A Loopy Fiasco

Lupe Fiasco never ceases to amaze me. As a rapper he ups the lyrical ante every time out. As an individual he is a living reminder that talent and intelligence are as incongruous as money and web impressions. Blitzen kicks off a smarty-art nigga rant aimed at Elliot Wilson and RapRadar with an improper use of “your”. As you can imagine based on how often I attack the Lazytown approach to hip-hop grammar, I immediately judge people who fuck shit like that up. This goes double for niggas who operate on a platform of being smarter than everyone else.

[Blogger’s Note: Impressions = money isn’t exactly true. Ask the people who created Twitter and still haven’t figured out a way to make a dime off of it. You have to know what to do with that traffic. There are also ways that websites make money without much traffic, but Fiasco knows everything there is to know. I'll be quiet. It's not like I work in this industry or anything.]

Is Elliot Wilson greedy? I don’t know the man as well as some other XXL veterans do. So, I can’t really speak on that. However, Fiasco attaches this notion of YN greed to a lack of integrity. That’s to say that YN expressing his distaste for Fiasco in an editorial contradicts covering Fiasco in any capacity on the site. I’ve been to RapRadar a few times to snag an NP or two--once with YN as the subject. It’s a sad sight overall, but RR appears to have an objective journalism component. I mean, they aggregate a story here and there like every other lazy rap publication. What more do you expect of them?

Long story short, it’s RapRadar’s responsibility as a publication to report on artists Wilson may not necessarily like. That’s why Wilson has an opinion column or five. Those--and the tampered blogs—are reserved for whatever he’d like to say. This separation of church and state indicates that the responsible thing to do would be to include Fiasco in the normal press rounds. This has nothing to do with dickriding or being whimsical. If anything, knowing that Wilson has never liked Fiasco’s work despite the amount of XXL coverage he’s gotten during the YN era should be evidence of some journalistic integrity.

An editor-in-chief can’t possibly like everything that goes into his publication. Sometimes there’s a story on some shit you don’t dig. You may not believe this, but I’ve done plenty of objective journalism in my day. It’s what I went to school for. It’s also the reason why I blog, because fuck that shit with a sandpaper dick. I’d rather tell you what I really think.

Speaking of shitfucking, fuck that shit Fiasco is talking about in his stupid-ass blog. His real problem seems to be that he is not built to be an artist in the public eye. The boy’s sensitive as all hell. It’s Philosophy 100 time again. On one hand you have a writer who expects everyone to read and accept his views. On the other, you have an artist who expects never to hear a disparaging word about his work. Who’s the greater megalomaniac?

Greater than either Fiasco or Wilson’s megalomania is the irony of all this. Based on what I’ve seen at LupeFiasco.com, Fiasco has taken to being a blogger like YN. Music aside, Fiasco expresses his thoughts and opinions in print just like the bloggers he promises to dropkick, or whatever the fuck he said he’d do to Bol. It might be hard to see as much about yourself when your site is full of cockriding minions who block your line of vision to the mirror.  I can only imagine that kind of thing happens when “your” a popular musician, though. I wouldn’t know from experience.

I’ve given Fiasco a pretty hard time here. Let’s give him the benefit of being dull. In which case, shame on Fiasco for expecting better from RapRadar. Looking for objective journalism out of a vanity site like that is like expecting Muhummad Ali and Michael J. Fox to play a quiet game of Operation.

The internet has blurred the line between objective and subjective journalism for many people, but niggas with education and intelligence should be able to tell when one or the other are appropriate and at play. This entire argument is Rhymefest smart.

SDN All-Star Challenge indeed.

Questions? Comments? Requests? Damn, this economic freedom is cheaper than a motherfucker. ron@ronmexicocity.com