes all one way.

Anyway, five nil to De La.

"Me, Myself and I" off 3 Feet High for the victory vid.