FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Music

My Ringtone Weighs a Ton #1: J-Kwon's "Tipsy"

My Ringtone Weighs a Ton is a column that attempts to give ringtone rappers the serious critical attention they never got when they were dominating your mobile phone. This edition covers J-Kwon’s “Tipsy.”

My Ringtone Weighs a Ton is a column that attempts to give ringtone rappers the serious critical attention they never got when they were dominating your mobile phone. This edition covers J-Kwon's "Tipsy."

Kanye West's now-legendary interview with the New York Times from earlier this summer has been referenced to death, and for good reason; it's the best celebrity interview of our time. If Kanye did one of those a month, there'd be no reason for Best Music Writing to exist; it'd just be a book of Kanye interviews.

Advertisement

But for every "I am the nucleus" or "complete awesomeness at all times" tweet you saw, there was a section of the interview that got moderately circulated, but which no one bothered to mock. "The last record I can remember—and I'm going to name records that you'll think are cheesy—but like, J-Kwon, 'Tipsy,'" Kanye told Jon Caramanica. "People would think that's like a lower-quality, less intellectual form of hip-hop, but that's always my number one."

Kanye saying that a ringtone rap single was his number one rap song of all time would have seemed inconceivable in 2004 when "Tipsy" actually came out. But in 2013 it barely registered. People just raised their eyebrows and moved on to stuff about the Kardashians. But it felt like a moment happened. It's finally OK to admit that ringtone rap singles were actually great. Kanye really is the nucleus. How did we get here?

Between 2004 and 2007, the music industry believed that the sales of ringtones were going to save their cratering profits. And that made sense, at least for a while; ringtones delivered people their favorite songs right to their Nokia flip-phones, for at least $2 a pop. They were easy to purchase, and the record companies could make tons of money doing it too; ringtone sales totaled a whopping $4.6 billion dollars globally in 2006.

Into this suddenly booming industry rose a subspecies of rappers known colloquially on rap message boards as "ringtone rappers." They had names like Hurricane Chris, Jibbs, and Dem Franchize Boyz. Their songs were about partying. They seemed to exist solely to make rap hits that's general essence could be reduced to 10-second ringtones. They were the Vine of rap.

Advertisement

The only thing you needed to know about ringtone rappers, if comments sections and dorm room discussions were to be believed, was that they were the worst thing to happen to hip-hop since the guys that killed Big and Pac. They were a scourge on the face of hip-hop. They were preventing true artisans like Jay-Z, Cam'ron, and Kanye from being the chart-conquering monoliths they deserved to be. Ringtone rappers were bad for rap, bad for music, and bad for anyone who was "dumb" enough to buy the ringtones. With the exception of mainstream country music (minus T. Swift) there was maybe no branch of modern music as knee-jerk hated as ringtone rap when it was at its most popular.

But most importantly, it was a genre that was never critically dissected. No one ever tried to explain why millions of people were willing new rap-pop stars into existence through buying their songs on their cellular phones. No one tried to explain why Mims became such a huge moment in rap and pop culture.

And that's what this column intends to change. All those songs sold tons of ringtones and then became hits on the radio for a reason. I aim to try to figure out why.

J-Kwon's "Tipsy" is a good place to start, given that it was released in 2004, right when ringtone rap started to become a phenomenon and before labels realized how huge ringtone sales could be. Sales figures aren't readily available for how many ringtones "Tipsy" actually sold, but given that literally everyone I knew in college in Oshkosh, WI, in 2004 had this in their ringtone rotation, it had to be a lot. It was actually a huge hit on the traditional billboard charts too: It stayed at number 2 on the charts behind Usher's canonical "Yeah."

The thing about "Tipsy" is that it really is a perfect song. The beat could wreck a mobile home foundation, and there can never be enough songs celebrating one of the few universal experiences we have anymore: underage drinking. Even its video is perfect; J-Kwon sleeps with the neighbor lady, and Jermaine Dupri, Murphy Lee, and Quincy Jones come to his pizza party. You have to try hard to make this the affront to "real hip-hop" that ringtone rap was dismissed as in 2004.

J-Kwon's career arc matched that of many other ringtone rappers. He came from a place outside of hip-hop's power centers (St. Louis), had the one hit, and was never again a commercial force. He released a couple albums following 2004's Hood Hop, but none of them garnered even a percentage of the attention of that Jermaine Dupri-bolstered debut.

The easiest way to dismiss J-Kwon and rappers like him in 2004 was to put him up against backpack rappers and say J-Kwon was terrible in comparison (this is echoed today in the Migos vs. J. Cole rap blog wars of 2013). But they were not even playing the same sport. Guys like Talib Kweli may have a deep catalog that is appreciated by some diehards, but J-Kwon has one song that is more popular than all of Talib's put together. J-Kwon might only get LOL attention today for releasing tepid Odd Future diss tracks, but for a brief period he was on top of the world in a way the backpackers can only dream of. And that counts for something.

Andrew Winistorfer's ringtone is now this. He's on Twitter - @thestorfer