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 marked a 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 studyingNas (“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 anyone whose 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.
