Today's blog was brought to you by the letter L
Today we are gathered to lay to rest one of hip-hop's true treasures, Germaine "Canibus" Williams. Mr. Williams was beloved in the hip-hop community for his uncanny ability to advance his career further into the depths of failure than ever before seen. Every failure he suffered was considered to be the absolute low point of his career, but Mr. Williams was persistent, and never settled for what he had already achieved. He was determined to master failure and pilot it to new levels never thought possible, and reached these heights masterfully.
Canibus received his first brush with failure when he linked with Wyclef Jean to release his debut album Can-I-Bus. Unsatisfied with simply having a corny pun in his album title, Canibus chose the worst beats 'Clef had to offer, assuring that the album would be critically and commercially panned. From there 'Bus entered his first major rap battle with LL Cool J, historically marking the first major rap battle to be decided by a single line, when L (ironically Canibus's favorite letter) crushed him by informing him that "99% of his fans didn't exist." Canibus had begun to establish himself as a loser, but his thirst for failure proved insatiable.
In 2002, Canibus enlisted in the military, and while he was away, Jedi Mind Tricks producer Stoupe the Enemy of Mankind used some of Canibus's vocal tracks to make the only 'Bus album remotely worth listening to, Rip the Jacker. Canibus was unhappy with the respect he had earned, as it completely undermined the years he had put in fighting for the opposite, and so he engaged in a battle with Eminem following his discharge from the military, creating the puzzling diss track "U Didn't Care." Canibus adopted the persona of Eminem's character Stan from the song of the same name, marking the first time a rapper has ever been dissed by a fictional character. Canibus was crushed again by Em, who released a comical track mocking "Stanibus" and his voice and subject matter, not even taking the poor little weirdo seriously. Canibus returned to his hole in the ground to continue writing furiously, releasing a slew of albums and essentially disappearing from the radar...until 2010.
Canibus has a love for being crushed in lyrical competitions, and so it was only logical that he would attempt to revive the beef with Eminem, using unpublished verses from Em's group D12 on another diss track, attempting to somehow make Eminem believe his own crew had turned on him. The trick backfired, as Canibus evidently forgot D12 were capable of refuting his story. The following year, 'Bus entered a lyrical skirmish with Slaughterhouse members Joe Budden and Royce da 5'9", and achieved another plateau in failure by releasing an 8-minute diss track to Royce that only contained roughly 10 bars of rhyming, interspersed with Canibus's manic ramblings.
Later in 2011, Canibus had begun to worry that another MC, J. Cole, was encroaching on his territory, as Cole had taken several Ls of his own. Canibus, furious that failure was being achieved and he wasn't involved, took shots at Cole, who was reportedly a huge fan and reacted only with disappointment. Canibus later made a sweaty apology video and released it on YouTube, rescinding his Cole statements.
Then came that fateful day. June 9, 2012, Canibus entered a Pay-Per-View battle with renowned battle rapper Dizaster. With the world watching (you know, the small, small world that doesn't care about the NBA and NHL playoffs, baseball, and one of the biggest boxing matches in recent years) Canibus finally took failure a step too far, spitting a barrage of weak lyrics and eventually forgetting most of his bars and resorting to pulling out a notebook in mid-battle, only to find that he was having trouble reading his writing. Dizaster was given the unanimous victory and Canibus, overwhelmed by the force of his failure, passed from this Earth. The cause of death was given as "choking."
Canibus's given age was 37 years old, although this conflicts with Canibus's own statements in his music that he was anywhere between 2000 and 10,000 years old.
