This story is worth following for so many reasons: Yesterday, Pitchfork ran former Status Ain’t Hood blogger Tom Breihan’s review of the new Clipse mixtape. (I gave it a slightly higher grade than Breihan, but we both seem to agree it’s great.) His review, however, while largely favorable, also featured a few questionable jabs — like this one:

Maybe by the time they release their next album, Clipse should look beyond the corner and make a few tracks that don’t revolve around white powder. Like, for instance, maybe some girl songs. Just a thought.

Fair enough. But Clipse themselves weren’t having it. On the Re-Up Gang Records website, they respond to review by asking, “7.6???????!!!!!!!” In essence, through the use of a dozen punctuation marks, they accuse Breihan of misunderstanding the duo’s entire mission:

Unlike many of our peers, we don’t get in the studio with the aim of making a club record, or a record for the ladies… Our club success has been almost coincidental, and is more a testament to our overall ability and versatility than it is a shrewd aim to appease a certain segment. Moreover, there’s a prevailing theory that targeting women as the main consumer/enjoyer of hiphop proved the genre’s biggest misstep. Once you start catering, when you worry more about how your product is received versus your own, organic creative process, you should simply drop the mic. Hiphop from its genesis was a meritocracy—a bunch of dudes lined up in a sweatbox trying to outshine the next man. Their aim wasn’t MTV rotation or club spins; it was renown around their hoods. While the technology has improved and the production has gotten more sophisticated, we still approach our music with that same purity.

Breihan, of course, was chuffed by the attention, and offered a mea culpa of sorts on his blog:

The bit in my review about how they used to make girl records is sort of simplistic, but I do kinda miss the spirit of a lighter-side-of-Clipse track like “When the Last Time,” a song they don’t include in their live sets anymore. The danger of keeping your music so unrelentingly grim and laser-focused on a couple of very specific subjects is that you could kinda run out of stuff to say about them.…

[However,] I wrote the review before I heard “Still Got It 4 Cheap,” the leaked track from the new Clinton Sparks mixtape. And if I had any lingering concerns about whether these guys could get any more mileage out of that old coke-talk, it’s gone now. Holy shit that song bangs. (Nah Right has it here.)

But if that wasn’t enough taking-yourselves-quite-seriously banter to digest, Breihan’s alma mater, the Village Voice — via its music blog — was just one of many blogs to be dumbfounded to discover that the Re-Up response, “which I would not have guessed on a blind test, is actually not written by the rap critic in this exchange, but by the rappers being criticized.” Which, loosely translated, is Caucasian for: “These self-proclaimed cocaine-dealing rap artists are surprisingly articulate!”