The Bush thing and the Taylor thing are connected obliquely, but also directly.
When the Bush thing happened, that was the first proper large-scale Kanye controversy. In other circumstances—say, if it’d come after his first album, which was a triumph itself but had less of an echo outside of rap—it might’ve been enough to have disappeared him forever, to have had his fame swapped out for infamy. But it came in the same month that “Gold Digger” had consumed America. The song was so big and so clever and so much wider than “just rap” that it couldn’t be discarded or denied or even disliked. It gave Kanye, at least in that moment, a tremendous amount of critical capital, and he leveraged all of it and then a tiny bit more. And so what happened was the “Gold Digger”–to–George Bush moment was the first instance of separation between Kanye West the musician and Kanye West the personality, which became a key component of his professional identity, and probably his personal one, too, if he’s being truthful in the interviews he gives. When the Taylor thing happened, that was the widest the divide between the two sides was.
In Bush’s 2010 book, Decision Points, he described West’s public shaming of him as the lowest moment of his presidency, which certainly seems strange, given he (probably) fabricated a war motive and (probably) knew about the systemic torture of terrorism suspects that and (definitely) forgot how a door worked one time.
When Kanye was asked about Bush’s evaluation of the event, he connected it back to the Taylor Swift thing: “Well, I definitely can understand the way he feels, to be accused of being a racist in any way, because . . . the same thing happened to me, you know, where I got accused of being a racist.” It was the lowest moment of Kanye’s career.
There’s an easy joke to be made about Kanye taking a moment he created and reflecting it up against a separate moment he created. But sometimes that’s just what it is. It’s neat when things make a full circle like that.
♦
TWO STRAGGLER QUESTIONS
1. 50 Cent’s gun-toting mayhem was the perfect antecedent to Kanye’s endless critical self-evaluation. If one of those nine bullets that hit 50 in 2000 had proved fatal and he died and never revitalized gangsta rap, would that’ve helped Kanye move forward quicker or would it have slowed him down (or would it have not affected him at all)? And what happens with Young Jeezy9 and Rick Ross10 in 2005/6?
2. Sometimes I think about a rapper named Shawnna, and I especially thought about her a lot this chapter, because when Kanye West made “Gold Digger” he’d intended for it to be used by her on her 2004 album, Worth Tha Weight. Shawnna, she was from Chicago, too, but she signed with Def Jam South. Her career was over before it started, really. She was on a song with Ludacris in 2000 that people seemed to like (“What’s Your Fantasy”) and she was on another song with Ludacris in 2003 that people seemed to like (“Stand Up”). But that’s it. I wonder what would have happened had she taken the song,11 and if Kanye not having “Gold Digger” would’ve somehow kept him from becoming the most influential rapper of the last ten years,12 or at least slowed him down, or, worse still, prevented his marriage to Kim Kardashian?13
REBUTTAL: “GO CRAZY” YOUNG JEEZY, FEATURING JAY Z
It’s immensely audacious for a regionally semipopular rapper to open his first widely promoted single by crowing “Guess who’s bizzack?” since most listeners probably hadn’t even heard of him more than two seconds before. Maybe Young Jeezy’s confidence came from knowing that “Go Crazy” would be the exact moment when the balance of power in hip-hop would shift from big-budget crossover stars like his guest Jay Z to wily, trap-haunted southern mixtape rappers like himself. But for all its historical significance, “Go Crazy” remains the most important rap song of 2005 simply because it goes so hard—Jeezy tearing across a drum-rolling Impressions sample like an unstoppable swordsman from a samurai movie, filling every available millisecond with lines like “I’m emotional / I hug the block” that will be quotable until the end of time. Plus, “Gold Digger” never got any kids suspended from school for wearing T-shirts with a crudely drawn coke-dealing snowman on them. —MILES RAYMER
Is Your Girl a Gold Digger?
Does she refuse to engage in a relationship, amorous or otherwise, with broke niggas?
Does she have a child whose father is possibly Busta Rhymes?
Does she have a personal history, amorous or otherwise, with R&B singer Usher?
Does she use the child support payments she receives for cosmetic surgery?
Does she possess a level of menace within her that would allow for her to lie about who the father of her child is for nearly two decades?
1. Since it sampled “I Got a Woman” by Ray Charles, it was also the first time Ray Charles had a number-one song on Billboard’s Hot 100 as a songwriter.
