Land Of The Lost

To paraphrase Phonte during his Little Brother days, I love hip-hop but I have a deep disdain for some of the people who participate in it. I, like you, truly enjoy the sounds, art and every other creative aspect of rap, but I’m just not entirely fond of the nitty-gritty, behind-the-scenes aspects of the culture. Hell, I’ll even admit that I don’t feel that I am that big of a deal in this shit to really have a feel for the true nitty-gritty, behind-the-scenes aspects of the culture.

*waits for c-sectioner to pop off at the mouth about the last comment*

Done? Cool.

To be honest, I sometimes feel a weird sense of guilt when it comes to this online shit. It’s finally nice to make a decent living for a change and not have to play musical chairs with my bills every month, but after a while I find myself thinking about what my next step is. Hence, I’ve tried philanthropic endeavors as some form of “moral balance,” such as spearheading the main hustle’s charity BBQ event this past summer. The event ended up raising a nice amount of money and hundreds of school supplies, all of which was donated to an organization dedicated to help Haitian schoolchildren.

I’m a modern day Charles Hackley.

When I see artists doing the same thing, though, I’m a bit torn about it. On one end it’s always a great thing to see these megalomaniacs cast aside their ginormous egos for the sake of bettering their fellow man, or at the very least pretend to cast aside the shit for tax purposes. On the flipside, it only seems trendy to do so around the holiday season, with most rappers seemingly pretending to give a shit about the less fortunate by going to the hood (with bodyguards and fur coats in tow) to toss turkeys out the back of a truck during Thanksgiving or X-Mas like they were Nino Brown or some shit for glorified tax purposes, as if that makes up for them spending the money the same people receiving said turkeys spend on their business endeavors on stupid shit like diamond-encrusted Nuvo bottle chains and such.

And you see why I haven’t purchased an album in years.

So hearing that Puff allegedly stiffed two separate charities isn’t anything surprising to me, save for the ironically funny fact that one of the organizations – a plastic surgical group – held a charity event to find a cure for breast cancer. Unfortunately, it also feeds into the notion that most rapsters don’t care about Black people only show their “charitable” side when instructed to do so by their handlers.

If a rapper isn’t going to do anything charitable at all, it’s perfectly fine; it’s their lives and they can do whatever they want with it. However, just keep it real and be like that. Fronting like you care when we all know you don’t is just a waste of our time and theirs.