Nite & Day...

24 Hour Access Kills the Rap Star
written by Just K

You bought the CD. You read the interviews. You saw them on Rap City. You went to the concert. You saw them in the news if they screwed up. The end.

That was before 24 hour access.

Now we have constant access to rappers and it’s definitely not for the better. In a world where street cred is everything, a few concentrated internet searches can turn up surprising information. We find out that a boat that pulled into the Port of Miami was probably property of the coast guard and not some heavy drug trafficker. We find out that a con is really only kind of a con after serving only a few days in jail as opposed to a few 365s. And that may just be the beginning. It’ll be interesting when you find out your favorite rapper didn’t go to jail for murder, but for unpaid traffic tickets. Also, I’m not really sure if Uncle Murda having a website strictly about murders is doing a lot for his marketability.

Then there’s the magic of youtube. It’s one thing to hear about Gucci Mane hitting a woman, but seeing the actual footage of how and why it happened made me lose respect for a guy I didn’t have a lot of respect for in the first place. Hearing about a guy getting punched or jacked for a chain is rough, but seeing the guy that raps about AKs and 9 millis get dropped, then get his chain snatched is just heartbreaking. If an artist slips off the stage in LA, everybody in Maine is laughing about it the next day. When Jay-Z can talk Beyoncé into hitting the stage with him in North Carolina, people in Iowa feel cheated when “all they get” is Jay.

Let us not forget the leakage. Everybody knows Dr. Dre has ghostwriters, but hearing Eminem actually rapping the lines he wrote for the good doc so that he knows how to rap them properly was actually painful for me. And sure nowadays artists put out a million songs, but there was a reason they never released some of them; they’re bad. So for someone to dig up unreleased tracks and leak them to the public – the songs might be bad enough to taint a fan’s view of an artist’s talent and ability. An unreleased track that leaks might even spark a beef that shouldn’t exist.

Mistakes that would never have surfaced are suddenly accompanied by footage. Information we never wanted to know about artists is spread worldwide in instants. Rappers we never wanted to hear are everywhere. We grow so weary of the horrible rappers that we don’t take the time out to search for the new jacks that might be incredible. Sensory overload if you will. The more we get the less we need. Never has the cliché been more appropriate: less is more.