Update 2/3: On second thought, this isn’t “ether”, and to have labeled it as such is actually an insult to the word and all that it stands for in hip-hop. True, 50 succeeds at delivering some pretty harsh blows to Rick’s character (which is the ultimate goal of any rapper engaging in battle with his/her opponent), however, the method behind his madness here (using his opponent’s ex-girlfriend as a pawn in such an unprecedented fashion) is all too real, too sleazy to sit back and cheer on as one would in a normal rap battle (which this is clearly not). This is the sort of thing that you’d expect to see on daytime televison, not in the midst of a what should be an entertaining rap battle confined to lyrics. What I fear most, though, is that in this age of hip-hop meets new media, this will become the norm. Just as “Nas vs. Jay” gassed up a legion of mediocre rapcats to take their best shots at hip-hop’s elite, this stunt and others like it, will give the go ahead to a new legion mediocre rapcats to take to youtube (and other video outlets) to do what it is that they are not artistically capable of doing on pen and pad, in the booth, or on the mic.

While I’ve seen similar hip hop trading cards in the past, this deck (32 cards/hip-hop pioneers in all) is the first that I’ve come across that features original illustrations of the artists, instead of archive photography (most of which we’ve seen a thousand times over)–definitely a plus!