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Music

Why Is Ray J Acting Like A Whiny Little Bitch?

Releasing a song about "hitting" Kim Kardashian first was a real dick move.

The 'friend-zone' has got a lot of publicity lately. Pretty much every Judd Apatow movie features a girl that uses raised eyebrows and fart jokes to put the boner-kill on the lusty nice guy who's been trailing them while broadsheet comment pieces have spent months debating whether you’re a misogynist pig if you fancy your mate.

But perhaps more attention needs to be given to the other side of relationship hell: what happens after you reach the hallowed 'boyfriend' stage that all friend-zoners are vying for. When the days of rolling around in bed together are long gone and the bilious surges in your internal organs that occur at the very thought of them with someone else have subsided, what do you do when you get to the ex-zone?

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Whatever the answer is, guidance needs to be out there: a 12-step programme, a pamphlet handed out on the bus, an aphorism set against a dazzling sunset to be Tumblred across continents. And however the trickle of information works its way around, Ray J needs to get the memo. The R&B whiner has written a whole song, dance and video about his erstwhile relationship with Kim Kardashian and the sex tape they co-starred in. The result is the worst pop comeback since Frankie Cocozza pigeon-stepped his way around a warehouse like an extra in a Courteeners zombie apocalypse.

If you don't know who Ray J is then you're forgiven, but here's a re-cap: he's Brandy's little brother, and he was dating Whitney Houston on and off for five years before her death. Him and Brandy hit number 5 in the UK charts in 2001 with their cover of Phil Collins's Another Day In Paradise, effectively making royalties for an ageing pop star's numerous divorce settlement funds using a song that trades off the plight of homeless people.

Then, only a few months after Ray claimed to be too torn up about Whitney's death to think about any new romantic developments, he made a song reminding Kanye West who stuck it in his babymom first.

The song, charmingly entitled “I Hit It First”, sees him pleading for Kim to come back to him so that they can make another sex tape together: "And I gave her that really bomb sex/ No matter where she goes or who she knows/ She still belongs in my bed…And if you were to come back to me/ Girl, I’ll get it wet – Jacuzzi/ And if you were to come back to me girl /We’ll make another movie." The chorus, not so much a pissing contest as Ray J wazzing up Kanye West's leg while he's just minding his own business, then goes like this: "I hit it/I hit it/I hit it/I hit it/I hit/I hit it first".

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Ray J’s not just stepping outside of the ex-zone as much as bellyflopping face first into a quarantined douchebag no-go area.

In the video he goes even further, bringing in a hologrammed Kim Kardashian lookalike to spend his life with. The pair indulge in a lifestyle that only Kanye could provide – fancy houses, big cars, linen with a five-figure thread count. Except of course, the jet's not his, the car's not his, the song production is exactly the sort of incidental default hip-hop muzak you hear in the earlier cycles of America's Next Top Model and even the guest rapper looks like he's on loan from a local youth centre. Ray can barely afford his (alleged) Tila Tequila child support cheques, never mind the make-pretend lifestyle in this deluded video.

Although Kim Kardashian's promotion of vacuousness and seeming inability to accept that fame should be reserved for those with talent would normally make her a legitimate flak-target, Ray J has done the nigh-on-impossible and made me feel quite sorry for her. Because even though it's Black-Mirror levels of grotesque that a woman's built a world of celebrity for her family off the back of her sex tape, Kim Kardashian's fame isn't purely down to that. Sure, the tape was the trigger for the TV series, but most of the people who actually watch Keeping Up With The Kardashians - the straight women who series-link it and know Kourtney's children's names but have never Googled "Kim Kardashian naked" - don't actually know about the tape. That Kim and her family have cancelled out the memory of this massive infringement of Kim's privacy with a mother lode of anodyne scenes in which Kim cries about losing an earring and Khloe falls over something is testament to there being something legitimately talented about the Kardashians. Not that I can put my finger on this talent, but it's too naive to think that E!'s producers only bought up the rights to every waking hour of the Kardashians' lives because Kim was pumped on video once. If that was the only criteria for projects to be greenlit, John Leslie and Abi Titmuss would be the British Sharon and Ozzy.

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All Ray J has done by trying to shame Kim with references to their love life and the tape is proven how far she's come. Not only is she no longer dating men so puerile they can't respect the women they're sleeping with, but she's a monochrome-clad fembot-cum-mother-earth with millions of dollars and one of the world's richest and critically acclaimed music moguls on her arm. And Ray? Even if he never gets the memo on how to reside in the ex-zone, it might be alright, because at this rate, a friend-zone would be a blessing.

Follow Sophie on Twitter: @SophWilkinson

For more on KimYe check this out:

Did Kim Kardashian Ruin Kanye West's Career?