Thirty Three Jones | Desktop Site
For those of you who have been with us since the early days, you know just how important Ron Artest has been to this site. Back in 2006, his promoter sent me a copy of his debut, My World, which you may remember allegedly only sold one copy its first week out. My review of the album was somewhat less positive than his camp was hoping for, which led to a few terse emails from the Tru Warier offices getting sent to my inbox.
Though I didn't like the album itself, I did think Ron Artest had some potential as a rapper - his life story, at least, could have provided some good material for a song, but he never managed to deliver with his lyrics. In the end, I think he would have been better off just using some of that NBA money to pay one of his Queensbridge neighbors to handle the rapping. It's a tough call as to whether or not it was as bad as, say, Allen Iverson's unreleased album (in which A.I. threatened to bust a few caps in the asses of all the haters, and ironically called out a few platinum-selling rappers for using ghost writers), but it did fall short of Shaq's magnum opus (and to this day, I will still argue that Best To Worst is actually a decent song).
That being said, whenever I post anything from Ron Artest it usually leads to a fair amount of traffic. An '05 post featuring Ron Ron's first ever freestyle continues to be one of the main attractions here, thanks in large part to a (now former) employee at Gawker media linking to it. So despite an occasionally rocky relationship between myself and Artest's p.r. team, I'm apparently still on their promo list, as earlier today I received a new "freestyle" from QB's finest two guard. Over the beat from Kanye's Flashing Lights, Artest hits us off with the first track from his upcoming mixtape with DJ Drama. I'm not sure if it's just the fact that I love the beat from the original song, or perhaps Ron actually has sharpened up his skills on the mic during the King's offseason, but this one is, surprisingly, not horrible. I'm not saying it's good by any means - the lyrics are filled with empty boasts and hip hop cliches, and I'm not sure who thought that the "All Around the Globe" chorus was a good idea - but it's better than anything on his first album. Check it out:
Ron Artest - All Around the Globe / Flashing Lights
To keep up with Ron Artest, both on the court and in the studio, hit up his MySpace page.
6/18/2007 07:10:01 PM posted by Fresh