The Fake Debater

As much as I like the Man In The Mirror mixtape and as much as I'm anticipating El Che's new album, Rhymefest just lost major points this week.

Chi-town hip-hop blog Fake Shore Drive unveiled a new series called The Great Debaters (via The Rezidue) in which they let Rhymefest conversate with another random rapper about different issues facing the urban/black/hip-hop community. They kicked it off this week with perennial Interview All-Star Killer Mike. Just hearing the lineup, I was pretty amped to read what these two highly-intelligent, articulate, "spokesmen for rap"-worthy rappers had to say. Unfortunately, I might've given Fest too much credit.

What sticks out and jabs me in the gut the most is Rhymefest's over-willingness to call black folks ignorant--he explicitly mentions "ignorance" in reference to the black community three times. He somewhere picked up this assumption that he was some sort of Messiah, come to save the people from their own savagely ignorant ways. So as Killer Mike speculates that Southern black folk wouldn't shop at bougie-ass, boutique-ridden Lake Shore Drive in downtown Chicago because they are comfortable in their own style and skin, Fest twists this into a symptom of black ignorance, the same ignorance that apparently keeps black kids from learning about different scholarships. Because that's how I learned about MY scholarship opportunities--by shopping. Rhymefest stretches his argument too far in order to direct the conversation into the topic of black people and how stupid they are.

Ultimately, Rhymefest falls into the familiar trappings of "conscious" rap and suffers the same faults. As implied above, he's elitist. Second, he's obviously biased against Southern rap, likely seeing it as some kind of harbinger of ignorance in hip-hop. When Killer Mike breaks down the inspirational stories of Lil Wayne and Young Jeezy, Rhymefest "wish[es] it would be told more often" as if Weezy and Jeezy weren't continually repping their rags-to-riches successes in their songs. It's like Fest don't listen to Southern music, he just skim through it. Luckily, Killer Mike calls him out on a faulty comparison between Young Jeezy and Kanye, which Fest tries to use to anchor his point that Southern rap is more harmful to the kids (because it always has to be about the kids) than Chicago rap.

And when there's nowhere to turn, please let's all rely on pre-packaged vaguesnesses and myths to prove our points:

- "..... ignorance is prevalent in the absence of positive role models, which is the enemy of our people."
Ignorance of what exactly? What golden knowledge will turn around the situation of the black community? And what role models need to be present to alleviate this ignorance? How do we go about developing these role models en masse? It seems unfair for me to ask all these questions and I don't expect Fest to have answers to all of these. But if he's as proactive as he would like to seem, Rhymefest needs to answer something. Because we've already gotten this far. We've come up with these questions before but no one likes to talk specifics about solutions.

- "I’m not saying negative or gangster rap is the downfall of our children in America. What I will say though, is that there’s no longer a balance between the positivity and the negativity. It used to be that I could listen to Scarface, but guess what, they’re gonna play Rakim right after that. I can go and listen to Too Short, but they’ll play A Tribe Called Quest right after that. Now, there’s no balance."
He just skim through it. As the "conscious" crowd will tend to do, Rhymefest misreads the positivity and negativity of rap. He places Rakim and Tribe at the positive end of the spectrum and Scarface and Too Short at the negative. I can't vouch for Too Short because I'm not up on him like I should be. But while Scarface presents an unhappy view of life, his psychological music is ultimately more substantive and thus more positive in terms of real-world benefit to his listeners than acts like Rakim and Tribe. While Tribe may have happier music, it's superficial jam music that has been misinterpreted as socially-conscious due to a few Afro-centric signifiers dropped here and there. The same could be applied to Rakim, who really just did the same by inserting some Five Percenter vocabulary into his battle rhymes. In terms of real world lessons, which is something that conscious rap strives for in theory, Scarface is much more positive. For Rhymefest to have misinterpreted this so wildly speaks to his inability to really comprehend rap and the messages behind the image, behind the chain, behind the thug front.

All this to say that Rhymefest is clearly out of touch with the mentality of the poor black people for whom he dedicates his work. You'd think a motherfucker be proud, to see his homie on his feet instead of talking him down.