Editor’s note: The
views expressed inside this editorial aren’t necessarily the views of
AllHipHop.com or its employees.We survived
winters, snotty nosed with no coats/
We kept it real,
but the older brother still had jokes/
… Check it,
fifteen of us in a three bedroom apartment/
Roaches
everywhere, cousins and aunts was there/
—Ghostface
Killah, “All That I Got Is You,” Ironman
(1996).
The working-class kid in me wants to
know why Hip-Hop fans would submit their precious time to the abuse of
spoon-fed, pampered, nannied, chauffeur-carried brats who know next to nothing
of growing up with no assurance “where your meal’s coming from.”
Yes, the long-awaited editorial has
arrived on schedule. Put down your shoes, pal! There’ll be no invective-hurling
today. But some frank truths have been piercing my ear for a while now; and I
know better than to disobey those voices once they get cranky.
If you’ve made it this far, there’s good chance we share core values. If not, hear
me out and prepare your profanity-laced, dimwitted e-mails thereafter.
In the last few months, I’ve had to
suppress some impulse to stave off this editorial. I figured over time the
better angels within my nature would allay my increasing worries that many Hip-Hop
fans are losing the battle to reality, but I find the need even greater now to
let out these unflattering observations—and the consequences I think lurk
around the corner if we don’t take heed.
When the young son of Rap legend Rev.
Run, Diggy Simmons, released his first mixtape last December, howls filled the
air. He was celebrated as fresh and unique and lyrical, by some AllHipHop
commenters I’ve depended on in the past for what Ernest Hemingway calls the
“built-in bullsh** detector”—a device he suggested no serious writer lacked.
You see it, feel it, and delete it. Each one dressed up their rave reviews in
contrast to his older brother, Jo Jo Simmons, and in contradiction to the tacit
presuppositions held of anyone with “Run” for a surname.
The mixtape was “an attempt by Diggy to
prove himself as more than just the son of Rev. Run,” wrote
AllHipHop co-founder and co-CEO Greg
Watkins, who filed the story. Diggy’s dad was “pleasantly surprised” to see his
son run swift with the flaming torch he lit some three decades back. Around the
time last year, I heard Diggy’s lead single, “Point to Prove,” and liked what
was coming through the speakers. I wasn’t blown apart or taken aback: I had no expectations. And whoever said
rich kids couldn’t flow? Listen to
enough Canibus or Talib Kweli, and your pattern should structure quite well.
But if hypocrisy were gold, many Hip-Hop
fans could own Vegas tonight. When Jo Jo Simmons first explored the unmapped
terrain of Hip-Hop music-making a few years back (on Run’s House), no one with a shred
of dignity
let him rest at night. Blogs and forums lit up, and Armageddon markeda minute away—all because a rich kid thought he could walk through the
executive doors of major record labels and sign on the dotted line because his
father and uncle could move mountains with a finger-snap.
I don’t know the extent of Jo Jo’s
experiences. Life, in fact, might be more complicated for him than most lacking
such access and ability available since birth. But if Jo Jo had no chance,
Diggy shouldn’t. No one believed Jo Jo had much to inform about life and
hardship, about struggle and pain, about uncertainty and destiny—and they ought
not to be hypocrites. But Diggy can spit;
Jo Jo can’t!, I can hear some yelping. Well, yes and no. Yes: Diggy handles
breath-control better, and can imitate Rakim quite well. But, no: it wasn’t the
flow that got the Hip-Hop aficionados
seething: it was the silver fork hanging from Jo Jo’s lips. It was a firm
commitment to ensure Vanilla Ice would have no reincarnation. (All due respect
to that much-maligned man aside.)
Speaking with AllHipHop right after his mixtape dropped, the “abnormally
well-spoken” 14-year-old Diggy Simmons, now an Atlanta Records recording
artist, recounted
the extent of his Rap career/passion: “I’ve been rapping since I was 5 then
I stopped. I don’t even know why I stopped. Then two years ago I got back into
just recording normal tracks. I recorded a song and posted it on my blog and it
got crazy feed back, it wasn’t even that lyrical it was more for fun. I love
music, I love making it. I’m almost in the studio everyday.”
