Why Rick Ross Doesn't Get It

What makes Rick Ross's line endorsing date rape on "U.O.E.N.O." so scary is how real it feels. The idea that someone you know could get you fucked up and take advantage of you is a painfully plausible nightmare. This is why people are (with good reason) up in arms over this line. Ross's twin "apologies" concerning the lyric only serve to prove how clueless he is when he comes to the danger behind his words.

When pressed about the lyric, Ross issued an apology that was pretty much as clueless as you’d expect from someone who thought it would be a good idea to rap about date rape in the first place. His apology was totally in line with our conventional understanding of what an apology from Rick Ross might look like—grandiose, full of contradiction, not to be trusted, and kind of stupid. The Boss more or less denied rapping about rape because he didn't specifically say the word "Rape" (not true; that is not how rape works) and said he'd never rapped about rape ever (also not true, as he explicitly said the word “rape” during his track "Gunplay"). The real mansplanatory kicker was when Ross described women as, "The most precious gift known to man," which is deliriously, deliriously stupid. Like, dude is speaking as if it’s man's right to be receive women from some divine patriarchal force here. That's not the way to go about showing that you've learned any semblance of a lesson in this situation.

Yesterday, Rick Ross offered a second dollop of ugh when he tweeted, “I don’t condone rape. Apologies for the #lyric interpreted as rape. #BOSS,” followed in two hours by, “Apologies to my many business partners, who would never promote violence against women,” and then added the Twitter handles of Reebok Classics and Ultraviolet, an organization that has started a petition to get Ross dropped from his Reebok endorsement deal. Saying, “I’m sorry you thought I said a terrible thing” is vastly different from saying, “I’m sorry for saying this specific terrible thing.” Rick Ross should not attempt to define and categorize rape, no matter how much he might like to. Acting as if he holds the keys to the universe, however, is well within the confines of Rick Ross’s persona.

As he likes to remind us, Rick Ross is The Boss. He is an inherently absurd, evil character, someone whose single-minded materialism causes him to view all other humans as disposable at best, and total objects at worst. Also, he's full of shit. He claims to sell crack to world leaders, he was a corrections officer and he claims he gives people stimulants to make them go to sleep. Ross’s job is to take rap to new heights of absurdity and excess: he is Al Pacino in Scarface, except if Pacino had won at the end, and then funneled money from his cocaine empire into his personal space program so that he could start selling drugs on the moon. One of the other things that makes Ross himself is his ability to project the image of “Gangster Rapper” with none of the tact or verisimilitude of rappers who understand things other than the fluctuations of Miami’s surely fickle yacht market. Instead, Ross asks such soul-searching questions as, “Am I really just a narcissist/ Because I wake up to a bowl of lobster bisque?” Rick Ross has one foot in the trap, one foot in Dexter’s Laboratory. Fuck a brick, The Boss is selling us something bigger than that. He’s selling us the idea that you can do and be anything you want if you bullshit hard enough. It's the ultimate perversion of the American Dream.

To a whole hell of a lot of people in America, Rick Ross is “Gangster Rap.” He understands this, and devours the nuance of other, better gangster rappers like a plate of crab meats, in turn shitting out ham-fisted platitudes and blunt approximations. If the average music-enjoying human sees Ross as a cartoonish essentialization of the genre, that’s because he’s doing that on purpose, though viewing him as such is as unhelpful to understanding the genre as it would be to take one’s sole understanding of punk from Wavves. Rick Ross is, after all, a pop star, and pop stars are creations and reflections of the realities in which they operate. Yes, Rick Ross is perpetuating Rape Culture, but he was also forged in it. And Rape Culture is indeed a cancer to society, but one cannot cure a cancer by simply treating its symptoms.

Rick Ross is being taken to task, but what next? How do we continue a very difficult conversation about Rape Culture within the context of hip-hop and society in general? On our next favorite mixtape, there may very well be five lines that are just as complicit in Rape Culture as Ross's, but more subtle, and therefore more sinister. What do we do about them? If this controversy begins and ends at Rick Ross, then we have failed.

In order to actually end the realities behind the lyrics in "U.O.E.N.O.," we need to enact severe sociopolitical change in America that drastically alters the systemic attitudes that govern our society. We can hear, "Rick Ross should stop trivializing and passively condoning rape" from critics, but even more than that we need to hear, "Stop allowing rape to happen" from everyone, and then take meaningful steps to turn that into a reality.

Thanks to all of those who helped shape this piece.