CeReBrAL GuMbo.....

"They call me Dope Man, Dope Man
I try to tell em I'm where hope, floats man
Ghetto spokes-man" - Jay-Z, Volume 3: The Life and times of S. Carter

A couple of days ago, VH1 had a special--I forget the name--dealing with Crack and Hip Hop. It was pretty darn interesting. They chronicled the rise and fall of the crack generation, how it inspired Hip Hop and how Hip Hop inspired it. What I got from it though, and from the artists that grew out of that era, was that a lot of young brothers didn't see that life as glamorous at all. I mean, yeah, they got money and cars and popularity from it, but for the most part that was the only way that poor, undereducated, disenfranchised black youth saw as an attainable way to provide for their families.

Now I could write an entire book about why this was the case, but the purpose of this post is to point out how weird it is that most of the Old Guard in Hip Hop used their music (fueled by the drug money) to GET OUT of that life but all you seem to hear now with rappers (who never even lived that life) is them glorifying it. It's so crazy how backwards people are!

Here's this man who is so poor and whose mind is so damaged from Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome, whose community and its leaders are being picked off one by one--and then you have a person wanting to rap about this man's life like he's sitting on top of the world? Are you dumb? Were you not paying attention when he got shot at his friends funeral? Or when his son was held hostage and killed by a rival? No? Well, maybe you were there when he went on "vacation" for 25 years and missed his daughter's ENTIRE life.

Why would you want to emulate that life? You say that this man was your inspiration but I think you were inspired by the wrong part of his journey. Maybe you should've been inspired by his best friend who decided to cut his losses and get a record deal rapping about the things people shouldn't do. It's really weird the turn that Hip Hop took in regards to the crack/cocaine lifestyle. It's like it went from a news report to a video game where the only avatars to choose from were dope boys, stick up boys or king pins--and nine times out of 10, these same rappers couldn't walk two blocks in Felix Mitchell's/Rayful Edmonds'/Azie's/Rick Ross' shoes--and they shouldn't want to either.