Lil’ Flip Responds to the Virginia Tech Tragedy, Reminds Us He’s Hard-Working

It’s been impossible this week to escape the nonstop coverage of the Virginia Tech massacre and, apparently, Houston rapper Lil’ Flip couldn’t either, so he went and rapped about it to a direct sample of Cyndi Lauper’s “Time after Time.” The first pop culture response to the tragedy–at least that we know of–Flip’s track (streaming on XXL.com and Flip’s Myspace page) is incredible because despite being heartfelt, he still manages to unsubtly give himself props for even thinking up the idea.

The song’s first half is oddly journalistic, basically running down the list of everything we’ve learned on the news in the past few days–“We just had a tragedy, April 16, Monday, 7:15 a.m.,” “Is it me, or did the police react rather late,” and “So we grieve for each and every one of y’all who lost a child and for the brave man who escaped the Holocaust,” etc. All fine so far. But then in the second half, he starts dropping stuff like, “I ain’t gonna lie, I got shot, but your boy’s still here,” “They can hate on me all they want, but how many artists gonna take the time to do this,” and “This is how I do it, I live in the studio, this wasn’t nothing.” We know he’s a rapper, but a bit self-aggrandizing, no? Not to knock the idea of tribute tracks, but we came away from this one with the lingering impression that it’s less about the Virginia Tech shootings than it is about the fact that Lil’ Flip did a song about the Virginia Tech shootings.

Lil Flip [MySpace}