Preface: This Really Is a Tribute
"This is the best song in the world... tribute." – Tenacious D
I look at it like this: If it's a book about someone who's done something worthwhile at some point in time or another, then it's a tribute... of sorts. If it's a book about someone who never once in their entire life made a worthwhile contribution to humanity, then it wouldn't be a tribute. A book about Tyler the Creator, for example, wouldn't be a tribute, though I might call it that anyway, because I find that sort of thing amusing.
Relax, Tyler the Creator fans. I couldn't fathom writing an entire book about him, even if I thought it had the potential to rank highly at Amazon (one of the main things I take into consideration when deciding what to write a book about these days). True, the upwards of 8,000 words I wrote about Odd Future in my last book, Infinite Crab Meats, did seem to just flow from my fingertips, this despite my presumably decreased zinc levels due to my other afternoon hobby.
Or does that not have any effect on your writing?
It's necessary for me to state at the outset that this is, in fact, a tribute because I've developed a reputation over the past 10 years or so as someone who lives to mock rappers, and for the most part, yeah, it is well-deserved.
I started blogging in college, back in the early 2000s, to pass the time I wasn't spending making sweet, passionate love to a series of beautiful women, and to share my views on important topics such as 9/11, Bobby Brown and some of the developmentally disabled kids I went to high school with. My career really kicked into high gear after I graduated, in 2004, mostly because I didn't have shyt else to do. I spent a couple of years interviewing for every decent-paying job I could find, but to no avail, and flipping burgers in the meantime to make the rent in the series of shyt holes I lived in with other guys in similar situations.
It's not true what they say, that if you work hard, stay out of trouble, stay in school and get a degree, you'll at least be able to find a job that pays a living wage. You could just as easily end up shyt out of luck.
In 2004, I spearheaded a campaign to have Kanye West banned from the Grammys on the grounds that he didn't write his own lyrics, at least in the case of "Jesus Walks," one of the main songs he was nominated for that year, but who knows how much, if any of his rhymes he actually writes? It seems odd that he would pay someone to write some of the rhymes he's kicked over the years, but look at some of the MCs he's surrounded himself with. Maybe that's the best they could do.
There was a petition that was widely circulated throughout the Internets and even mentioned in some mainstream media outlets, including one of those drive-time radio shows for older black people – one of those ones that occasionally host a cruise, where everyone dresses like broke pimps, listens to Frankie Beverly and Maze and celebrates the fact that they're too old to impregnate each other anymore. Those shows hold a lot of sway in the black community, and I'm sure they're responsible for a lot of the amazing commercial success of Tyler Perry (along with those chain emails about the expiration of the Voting Rights Act and the Jena 6).
I'm not sure how many signatures it received at the time, because it picked up a lot more signatures years later, after Kanye interrupted Taylor Swift's acceptance speech at MTV's Video Music Awards. If I'd been there that night, I would have slapped the shyt out of Kanye, in part because Taylor Swift is so adorable and maybe she'd be impressed, and in part because I just plain disagree with what he said. I don't #fuxwit Beyoncé musically.
In 2006, I began blogging for XXL magazine's website. Shortly thereafter, I was involved in one of my most famous beefs to date, with Bun B of UGK. I'd written a review of T.I.'s album King, in which I jokingly suggested that Pimp C, who made a guest appearance on the album, should be thrown back in jail, because I didn't like his verse. Later, I referred to this in one of my posts for XXL, and one of Bun B's PCP carriers must have seen it and emailed him a link to it. Bun let loose in the comments section with a diatribe about how I'm the kind of person who throws rocks at people and hides behind a bush (I've never once done such a thing), including what I interpreted to be thinly veiled threats to pop a cap in my ass.
So of course I responded to this with a series of posts in which I both skewered Bun B's retarded comment and revealed the real reason – as far as I know – why Pimp C was locked up in the first place, which I'll maintain to this day really is something I read on a message board back in college, probably okayplayer, from someone who was there at the time. (Supposedly, Pimp C went to a mall in Texas with an AK-47 tucked into his fur coat and pulled it out on a woman.)
