This is a public service announcement to 99 percent of rappers and other musicians. We get it. America gets it. You like to pop bottles, get ignant and slip some molly to the big booty gull on the dance floor so you can take her to the telly and get funky smelly. Ok, that’s your thing, but it’s nothing new, either.
The lack of quality music in this day and age is disheartening, to say the least. The FM airwaves are filled with junk music, artists masquerading as wealthy private jet riders and ghetto survivors.
But most aren’t even close to that and could profit from proper usage of reality and the newest version of Webster’s thesaurus. America wants its next musical icon, and it wants it now.
Kanye West, Jay-Z, Kendrick Lamar and Macklemore are some of the only few in the hip-hop scene that have put out albums in the last three years that could potentially be apart of the top-100 list for all-time favorites. This is an unacceptable fact, a realistic one nonetheless. This is a plea to creative minded individuals and even English literature majors across the seven continents of earth. Please use your brain and get off the ‘cane.
As someone that grew up on the core of hip-hop from Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg and Tupac, I cannot stand it. My mp3 queue is full of phrases like “putting it down for the 9-6” and references to Bill Clinton. That may be a fault of George Bush hating black people, as Kanye so eloquently phrased, but it still doesn’t alter the demand for bona-fide lyrical content and rhymes which scribe what life is really like. Especially with the wide knowledge of how many musicians could never afford a Gulfstream jet beyond charter and how record labels reap the majority of sales.
So potential musicians across America: please stand up and put your brain to use. The American public will thank you. Even if your music sucks, it still might be better than what’s being played on Hot 97 and KMEL.