I’m sure at some point in your life you have heard this quote:
Watch your thoughts, for they become words.
Watch your words, for they become actions.
Watch your actions, for they become habits.
Watch your habits, for they become your character.
Watch your character, for it becomes you destiny.
While there are multiple lessons to learn from these lines, I will focus on one. Specifically, the one that makes me think about hip hop (in my life, everything comes back to hip hop…everything.) This is where the idea of the self-fulfilling Prophecy comes into play (which is also quite philosophical).
Hip hop artists are by far some of the best examples of people who voice what they desire and what they want into existence. Case in point, most novice rappers do not have million dollar chains or the fastest cars on the road. Most of them are just hustling trying to get those things by whatever means possible. However, if you listen to the majority of their songs, they make you believe that they already have them. Truth is, neither you nor I would like to listen to an album whose subject matter is the ten year old car they’re driving, the one bedroom apartment they live in with a kitchen that is too small to cook anything in, how they are working a dead end job to pay the bills until they can get out and do what they want (the exception is Kanye’s Spaceship…I love that joint), or any multitude of subjects that reflect their real life situation instead of the one that they are perpetuating to the public. However, that does not stop them from speaking in the present tense on their albums, where they say they’ve got all the things that in truth are on still their wish lists of things to come when they finally blow (I’m sick o’yall niggas with ya now or later raps/Rap about it now, hope you get it later).
XXL had an article many years ago about how TI claimed he was the King of the South pretty much immediately coming on the national scene. However, he was not the King of the South. Fact is, until his national debut, I (a Southerner) had never heard of the dude. If you asked me to name 10 Southern rappers, he would not have even been mentioned. However, he proclaimed himself as such, and his words became his destiny (well, until now that is). He wanted to be the biggest rapper in the south, so he just said he was. Eventually, people believed him and it seemed that he actually did became what he claimed. This is the beautiful part of the quote above. Your words have the potential to become your destiny. So if you say what you want, you have the potential of eventually realizing the dreams.
But like everything in the world, there is a dark side waiting. Sometimes, the words that you say do not have anything to do with being great, loved, or rich. Sometimes the words are a bit darker, a bit more menacing, and unfortunately they too can become your destiny. There are two examples that stick out to me in this regard. One from damn near 15 years ago, and one from last week.
The first is of course, Tupac. Not many people who are casual observers or fans of the man realize the depth and irony of his story. Lucky for you though, I am not the casual observer. His story is multi-faceted with plenty of examples of how he spoke his destiny into existence. Take into account that his troubles with the authorities started after his rap career began, not before. The facts of that situation are fascinating (but too long to discuss here, maybe I’ll talk about this in another blog).
I think most notably Tupac’s words becoming real is his predictions of his demise. Through multiple songs and poems, Tupac talks about his death. For some people, those who didn’t want to believe he was actually dead, these words were used as evidence to him faking his own death because of how closely his words mirrored what actually occurred. He spoke of dying in quiet and not with screams around him although he frequently spoke of being shot. The truth ended up exactly this. He was shot, on my 16th birthday in fact, and died quietly in a hospital bed nearly a week later. Some people, myself included, have called him a prophet. In Greek, the word prophecy means “to speak forth” where the prophet is the person who actually “speaks forth”. Tupac spoke of his leaving this earth after a rain of bullets, and it was fulfilled. Here again, his words became his destiny.
The more recent example of this is Mr. Wyclef Jean, former member of the Fugees and current Haitian presidential candidate. What is interesting to me here, and something that I have not heard mentioned in the wake of his recent shooting, is his performance on The Chappell Show. On this show, Wyclef performed his song If I Were President which gives his account of what would happen should he be elected. While the title may give you the impression that the track will give us his personal plan for solving a country’s woes, in actuality, the song lists how he would be elected one day, assassinated the next, and buried shortly their after. He says that should he ever become the man in power, his power would last about a week. This concept of great men ascending to power only to have the power taken away by someone is not only the plot of fictions. It has been played out many times in the history of this world.
