Split personalities...

Real Talk
written by Just K

I’ve seen a lot of movies. I’ve lived in a rough neighborhood. I own a pencil and a notebook. I own a car. I can find a studio. If I wrote some lyrics with my pencil in my pad, hopped in my car, drove down to a studio, and rapped about the things I saw in the movies and in my neighborhood would that be wrong? Ok. What if I rapped it in a first person point of view? After all, who wants to hear a whole CD about “I saw?” Ok. What if the beats were crazy, the rhymes were on point and I dropped a classic album? Would you buy my album or would you be caught up in the fact that I didn’t technically live any of it? Should it really matter as long as it’s hot? Depends on who you ask, but realistically speaking, I actually hope most of it’s fabricated.

What fans fail to realize is that anyone that’s listened to rap, watched movies, lived in a bad neighborhood, and/or has access to a Google search engine has enough information to drop a CD about drugs, hoes, prison life, or anything. Malice of The Clipse/Re-Up Gang recently released a video stating that rappers (including himself, much to his fanbase’s chagrin) don’t live what they talk about. Rap is just another form of entertainment in which you can fabricate any lifestyle, good or bad. You can be a drug kingpin, a hitman, a dude that hops on planes that haven’t been invented yet, a ladies man, whatever. Why not take advantage of such freedom? Why not escape reality? When white America is the greatest consumer of hip-hop, it’s not like people are buying the music in hopes of relating to it. People buy music for the same reasons they read a novel or go to the movies. They want entertainment. If that entertainment happens to be reality, that’s a bonus. It’s the equivalent to seeing a movie that’s based on a true story, and even then some of the details are altered or simply invented for the sake of making things more exciting. Do we really want to argue over who is the “realest?”

If these MCs all live what they talk about, we ALL have a problem. First of all, they’d be snitching on themselves on a regular basis. It’s like having the authorities eavesdrop without even needing to bug the room. It gets funnier if/when the MCs go to court and say that nothing they said in their music is true. On top of that, we’re supporting big time drug dealers, homicidal maniacs, and admitted rapists just because they’re “nice.” If that isn’t enough, many consumers buy music from no-talent rappers who put little work into their craft based on the belief that these individuals are real.

In the end, if you’re being honest with yourself, your favorite MC didn’t kill anyone. He may have sold a little weed to support his love of buying Jordans. He may have even sold a few other drugs, but I doubt he spent a lot of time at some boating dock waiting for the next shipment of kilos to come in. Hey, at least his music’s entertaining. Besides, when you get a backlash like Malice did for telling the truth, who wants to keep it real anyway? Keys open doors, even if you never held the keys yourself