You Shouldn't Write About Rap Music: Snarky Racism Edition

Everybody ready for another round of righteous indignation? OK this shouldn’t take long.

This week’s reason you shouldn’t be writing about rap music is if you are writing an article which boils neatly down to “ha ha rappers.” GQ and Businessweek each ran something along those lines this week.

GQ ran a slideshow by Rob Tannenbaum called “The 25 Worst Rappers of All Time.” If this was just standard Buzzfeed-level white dude slander, I would roll my eyes at the tired jokes about Tom Green and MC Skat Kat (I mean, really? I know the 90’s are back but that was like 1991). I wouldn’t have even clicked through the whole thing, which was riddled with ads, pop-ups and various glitches, if Complex hadn’t tipped me off that it featured actual, respected emcees. It’s one thing to take pot shots at the extremely low-hanging fruit that is Insane Clown Posse (who are like a year into a phase of cool-guy unironic respect at this point anyways), but this dumbass called out legitimate icons Too $hort, Master P, Eazy-E, as well as the extremely relevant Soulja Boy.

When I was in college, every bro had token CD’s by Tribe, The Roots, De La and Mos Def. Today’s bro is a smarter, better-informed bro with a more nuanced view of the hip-hop landscape. Not only do they love Kendrick, they also avidly track down Schoolboy Q guest verses and even casually peruse Livemixtapes for stray 2 Chainz collabs and the occasional obscure club banger that their friend from Atlanta told them about. They like Odd Future but also probably have some understanding of the controversy around them.

All that is to say that hip-hop fandom has made some notable strides in the last decade, and GQ could probably find someone on Twitter to write a credible (but still funny!) list of the 25 Worst Rappers of All Time. And it could still rightly contain all four of those rappers: Too $hort is extremely upfront about how he’s not that into being a super great rapper and has been saying as much for over 30 years. But to equate real, successful (and extremely respected!) artists with comedians, pop-star dilettantes and fucking cartoon characters, is ignorant and kinda racist. It’s not 1998 anymore and The Offspring’s “Pretty For A White Guy” is a distant memory. This shit is terrible and GQ looks awful for publishing it.

Businessweek’s “Jay-Z Is Right: Most Rappers Are Lying About Their Wealth” aims higher in that it actually has a journalistic intent, but does such a half-assed job of answering the question it asks that it’s even worse. Author Allison McCann claims to have found a way to “seperate the truly rich from the loud-mouth lyricists.” Her methodology involves cherry-picking when the twelve rappers she’s heard of (I guess?) threw out a claim about their cash situation and then comparing it to whatever recent data she could find on their financial situation. I would figure it goes without saying that, for example, Gucci Mane is not actually giving Hard Data when he says he’s worth $20 million, but that’s apparently below the research standards for Businessweek. But even more egregious is the data McCann uses as “real”; sometimes it’s net worth, sometimes it’s annual income (even if that data is as much as three years old). For some reason, Nas’s $6 million debt to the IRS is represented as his entire income for 2012, even though fucking Businessweek should know that’s a wildly oversimplified statement. And not only is Ludacris a weird choice, but it’s unclear if his 2009 earnings include acting roles or if it’s just rap money.

(RAP NERD SIDEBAR: “Stomp”—the song where McCann gets her info from, is from 2004. It’s Young Buck featuring Luda and TI and they diss each other on the original version of the track, although the album version replaced TI with The Game. I had to look it up to remember whether it was Luda or TI that got replaced. The whole incident was awesome and the track is hard as fuck.)

The thing is, there’s a wellspring of great pitches buried under this lazy-ass graphic. Wiz Khalifa and the indie success of Rostrum Records is a great story about small business and the modern music industry. Dr. Dre realized rap money is slow and got into the audio equipment game. The rap game in general is all about diversifying income streams and building one’s business, which is why everybody has a clothing line and why everybody has a crew of artists coming up in their wake. But Business Week doesn’t have time for that shit, they just want to briefly remind their readership that rappers aren’t really that successful and we should be skeptical of their claims of any kind of financial accomplishment. The subtext here is “independant black business is a lie.”

When you write about rap in a non-music context, please ask yourself if you are writing about rap because it’s relevant or if you just think it’s funny because rap. This is the same principal everyone should be using before they dress up like a rapper (or any other person of another ethnicity) for Halloween. Otherwise you’re being lazy and racist and looking like a total ass.

Skinny Friedman is a writer and DJ living in Brooklyn. He's on Twitter - @skinny412