2. Both records have since been broken.
3. It actually won a Grammy for Best Rap Song.
4. It topped out at number forty-three on Billboard’s Hot 100.
5. The term “shooting” here is meant as in “shooting the scene,” but I suppose it could also be taken to mean “shooting a bazooka at George W. Bush’s forehead,” too.
6. “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)” was nominated for nine awards that night. It won three (Video of the Year; Best Editing; Best Choreography).
7. This was a completely inaccurate claim.
8. Poor guy.
9. I’m guessing he’d have been okay. He was more an evolution of the Clipse than 50.
10. I’m guessing he flounders a bit.
11. Nothing. She was never really very good. Best possible outcome: It becomes her version of Mims’s “This Is Why I’m Hot.” Most likely outcome: It becomes her version of J-Kwon’s “Tipsy.”
12. Nope.
13. Not a chance.
WHAT THIS SONG IS ABOUT
A good work ethic.
WHY IT’S IMPORTANT
Rap has, nearly since its origination, celebrated itself, and it did so especially well in the late ’90s up through the middle of the aughts. But it aspired to be planted in some sort of truth. “Hustlin’” marks the origination of rap that became more about imagination and the luxuriance of what was being said rather than the authenticity of it.
The following is a description of a Rick Ross music video that is not “Hustlin’.” Though that would appear problematic, given that this is a chapter about “Hustlin’,” I can assure you that it is the same philosophically.
Rick Ross is driving a very expensive car over a bridge in some part of Florida (probably Miami, were I to guess).
He is in the car with DJ Khaled, who is in the passenger seat, and two attractive women, both of whom are in the backseat and in good position to massage Ross’s and Khaled’s shoulders, so that’s what they’re doing. Ross gets pulled over. A cop, burly and wide but not offensively so, walks up to the side of the car and taps on the window. Ross lets the window down, smoke furling out from his nose; he very much looks like Waternoose from Monsters, Inc., if not literally then at least metaphorically.
“What’s the problem?” Ross asks. “Speeding,” the officer replies back. DJ Khaled is exasperated. “Man, you must be new or something, man,” he interjects. “We the best, man.”
The “we the best” legal defense does not move the cop, as Khaled was hoping. “License and registration,” the cop says.
Ross steps out of the car. He walks slowly toward the front of it, then, without warning, sprints—inasmuch as a three-hundred-plus-pound man can be said to sprint—toward the railing on the bridge and jumps over, falling the some twenty-five feet down to the water. This, to me, is an overreaction to the possibility of receiving a speeding ticket. I suppose it’s not outside of reason that Ross had warrants, and so maybe he was trying to avoid getting locked up. But who knows? And who cares? Can Rick Ross even swim?
As his body splashes down into the bay (Biscayne Bay, were I to guess), the music starts. It’s “Speedin’,” an okay single from his okay second alb
um, Trilla.
Now Rick Ross is in a speedboat with a handful of money and three new women, none of whom are massaging his shoulders, FYI. He is flanked by three other speedboats. One is driven by Fat Joe, one is driven by Puff Daddy, and the third by Gunplay, a lower-tiered rapper serving on Ross’s Maybach Music Group record label, who I can only assume is in on this particular fantasy because somebody else who was supposed to show up to drive that boat in the video didn’t make it. But again: Who knows? And who cares? Because reality doesn’t matter. With Ross, it never has.
Rick Ross’s reality is flexible, and the circumstances of it, and his abilities within it, are bound only by what he can think up to say.1 One time he said that he moved a brick of cocaine per day. One time he said he kept rubber Uzis in his Jacuzzi. One time he said he owned a Mona Lisa painting that comes to life. One time he said Wale was a genius and Meek Mill was a superstar and I’m not sure which of the two is more offensive. Logic and reason and common sense and the truth are all just barely even visible to Ross, clouded by all the gold dust and diamond sparkles in the atmosphere around him. It’s his whole aesthetic. That’s how he became a superstar. That’s how “Hustlin’,” a song where Ross rhymes “Atlantic” with “Atlantic” and says the word “hustlin’” forty-six separate times, became the most important song of 2006.
Rick Ross makes sense if you suspend belief in everything else except for what he tells you and shows you. If you don’t, then you’re just watching a fat guy jump off a bridge for no real reason.
♦
Rick Ross spent August 2006 to July 2008 positioning himself as a drug-trafficking mega monster titan. He did so loudly and confidently and proudly, first with “Hustlin’,” a gorgeously composed, unbeatably simple song, and then basically with everything that came after it.
