Most of your favorite rappers are snitches
As if hip-hop didn't already have enough problems, what with the likes of Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson prepared to pull their usual shakedown tactics on the major labels, Cam'ron of all people went on 60 Minutes last night to discuss hip-hop's ignorant-ass black people's hip-hop's stop snitching ethos.
If you haven't already, you might want to check that out.
It actually gets into a lot of the same shit I discussed here last year in the aftermath of the killing of Busta Rhymes' jewelry polisher (no, really) Israel Ramirez and the subsequent debate over when, if ever, it's okay to talk to the police. Which would lead me to believe that they began working on the story back then and only decided to run with it now that hip-hop is catching so much heat from all directions.
As I mentioned at the time, this idea of talking to the police being so verboten in hip-hop is especially ironic since so many rappers who claim to uphold the code of the streets have been talking to the police on the low for years. In fact, both of the main artists featured in last night's 60 Minutes segment have said a lot more to the police over the years than "Hi, how are ya?"
Cam'ron may not have said shit to 5-0 when Jay-Z tried to have him assassinated in Washington, DC a few years ago, but he sure as hell did that time he got his as whooped at a basketball game in his own hood back in 1999. According to the police report, which you can peep for yourself at The Smoking Gun, Cam filed an official complaint with NYPD while was holed up in the hospital waiting for the swelling to go down.
Similarly, Busta Rhymes, whose failure to implicate best weed carrier evar Tony Yayo in the killing of his bag handler was the crux of last night's segment, didn't have nearly as much of a problem pointing the finger when one of his babies mothers went ape shit on his car and then tried to pull some of the dreads out of his hair. (Though, as I noted at the time, a case can be made that snitching on women doesn't really count.)
In fact, does it strike anyone else as odd that 60 Minutes would run a segment on rappers who refuse to cooperate with the police featuring two rappers who are on the record as having cooperated with police? Did they not even bother to check one way or the other? I realize both Mike Wallace and Ed Bradley are dead as doornails, and Anderson Cooper is more of a secretly teh ghey trust fund baby with a death wish than an according to Hoyle journalist, but stil.
If anything, last night's episode just goes to show that a) that movie The Insider was right - 60 Minutes has no credibility as a news organization (unlike, say, Bol's Saturday Night Workout), and b) rappers are full of shit. When it comes down to it, these d-bags will say pretty much anything, if they think it might make them a dollar. What hip-hop needs is real journalists who are willing and capable of pointing out such bullshit.
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