I don't want to take credit for some shit I don't deserve, so feel free to correct me here if I'm wrong, but I think I played an important role in mocking Maia Campbell on Twitter yesterday.

Obviously a lot of people were amused at the video of her that hit sites like World Star - and the numerous blogs that post videos from World Star - yesterday, with her sitting in a white Chevy Monte Carlo, spouting vulgar gibberish, and going to town on a bag of Flaming Hot Cheetos, the hoodrat breakfast of champions. Even if you felt sorry for her, you couldn't help but chuckle a bit.

I didn't even bother to watch the video, before I went in. I was in the mood for some schadenfreude anyway, because of the revelation re: Roxanne Shante's academic background, or lack thereof, and any number of other tangentially related news items from this week. If you notice, crack is having its strongest week in quite some time, perhaps since it hit the scene back in like '86, when Ronald Reagan did that bizarre address in which he pulled a baggie of crack from his desk on live TV and said that shit was poison. Also, did I mention it's way cheaper and way more addictive than regular cocaine? It was like an advertisement for crack. Then come to find out the CIA was shipping cocaine from Nicaragua and dropping it off right there in the hood. Shocker! Where do you think Ronald Reagan got that baggie?

If there was a stock for crack, it would be the only stock that isn't completely worthless right about now. In addition to Maia Campbell making that slight lateral adjustment from acting on the WB to being a crack ho, there was DJ AM being found dead with some crack sprinkled on him; DMX going off on Jay-Z in another video on World Star; and Whitney Houston going on Good Morning America and confirming the fact that she smoked up her vocal chords, even though crack was supposedly too cheap for her. (If there's one thing worse than a crackhead, it's a stuck up crackhead.)

And I wouldn't be surprised if crack played a role in Roxanne Shante pretending she was a doctor. You know Marley Marl was one of the original crackheads. KRS-One mentioned it in "The Bridge Is Over," which is turning out to be perhaps the most accurate dis song of all time, even more so than "Paper Plates" by the GZA. I mentioned it myself in a post I did a few years ago about the album Marley Marl did with KRS-One, but that part of the post ended up getting swallowed up by this site's infamous software glitch. Then, a mere matter of days later, Marley Marl somehow managed to suffer a heart attack at the ripe old age of, like, 40 something (the new 30), and people wondered how that could have happened. I could have told them, except... I couldn't. And people wonder why actual rap magazines are constantly being scooped by the likes of Slate and the Smoking Gun, who hardly know from rap music.

But I digress.

The music itself might not be very good, but I've never had as much fun writing about hip-hop as I have in 2009. Things have just gotten so desperate. The economy in general is fucked the fuck up, and the music business is doing even doing even worse than the economy in general.  Artists are out here spazzing out, resorting to drug use, and ho-ing, or, in Maia Campbell's case, all of the above. And of course I'm going to mine this for as many potential lulz as possible. This is actually one of the few areas where eskay and I agree. He was going in on Maia Campbell yesterday on Twitter. He apparently has some sort of personal thing against her. He might be a bit more attuned to that world of crack hoes than I am, being out there in Yonkers, the town that spawned DMX.

But I can definitely see where he's coming from. These days, it's a lot harder to feel sorry for people than it used to be. If you can afford enough drugs to kill yourself, you're off my sympathy list in 2009. Maia Campbell made more money than I'll ever make, on that LL Cool J show, and she could probably still be, if she wasn't a crack ho. (Oh, who am I kidding? She probably still makes more money than I do.) I know some people have pointed out that she has a mental problem, but I'm pretty sure her main problem has to do with the fact that she's a crack ho. Schizophrenia alone doesn't put a woman out there on the stroll. You didn't see any of those guys in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest sucking dick for coke, now did you?

It goes back to how a lot of us felt about DJ AM. Here's a guy who got paid into the 10s of thousands of dollars per day to play records, who walked away from a plane crash, then cracked himself to death. If I had that kind of money, I'd be out here eating the finest of crab meats. Fuck the dumb shit.

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