I was listening to the Satellite Radio Old School Rap Station and the Too Short Gem "Da Ghetto" came on. Setting aside 90s rap mysogyny and violence, there were a lot of rap lyrics like this:


So just peep the game and don't call it crap
Cause to me, life is one hard rap
Even though my sister smoked crack cocaine
She was nine months pregnant, ain't nothing changed
600 million on a football team
And her baby dies just like a dope fiend
The story I tell is so incomplete
Five kids in the house and no food to eat
Don't look at me and don't ask me why
Mama's next door getting high
Even though she's got five mouths to feed
She's rather spend her money on a H-I-T
I always tell the truth about things like this
I wonder if the mayor overlooked that list
Instead of adding to the task force send some help
Waiting on him I'd better help myself
Housing Authority and the O.P.D.
All these guns just to handle me in the
ghetto


Reading it now it sounds like Trump or Rush Limbaughs vision of what inner city life must be like.

I mean think about "Self-Destruction", you assemble some of the best rappers of the day and Identify the problem facing the black community as something we are doing to ourselves? Think about the think pieces the West Coast Version "All in the Same Gang" would inspire with lines like "A basehead cluck can't blame nobody for smoking" coming from NWA members or respectability politics in the very first verse "I'm trying to stress the fact that you're dumb, Get yourself presentable, son, and just come".

I think about Ice-T's Colors or the Movie Menace to Society and I think, having lived through all of that and looking back on it, I can see why so many politicians we are roasting today thought the 90s crime bill was a good idea at the time.

I think I might ruin a perfectly good rap discussion by bringing todays politics into it, but yeah, this is what I was thinking about listening to Old School Hip-Hop.




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"Everyone has a plan until you punch them in the face. Then they don't have a plan anymore." (c) Mike Tyson

"what's a leader if he isn't reluctant"