This might be something amazing or it might be really nerdy. Okay. Ready?

There's this Hot Boys song by the name of Blood Thicker (from the seminal 1997 Cash Money Get It How U Live!). The chorus is this darting, fraternal call-and-response chant between Juvenile and Lil Wayne and I listened to this song something like a BAZILLION times trying to figure out where I thought I'd heard this before. It goes like so:

JUVENILE
load it up slide it in cock it back pop it out load it up slide it in yall die

LIL WAYNE
load it up slide it in cock it back pop it out CMB 226 we all ride

And I couldn't place it until I gave up on the hunt and went back to working on final essays. I'd been writing a term paper for an Apache ethnicity/history class on John Ford's 1939 film Stagecoach (Ford's first film in Monument Valley and John Wayne's first time under Ford, it pretty much set the standard for the traditional American film western and made both men synonymous with the American West). Anyway, I was writing this paper while I was discovering/recovering the Hot Boys' discography so I was pretty much on lock-down in my apartment playing Get It How U Live! on my stereo and Stagecoach on my tv, on no sleep, no food and a belly fulla coffee. It was delirious.

And there's scenes with the cavalry because, hello, it's a western.

And if you're in the military, have ever seen a movie about the military, have been to horse races, have seen movies about horse races, or remember the television western Rawhide, or the animated feature film An American Tail Part II: Fievel Goes West, you're probably going to already be familiar with the First Call, used to "sound as a warning that personnel will prepare to assemble for a formation."

So I put this shit together and realized that this was maybe the most poignant example of intertextual incorporation of historical themes that I'd come across in hip hop--since Nas dropped Hip Hop Is Dead the same week I saw The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence for the first time and opened a file for the book I will probably never write because I'll be busy writing other books--because on the one hand the cavalry's all about ridin' out and killin' redskins, but on the other hand the cavalry's also totally The Man in every sense of the west--they had guns but they were by no means the cowboys and, in fact, allusions to generic western motifs and imagery in rap usually aligns the speaker with the Native Americans (even the slang appropriation follows--think cheifin' reefer). Additionally the first call in particular has become weirdly woven into the American consciousness--our advertising, athletics, and pop culture. I

I'm getting too sleepy to wrap up all of this or organize all the relevant information in any coherent way so I'm going to end my first post here at WG by sputtering out and leaving it to the readers to plumb the significance of Cash Money's thematic pathological self-identification with the post-modern anti-heroic figures of revisionist rather than classical westerns.