A Mighty Fair Trade: My Monetary Earnings for the Blueprint III Compact Disc!

1.20

I bought Jay-Z's Blueprint III today.

Because I'm hip and know a lot about rap music.

Like a chump though, I went out to Best Buy and picked up the CD, actually paid money in exchange for entertainment if you can believe that garbage! I wrestled myself into laying down the ten bucks, but once I plopped it into my truck's CD player, I felt like I would have paid a good twenty.

Not just because the album is that good (it is!), but buying an album is part of the whole music experience that I've been missing out on lately -the ten minutes trying to remove that stupid saran wrap and adhesive cover they melt onto the case, the flipping of the album ten times, the reading of the insert, the inevitable destruction of the original CD due to scratching when you inadvertently try to clean it with your floorboard. As an added bonus though, I get a nice little souvenir of a jewel case that sits on my shelf and says, "Hey, Brice has culture. Check out his rap collection."

This album pretty much is my rap collection, but I feel like I got a good start. The whole album flows from the concept of "Death of Auto-Tune" and pushes for a return to authenticity. That's what got my attention on the album. So yeah,

I'll pay money for that.

I'm not going to pretend to be an expert on the hip-hop scene. All I know is that I hear a lot of robot voices sneaking through my air waves, and that is totally not cool, robot voices! Get off the

mic and figure out how to solve the recession of something you silly little robots...

Anyway, I've decided that Jay-Z is a real artist and he deserves that bit of money I spent. I hope he uses part of it to take Beyonce out to a Grizzly Bear concert or whatever it is the cool progressive rap artists do these days: