CRS
Chandler, Arizona, United States

There's an old saying. If you don't want someone to join a crowd, you ask them, "If everyone were jumping off of a cliff, would you?" Well, I have. So my answer would be "Yes". True story.
Profile continued . . .

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Oh, don't worry about the noise-- it's just another rapper shooting somebody.

Saturday, June 10, 2006

this entry brought to you by the yeah yeah yeahs, "fancy"


I was reading an article today about the rash of rapper-related shootings this year, and it left me somewhat speechless out of disgust. Shortly after Biggie and Tupac died, comedians started joking that being a rapper was hazardous to your health. The thing was, at the time it was true but still an exaggeration enough to be considered a joke. Nowadays, though, rappers shooting at one another and getting shot, often to death, is becoming so common you can't help but half-heartedly wonder to yourself what rapper got shot this month when you pick up a music magazine, and, sure enough, on page 26, there it'll be. Someone's been shot. Someone's dead. Some other rapper is going on trial for witnessing a murder on the set of their video, or a member of their entourage exchanged gunfire with the members of someone else's entourage after a heated argument about something. Any award show where hip-hop acts might be hanging out, the chances of someone getting stabbed or shot dramatically rise.

And you know what pisses me off about this? I'm not particularly mad at the rappers involved in these situations. When you take an ant out of his anthill, he'll go about doing what he always does, and gangstas are the same way. Snoop Dogg (who was recently permanently banned from the UK for violence) famously once said, "You can take the G out of the ghetto, but you can't take the ghetto out of the G," and this couldn't be truer. If you bring trouble makers out of the ghetto and give them a lot of money, you're going to get the same shit you had before, except now it'll be over issues even more ridiculous than street bullshit: now it's over music, for the love of Christ.

So I don't blame the rappers that were famously once pimps, hustlers, drug traffickers, and in many cases, violent offenders, when they come out of the ghetto and continue being what they do best, only now with a phat beat. What I put the blame squarely on is the wretched excuses for human beings that work at the record labels, gleefully peddling this shit to the mainstream masses under the excuse of "giving the people what they want", and then profiting when a known ex drug dealer gets slain outside of a radio station for bad blood from years ago, or when a peaceful, love-spreading hip-hop pioneer like Jam Master Jay gets killed in his own studio for no known reason whatsoever. You could blame the audiences for buying this stuff that fuels the violence, but of course people want sensationalism-- when has that been news? But the record labels produce a breeding ground for violence and do absolutely nothing to stop it from happening. And hey, if they can squeeze seven or eight albums from a beloved dead rapper post-mortem, then hey, all the better.
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 yesterday, last year i don't care how old i get, i will always make a conscious effort to be cool, according to my definition of cool. not only do i really like the entry for the message (a meditation on being "cool"), but also how many times i mentioned the word "cool" in a single entry. very well worth reading.

on this day last year a word we don't use enough. mildly amusing, but not worth reading if you read it last year
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with love from CRS @ 10:31 PM 

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