Real talk! Malice from the Clipse just became my muthafuckin’ hero. With all these fake ass gangsters in the rap game today, cats ashamed to say they held an honest job, even it was as a corrections officer, and beefs that have become an outright embarrassment to the culture, this dude’s words felt like a swig of water in a hot ass dessert.

Why can’t some in hip hop separate fact from fiction? Entertainment from reality? That puzzles me. It wasn’t always that way. A climate has been created in hip hop that says if you’re not living what your spit in your rhymes then you’re a fraud. It’s been costing some the loss of record sales and some the loss of their lives. IT’S ENTERTAINMENT!! I love me some gangster hip hop. Just as much as I love the film Scarface or the Godfather. Has the fact that it’s known that Robert Deniro or Al Pachino are not real gangsters had any effect on their success? No!

See, after they leave the movie set, they take off those tight silk suits, give the pistols to the prop man, and enjoy a life free from unnecessary bullshit. And when they go out to the nightclub, they don’t need to strap up. You, (misguided rapper) use their films and fictional characters as a road map to your life. We all know someone who quotes “Scarface” like Bible script. What I’m getting at is, you don’t have to have a make-believe life for people to accept your music. Just keep it real with your fans. Hell, everyone knows that pro wrestling is fake and it’s a billion dollar industry. Emcees are poets, storytellers, and it’s not a requirement that they live what they write about.

The world is pointing the finger at Soulja Boy for the demise of rap but I think they’re fingering the wrong suspect. Soulja Boy never self-declared his music to be hip hop nor has he ever tried to be anything other than who he is, and that’s okay with me. He won’t hurt hip hop. He’ll do as little damage as Sir-Mix-A-Lot did. There will always be a lane in the road for that kind of music. I’m more concerned with these false realities that are being fed to the youth. We all are either part of the problem or part of the solution. As long as these artists continue to sell records and we buy into the manufactured drama they put out, mainstream hip hop will continue to be a sideshow. This is why Malice gets mad props for really “keepin it real”.

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