Whatever Happened to Wack MC’s?

I find myself in dire need of mind bleach when I have to remember the athletes who tried to rap, and boy, they were wack.  It was garbage; despite maybe having similar backgrounds as rappers, their lives are totally different and they do not have the same reference material to pull from.  While Red and Method became rap’s Cheech and Chong on a bong, Deon Sanders is rapping about joining the NFL and shit.  Like Key and Peele noted, there’s something wrong with a person who deals with a lot of concussive contact and then tries to rap.

Some athletes actually have rap skill — Shaquille O’Neal, for example actually did and has widely accepted in the rap community, surprisingly.  But no one really wanted to hear his super-husky voice on tracks rapping, we want see him actually make free throws.

Extinction or Evolution?

So in looking at all the wack MCs that existed yesteryear and looking at rap now, my opinion hold two possible answers, or a combination of both:

1. Wack MCs EVOLVED into well-accepted rappers.
2. Really great MCs illustrated wack behavior and we gave them a free pass, thus changing the standard.

Let’s examine a couple of things that happened throughout the years:

Biting becoming Acceptable
Jay-Z is without question, a rap phenomenon.  Reasonable Doubt, is a hip-hop treasure.  However I do believe that one reason why wack rappers don’t seem to exist is because things that were deemed garbage are now accepted.  Around 2005, Jay-Z got into a small beef with Cam’ron.  While Cam’ron — a rapper who I’m compelled to speak on next — isn’t powerful enough to murk Jay-Z in a beef, he CLEARLY had a valid complaint in regards to Jay-Z biting.  When it was brought to light that Jay-Z has bitten a plethora of rappers, we made excuses.

I’m not a businessman, I’m a business, man!
Let me handle my business, damn ~ Jay-Z

In the sense of a corporation personification, Jay-Z by then was too big to fail; we were not going to let him being a biter be a deterrent in his success.  After all, he’s still an awfully great rapper alone, and he has graced us with numerous tracks and collaborations.  I will be the first one to admit that when it was revealed that Jay-Z was a huge biter, it broke a part of my heart still… because it marked the death of an era where biting was detested, and ushered a new era where rappers who bite other rappers, are accepted.

Highly Skilled Rappers Rapping Stupid
Cam’ron to me is the poster-child of this one, and it’s rappers like these who pisses me off.  Nowadays folks may only know of Cam’ron from his post-Come Home With Me album where he just makes himself wack as fuck when it comes to lyricism.  But a true hip-hop head like myself knows of Cam’ron during his Children of the Corn days, as well of is first two albums Confessions of Fire and S.D.E.  Cam’ron is a rapper who dumbed down his lyricism; no longer rapping with the high multi-syllabic rhyme schemes.  While rappers like even Jay-Z simply got better with age and continues to challenge himself, Cam’ron makes no effort to showcase the fact that he’s actually more skilled than what he portrays. Thus, this self-inflicted suppression of skill only normalizes wack rap behavior by mimicking sucker MC standards of style.

 Fakeness Becoming Acceptable

Rick Ross is another phenomenon.  The fact that he was a parole officer… back in the day, it would be rap-career suicide had it been known that you were a cop sitting there listening to numerous actual criminals’ stories, and then becoming a cocaine-rapper based on your experiences dealing with people in prison.  His acceptance is categorically absurd, and that marked the point where it’s perfectly okay for rappers to be accepted even after lying about their lives.  Sure, many rappers lie, but a cop though acting like he sold drugs is a little too much.

If rappers are the “new slaves” as Kanye describes, the battle rapper serves undisputedly as the “gladiator” slaves.  Almost slipping my mind, I believe a final nail in the coffin was when Canibus — a battle rapper of renown — nearly destroyed hip-hop single-handedly by pulling out a notepad after being soundly defeated in a contest.  Again, when great MCs do wack things they create a new standard.  When I witnessed this for real, I couldn’t believe my fucking ears.  A battle rap icon… true gladiator of the arena… threw his reputation away and all of a sudden became super-wack.  I’m still in shock years later.

So overall I think the reason why wack rappers are not targeted for extinction anymore is not because we killed them all; we accepted them into mainstream.  Drake, by the publishing date of this article, is currently the target of many memes declaring him as the wack rapper of our times.  Maybe one day Drake will be a Hollywood superpower.  With how we reward rappers these days, only time will tell.  One thing for certain is that the extinction agenda and the war on wack rappers has long ended.

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