DISPATCHES: "Everything's On Me" - Franz

Many months ago, this video was forwarded to me from the submission folder and I gave it a onceover, didn’t think it was spectacular and forgot about it. Now that the hate is strong again, I’m drawn back to the INBOXXX, if only to give these hunks of space-age internet turds one more listen.

Thus, enter Washington Heights rapper Franz’s “Everything’s On Me”. So let’s party. If everything’s on him, then I’m gonna need a case of Veuve Cliquot and some oxycodone in hopes that it will demagnetize my temporal drive, thus cleansing me of the listens I had to endure to write this fucking critique.

This guy really isn’t a bad rapper at all. He’s also nothing special either. Sometimes he raps a little bit faster, weaving what I’m sure he purports are lyrics into an indecipherable wall of vocal noise; a stylistic choice that I’ve never understood from the top of the rap game all the way down to this dude. He does “go in” at times but not really in this lazy, lethargic video which centers around Franz yammering about what I’m sure is a fabled prosperity from which we can only get the eponymous charitable title.

When I moved further into the armpit of the country back in the early aughts, I found myself dick deep in a culture of high school kids who loved Triple Six Mafia (and other early trap rappers from the south and west), drove nice cars, lived in ridiculously expensive homes and mostly had never worked a day in their lives. As such, everything was generally “on them” in those days. I was just lucky, I guess, but it baffled me; a Black Flag, Wu Tang and Gangstarr fanatic, how anyone could like the obnoxious high hat patterns, the low quality, bass heavy, caveman tapping keyboard production of that trap shit; whose lone topical themes were bodily dismemberment, abusing women and heavy drug and alcohol abuse. I always thought these kids were some sort of what I would now call hipsters, who revelled in the irony of enjoying, quoting and, for even some, poorly attempting to mimic the lifestyle of the cats behind the Triple Six (lots of DUIs, lots of drug arrests back then for those poor players). I’ve only come to respect Three Six recently due to my realization that their sound has almost entirely proliferated the rap genre (shit, Yasin Bey even ripped a trap beat). You can track those early trap, dirty south-Memphis Triple Six tapes all the way back to the early, early nineties.

So, I can’t tell if “U-Dub”, the producer of this masterpiece is, but Franz definitely looks old enough to have heard of Lord Infamous, Three Six and their posse tapes. I bring that up because the loop is just like what I remember old Three Six sounding like; and Project Pat could have definitely held his own against our rapper Franz here, hero of climbing street crossing signs. I wonder if that’s the bat signal for summoning “Everythings On Me” to his yes boys bouncing behind him throughout the video. But in this unbeknownst, trillionth tribute to them North, North boys, we get something much less entertaining than voodoo dolls falling on your bed while hearses circle your house. We get the same old same old but worse. Franz is, ugh … charitable.

God, I’m going to get shot for one of these critiques someday.