I Ain’t Got No Money In The Bank…

When the XXL Mag Dot Com site went down a couple of days ago I ain’t gonna lie to y’all but I was scared as shit. I thought that my Harris Publications gravy train had been suddenly derailed. First Scratch Magazine gets put on the skids and then the best gotdamned Hip-Hop website evar gets shut down. I was blaming Curtis ‘Interscope’ Jackson for this turn of events. The KanYe West XXL cover must have sent him into a cataclysmic ‘roid rage. I could imagine that Blackberries were being thrown around with reckless abandon at the G-Unit offices. I was already getting on my plan B grind though.

I sent some e-mails to the people over at the King Magazine website. Yeah, I’ve talked shit to their lead blogger, and maybe I’ve burned some bridges with their editorial staff, but why can’t we let bygones be bygones? I was scrambling like Jermaine Dupri was after the first week of that latest Janet Jackson album. If I was going to be back on the streets again writing for D-list rap magazines it wasn’t going to be due to my lack of begging for a cushy job at another Harris Publications periodical. Guns and Hip-Hop are kind’a related. With basketball season right around the corner I thought maybe I might get a gig at Slam Magazine. Too bad for me that no one in their editorial staff wanted to read my in depth expose on the rise and fall of Harold ‘Baby Jordan’ Miner, or my drop on the greatest Minnesota Timberwolf evar, Isaiah Rider.

How could this shit happen? Everything was going along so swimmingly. Jay-Z was releasing new music that apparently no one cares about. KanYe West has the number one album in the country and the hottest magazine cover on every newsstand. [ll] to that last sentence, of course. Why was Jimmy Iovine doing this to me? I had finally turned a corner after eight months of inane and ridiculous columns about the relationship of semi-retired athletes to semi-retired rappers. I finally found the voice I needed to bring social awareness and polysyllabic lyricism to the massive Hip-Hop collective and it was all being snatched away from me.

This is what I get for thinking that this rap music reporter on the periphery job would last forever. I’m mad that I didn’t save all my money for this eventuality instead of buying cases of Patron and duplicate pairs of Nike Air Max. This should be a lesson to all of you. This Hip-Hop shit won’t last forever, and what will you do when no one wants to hear rap music anymore? Have you saved away enough mental equity to return to mainstream society and still be productive? Are you up on your rock music references like Bol? If you aren’t then I suggest you get your ass to a Borders bookstore and copp the magazine Revolver. They talk a lot of rock shit up in that piece. And in this way you won’t be an outsider when that discussion moves away from rap music. This was a wake up call for me to stop taking this time and this opportunity for granted.

I hope all of you appreciate this forum that Harris provides for us to talk shit to one another and then do it all over again the following day. That in itself is a blessing that we are lucky we don’t have to pay for. So who cares anymore if you leave your comments in all capital letters? At least we have a place to leave comments.