Katy Perry Desecrates 'Niggas in Paris'
[There was a video here]
In today's second edition of "Don't Make That Rap Video," Katy Perry covered Kanye and Jay-Z's "Niggas in Paris" over the weekend. It is obviously horrible, but it did leave us with a fascinating chicken-or-egg question: Did Katy Perry beget Karmin, the white-people-rappin' duo featuring Perry doppelganger Amy Heidemann on vocals, or did Karmin's insufferable covers beget Katy Perry trying to be more like Karmin?
We will never know, because now our ears are bleeding.
At the start of the video, Perry cops that the cover will be "embarrassing," but it is far worse than that. "Niggas in Paris" is simply not a throwaway cover. "Niggas in Paris" is the ultimate banger of 2011, and it is (in part) about black men celebrating their wealth in one of the most inaccessible cities in the world. Jay and Kanye ended their shows on the Watch the Throne tour by playing "Niggas in Paris" four to six (or 13) times in a row, and the crowds only got more and more rowdy as they heard it.
So you can't throw a white girl in a Yankees cap on a song like "Niggas in Paris," edit out the bad words with cable movie placeholders ("ninjas," "mofos") and expect people to enjoy it. Even the crowd here—presumably Perry fans—seems perplexed with the choice. That's because Katy Perry didn't "escape" anything to get where she is, and so when Katy Perry raps that "if you escaped what I escaped, you'd be in Paris getting fucked up, too," she sounds like a clueless white girl. In a Yankees cap.