Wyclef spoke of what would happen should he become president. While he was simply on the campaign trail someone attempted to make this prophecy a reality. While it has been reported that Wyclef was not actually shot and the wounds that he sustained were not the result of a bullet but rather a cut sustained in the attack, I must point out here that whether or not the assassination attempt was successful, there was still an attempt on his life. The person wasn’t trying to scare Wyclef into cutting his hand, this person was trying to kill him. Wyclef predicted this would happen, and it did.
The point of this is the following, we think and put these thoughts out into the world now more than ever. Social media networks like Facebook and Twitter allow us to interact with a far greater audience. Be careful what you say and think, because what if you were given everything you ever said. While some of us would have money, cars and hoes, we might also have those millions of haters and problems we claim to already have.
I recently heard someone say that there are only so many ways for hip hop artists to talk about money, cars, and women and, consequently, isn’t it time for artists to pick another topic to talk about? I could not agree more. Don’t get me wrong - I still love my money, cars and bitches music (I think if a hip-hop head denied this then he/she would be a liar). However, while listening to Excuse Me Miss by Jay Z and Pharrell the other day, I could not help but get sucked in to the music and think about this a little more.
Jay-Z is one of the greats at storytelling, and does not just rhyme for the sake of making money and/or selling records without attention to the detail of his wordplay. Compare him to someone like Lil Wayne. Now before you put a hit out on my unborn children for hating on Wayne, let me clarify, I am not. I love Wayne, I do. I own the majority of his catalog. Mixtapes and albums alike. The only person I know who does in fact own more is, of course, The Brain who, as a native of New Orleans, was able to get his locally released music before digital music took over.
With that little confirmation of my appreciation of Wayne being said, let me say this. Yes, sometimes he says crazy, off-the-wall shit that does not make any sense. Lines like:
Swagger tighter than a yeast infection/
Fly, go hard like geese erection...
Or this one:
I leave her pussy Microsoft/
Like Windows Vista.
Or even better yet:
When I was 5 my favorite movie was The Gremlins/
Ain't got shit to do with this but just thought I'd mention.
I don’t know about you but I can tell when he is deep in his Styrofoam cup and fucked up to the point that he has a stream of consciousness rap comprised of nonsense (yeast infection swag….really???) along with his classic in your face, tongue in cheek lines. It takes intelligence to put it all together, and I am not taking that away from him. I also understand that all hip hop artists are not alike and that the artist has to create a product they feel comfortable with, at the same time producing something that the public at large wants to hear.
Hov said it best on Moment of Clarity:
If skills sold, truth be told/
I’d probably be, lyrically, Talib Kweli/
Truthfully, I wanna rhyme like Common Sense (But I did five mil)/
I ain’t been rhyming like Common since.
The entire second verse describes what the music business is and how it affected him as an artist. In the end, he had to say fuck perception and go with what made sense to him as the artist. As the first interviewed on Oprah’s (how did she end up here?) Master Class, he attributed his success in the music business and in the business world as a whole to staying true to who he is as a person, amongst other things. Rather than following what everyone else was doing, he forged his own path and opted to approach things in his own way, based on what was right for him.
Jay did not pattern himself after anyone. He did not make himself a cookie cutter rapper that went through the warehouse and picked one fast car, one chain, one video hoe, one catchy beat, and one drug reference to build his career on. While there are of course money references, car references, and hoe references, Hov never sacrificed the art that hip hop was built on (specifically storytelling) to make his way.
There are countless artists who have able to take the now popular references of money, cars, or women and incorporate them not just into the bars of the song but the plot of a story found in those bars. Excuse Me Miss is evidence to this fact. Jay must have been inspired by Slick Rick, the master storyteller himself, and somehow along the way the inspiration the greats like Jay or Slick Rick gave to the young heads coming up must have died.
How did hip-hop evolve into primarily one-liners? I miss the days of the story and more importantly, I miss the days of the storyteller.
Put that in your trunk and thump it,
GFUNK
