WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED TO BLACK MUSIC?

I'm proud of my heritage and I try to stay educated on my people’s history and blah blah blah...but sometimes, I just see things that make me wanna trade my skin in. I need to look into something like navy blue, because the "black thing" is getting a little embarrassing. People’s fascination with the "thug life" was always stupid, but it’s never been this bad.

Let’s begin with R. Kelly, shall we? When he jacked Aaron Hall’s style, I didn’t care. When he was on the freak tip, I never paid his antics any mind. When he got on the ghetto-workingman-R&B-storyteller tip, I just figured it was more record-grabbing theatrics. But now, after watching the video for "I Wish – The Remix (To The Homies That We Lost)," it’s safe to say that he’s lost his goddamn mind. Let’s start with the title. I’m not saying an R&B singer can’t make a "dead homies" song, but he could attempt to make it sound more genuine than another volume in Master P’s ongoing saga of tributes to his dead brother. Then, in the middle of the song (which inspired me to write this entire essay), he just breaks into a DMX rendition! This is a loose transcription: "you dead and gone my nigga, so I wrote this song, my nigga, to let you know what’s going on, my nigga, I know its wrong, my nigga..." Man, what in the fuck? If I didn’t tell you those were lyrics from an R&B song, you’d swear a Ruff-Roc-a-Fella-Ryder wrote them. How has R&B come to the point where 30% of the words need to be edited out?

Then there’s Nelly. His songs are catchy and I’m not bashing anyone who’s a fan of his. As a matter of fact, I’m the last person you’d see trying to make an argument for "real emcees vs rappers." We all know that’s just a bunch of insecure, petty individuals trying to dictate a genre of music based on their personal preference, and disguising it as a love for preserving a culture...fuck them and their pseudo-principles. But anyway, aside from the question of emcee vs rapper, this man raises the question of rapper vs SINGER. What the hell is he doing? When did it get cool to write a thugged out rhyme and then sing it like a 6 year old girl reading a poem to her mother? Every time he opens his mouth, I picture a group of kids playing hopscotch, humming his melody at recess. Rap like you have a dick in your pants dammit.

And lastly, Chico Debarge has a song on the Bait soundtrack called "Player Hater," and in the video he’s (get this) sporting a bandana, sideways in true R&B thug fashion. Don’t y’all get it? When the squares and corporate guppies start get earrings and tattoos, they don’t mean anything to the hippies anymore. The same thing is happening now, but instead of hippies & squares, it’s thugs & posers. All of the "thugisms" have passed beyond the realm of cliché, and now it’s just flat-out embarrassing. With recent releases like Reflection Eternal and Outkast, it’s obvious that good black music isn’t in danger of becoming extinct. But even still, some people need to be beaten to death with a nerf bat.

I blame Palm Beach County.

- Justice