Dee-1 sat down with The Art of Dialogue for a recent interview, where he was asked about Special Ed’s previous comments on Drink Champs. During the conversation, Special Ed insisted N.W.A ushered in the “age of destruction.” The openly Christian rapper appeared to side with Ed’s argument, albeit cautiously. After explaining he wasn’t old enough to witness first-hand how N.W.A changed the Hip-Hop landscape, he acknowledged they are credited for helping pioneer gangsta rap. But, at the same time, he suggested the group’s legend status should be stripped for the greater good.
“What do we do with that?” he asked. “Once we acknowledge what you have contributed to the genre, your whole career, and if we acknowledge that you’ve contributed a bunch of negativity, a bunch of violence, a bunch of disrespect of women, what do we do? Do we call you a legend or is it like, ‘Wait, we don’t need to call you no legend.’ I think that calling people legends in Hip-Hop is also a force of what helps to perpetuate negativity and that’s a trick of the enemy. That’s the devil’s work at his finest.
“We’re going to make it to where y’all start to call people legends and immortalize people inside of Hip-Hop, and the main thing they’ve contributed is the glorification of violence, the disrespect of women, the glorification of drug dealing and drug use. Like that’s crazy. We need to take the legend status off of a lot of the people who we call legends in Hip-Hop and that’s going to hurt their ego, but that’s going to help our community.”
When pressed to expound on the topic, Dee-1 concluded “any rapper who has glorified drug dealing and drug use” should sacrifice legend status. He continued, “If you are glorifying the trap, what it means to be in the trap and to make the type of music that is all about the dope that you sold and everything that came along with that and you glorified all that, you’re not a legend. So you could put it together.
“It’s multiple artists who it’s like, ‘Man, all y’all did was…’ Nah, just because I see that a lot of Hip-Hop artists can’t take any level of accountability, man. To the point where it’s like, ‘Yo, I am ready to just get mad at the messenger regardless of if the message is true or not.”
He concluded, “So all of the rappers who have glorified trap music should not be considered legends. I’m going to say it again. All the rappers who have glorified trap music should not be considered legends. That’s just a fact.”
Special Ed appeared on Drink Champs last September and inadvertently sparked an online debate. Kurupt reached out to Ed for clarification on his comments. He offered: “[Media] put their own headlines like ‘Did N.W.A. ruin Hip-Hop?’ That’s not what I said. My point basically was that N.W.A. was used for the era that we are in now. We are in the era of destruction, we are destroying ourselves as a Hip-Hop community period. We got teenagers in every state killin’ each other over Hip-Hop music, tweets, and social media, and none of this existed before the FBI got involved.”