I was with XXL for just about five years exactly. It was February of '06 when they asked me if I'd like to contribute (“on the strength,” natch), and it was the beginning of March 2011, a day or two shy of my 30th birthday, when I was unceremoniously let go. XXL likes to get rid of people on their birthdays. When Elliott Wilson was fired, under mysterious circumstances (rumors circulated that management found a baggie of coke in his desk), after a 10-year stint as editor in chief, it was his birthday.
A few days before management at Harris Publications had someone from the tech department change my login, and didn't even bother to tell me about it (I only found out when I emailed someone to ask why my password didn't work), I was involved in an incident with the aforementioned Tyler the Creator. I suggested that his group, which had been presented as a grassroots success story, was being "astroturfed," and I also drew the obvious connection between Odd Future, Juggalos, and the kid who shot Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. Some people suspect that this led to my firing, but I'm not sure. It could just be that management wanted to shift its focus to more aggregation and less original content. There aren't enough strong writers in the hip-hop community to put together a site like what I was trying to do at XXL back in the mid to late '00s, and there aren't very many avid readers anyway.
You can imagine the success I've had, in the past couple of years, trying to become an author in this field.
***
Certainly, Nas is someone who could serve as fodder, if you're the kind of person who still spends his afternoons sitting around on the Internets talking shyt about rappers.
More so than maybe anyone else in all of hip-hop, Nas has developed a reputation as someone who put out one really good album, a long, long time ago, and hasn't put out anything nearly as good since. Sure, I can think of literally millions of other examples of artists who never topped their first album (or their first great album, if they didn't quite hit the mark until their second or third album) – most artists are only really, really good for an album or two, if they're ever that good. The difference is, most artists aren't allowed to continue to release as many albums as Nas has released after they've lost the plot. At a certain point, Warner Bros. decided it was done putting out Big Daddy Kane albums. If he had a security code to their corporate offices, they must have changed it (and probably didn't tell him about it). Nas, on the other hand, may never stop putting out albums.
As I write this, he's not even 40 years old yet, and yet it feels like he's been around since forever. In a sense, he has. The guy's been on the scene since I was in elementary school, and I'm rapidly barreling towards old age. Somehow, he was an adult when I was still a child, but now we're both in our 30s. Tha fukk? And it doesn't help matters that I'm a grisled, old-ass 32. If I were to drop dead watching American Idol on some random white chick's sofa like Charlie Parker in the movie Bird (and also, I guess, in real life), a medical examiner could easily mistake me for a 50 year-old man. Years of hard living will do that to you. Not being able to afford as much beer as I'd like to drink on many a night now has been my only saving grace.
There's a few younger rappers out here keeping hope alive for aging haters like me, guys like Action Bronson, Meyhem Lauren and Roc Marciano, and even those guys aren't that young. And that's it. For the most part, the best rappers out right now could double as some of your friends parents from back when you were in high school, if you went to a school with a lot of black kids, and those kids' fathers were somehow still around, despite the fact that they were apparently degenerates. Okay, bad analogy. But you catch my drift. Hip-hop used to be a young man's sport, and now it's an old man's sport (well, to the extent that there could be such a thing as an old man's sport). More and more often these days, you hear about rappers dropping dead, having strokes and needing organ transplants. Bonecrusher was pictured riding around a mall in a Rascal scooter. Tone Loc passes out on stage at a state fair every six months or so.
I tend to not get involved in this corny holy war y'all stansets got going on, but the nikkas catching feelings over some photoshops to the point they're trying to derail the thread are some of the most bytchmade fakkits I've ever seen in my life. Y'all realize you've dedicated a whole day, every year for years now, to clowning Jay-Z and making photoshops and memes right? Y'all created an actual holiday to do what you're bytching about right now.
Same nikkas with their panties in a bunch were all up in the Dr. Dre thread dapping left and right. It's jokes, put the fukking capes away for a day.
fat broke clowns dissing now