Once, Hip-Hop offered loud voice of
political courage to command the attention of society toward moral correction. (Ever
heard “The Message,” “By the Time I Get to Arizona,” “Evil That Men Do,” “Burn
Hollywood Burn,” “Black Korea,” “Mystery Of Iniquity,” “Strange Ways,” or “American
Terrorist”?) Today, Hip-Hop fills vacuums: it’s a hobby; it’s an emotional
alleviator; it’s a social legitimator—it means you’re cool. Once, Hip-Hop offered the only legal means of true financial
liberation for kids trapped into unlivable conditions. Today, Hip-Hop adds an
extra “0”—to the many other 0s lined up from fashion and modeling and TV deals.
Aubrey Graham, better known as “Drake,”
fares no better in my book. And though three years ago (please listen to Room for Improvement), I could vouch for
him, today I hang my head in shame at the caricature Young Money has turned him
into. But the once-Degrassi (some
suburban White middle-class drama) star doesn’t mind: He rolled out the womb
into a golden crib.
For his much-anticipated (sure-to-flop)
debut album, So Far Gone, he’s been studying
Nas (“to understand how he painted those pictures and his bar structure and all
of that”) and Andre 3000. Take a few seconds to award Mr. Graham his ovation.
But a few of us—fans and artists alike—studied Nas for quite different reasons:
for the sense of agency and empowerment he provided our struggle; for the eloquent and extensive definition he gave to
inner-city reality; for the wisdom sprawled liberally from his lips to our
ears. No doubt artists can learn a good deal of poetic structure from Nas; but
when Rap music fails to inspire anymore, when technical mastery is all left to
glean from, something is wrong—either
with the teacher or the student, the speaker or the listener.
I tend to judge the likes of Drake like
Cormega would: “I don’t like when these spoiled rich kids … just get into
rap because it’s something they can
do. … They pops got money and they put ’em in the game and then they start
rapping about something, a life they could never live. Go do something else. … Ni**as
like us rap about sh** because we
lived it. These ni**as use Rap as a hobby.”
If you’ve ever let your eardrums—and
heart—fall victim to a Cormega track, the knee-jerk he’s hatin’ reaction shouldn’t find value following those comments:
he embodies every word. And Hip-Hop fans and artists have always stood close to
that timeless axiom—“no pain: no gain.” Not in a fascistic sense—as I picked up
from Nas and Damian Marley’s “Strong Will Continue”—but meaning, if hardship to you is running late to a
video shoot, or the late arrival of a chauffeur, or a missed opportunity to
clock your closet with a limited-stock-collection-edition sneaker line, you
might as well stay clear of the mic and pick up a more appealing, less
transient hobby—like curling.
And, sure enough, Hip-Hop fans have come
down terribly harsh on rich kids who, with good muscle movement, eventually made
it onto the roster at some major label outfit trying to suck up to their
parents. It’s only right that a keeping
it real
-obsessed community should take sharp swords to the ankles of anyonewhose definition of poverty has more in solidarity with Carlton from The French Prince than J.J. from Good Times. (May I take this opportunity
to plunge into Will Smith? Nah, let’s move on.)
The code shouldn’t take much to crack:
we don’t greatly appreciate rich kids
because they can tell us next to nothing of what nihilism means, of what
fatalism means: in short, of what Hip-Hop means. If I ask readers to name one born-wealthy
Hip-Hop artist whose message has poked in their hearts the perseverance to keep
keepin’ on until someday, as Lil Boosie might put it (fall out your chairs,
purists!), “selling out the store/ my money don’t fold now/,” we might be
waiting till the trumpets sound, for an acceptable answer. But I let loose the
name “Tupac Amaru Shakur,” and libations shower the earth.
Listen, folks: I hate to be that guy—you
know, the party-crasher, the stink at the board meeting, the grump at the bar
mitzvah, the atheist at church; but wipe off your lips: you’re drooling. These
folks share nothing in common with the artists by whom our lives have been made
meaningful and purposeful. So, feel free to wash over their albums at your
local store: they don’t need the money. But some do—and if you’ll rather shell out precious coin to enlarge the
coffers of some glitterati scion, please don’t show your face around here any
longer. I don’t mind one less reader.
Tolu
Olorunda is a cultural critic whose work regularly appears on
AllHipHop.com,TheDailyVoice.com, and other online
journals. He can be reached at: Tolu.Olorunda@gmail.com.