I don’t know that anyone actually believed him—he sampled the “Push it to the limit” line from Scarface on his second single, “Push It,” which seemed especially ham-fisted, a lot like taking a picture of yourself smoking weed on a beanbag chair in front of a Bob Marley poster and then captioning it “revolutionary”—but nobody was saying they didn’t believe him, and so that was close enough for him to keep playing gangster uninterrupted, and he played gangster very well, so he just kept on doing it. But then, oh no:
Right around the boring part of the summer of 2008, photos of Rick Ross at what appeared to be the graduation ceremony for a class of correctional officers spread online. He was wearing a CO uniform and shaking hands with a white woman. He had hair and no beard, but it was very obviously him.
When he was asked about it, he said: “Online hackers [put] my face when I was a teenager in high school on other people’s body. If this shit was real don’t you think they would have more specifics, like dates and everything? Fake pictures are created by the fake, meant to entertain the fake.”
It was the first time he’d told a lie to America that he didn’t tell in good measure, or at least in a fun song, and so people wanted to unravel it, and so that’s what happened. From then to October, more specific things, like dates and everything, were hunted down. His Social Security number was matched up with DOC records to establish his identity, then his salary,2 then the time he worked there,3 etc. When he was asked about it again, this time with enough supplemental incriminating evidence to box him in, he bowed. “Yes, it’s me. I never tried to hide my past.” He literally said, “I never tried to hide my past,” and that was the moment he crystallized his superstar status as quite possibly the smoothest, not-batting-an-eye liar there ever was.
There was a tiny bit of pushback after his admission, but nothing major—at least not like the initial fervor the photos created, and certainly nothing close to what history had shown could come. 50 Cent, who took the nine bullets fired into his legs/arms/face and turned them into a true fortune, had taken it upon himself to end Ja Rule’s career because Ja Rule was on a label called Murder, Inc., and he’d never actually murdered anyone.4 Ross’s misstep was way more egregious. The result? Nothing. It made his cartoonishness even more powerful.
That exorbitant lie-telling all began with “Hustlin’.” It was a Trojan horse with a belly filled with fables.
♦
Ross, by either accident or design, began ex post facto legitimizing his illegitimacy at the same time he was building up his kingpin mythos. “Hustlin’,” the first song most of America had heard from him,5 established that early on. When he claimed he knew Pablo Escobar and Manuel Noriega, the real Noriega, that was his first YFR6 moment. We’ve all only ever known Ross to be a liar.
After Ross admitted to being a CO, after he’d absorbed the nonresponse, his self-styled extravaganza floweredFlowered-FLOWERED. On Deeper Than Rap, the album that followed the noncontroversy, he showed that he’d grown it into a science (“Vacation to Haiti, it nearly broke my heart / Seeing kids starve, I thought about my Audemar”). By Teflon Don, his fourth album, he’d turned it into performance art7 (he chanted, “I think I’m Big Meech, Larry Hoover,” and you yelled it, too, because it was so exciting and ridiculous, but also because you knew you were both telling the same amount of truth). By his fifth, God Forgives, I Don’t, he was over the moon. (He fucking called the album God Forgives, I Don’t.)
Ross’s megalomania is the evolution of 50 Cent’s true and real street tales. Ross is a copycat killer who’d never really killed. Rick Ross’s megalomania is the countermeasure to Young Jeezy’s existence, which was always doused with the sort of hinted regret that can only be fostered by actual experience. Ross is a copycat dealer who’s (likely) never truly dealt.
Ross single-handedly adjusted the valuation of credibility in rap. He’s hustled us since “Hustlin’.” That’s always going to be true.
♦
The irony: The moment it felt like the things that Rick Ross was saying were actually true (sometime between Teflon Don and God Forgives, I Don’t), the moment where it felt like “Hey, I mean, he’s worth about $35 million now, so he probably could be on a helicopter with thirty virgins headed to Monte Carlo,” that’s when people stopped caring about him.
♦
Rick Ross stole his name from “Freeway” Rick Ross, an illiterate drug dealer who was responsible for the movement of thousands and thousands of pounds of cocaine across the country8 in the ’80s. Freeway Rick spent 1996–2009 in prison behind drug-trafficking charges.
On May 1, 2012, I received a private message from whoever was running Freeway Rick’s Facebook page (possibly him, but probably not). I’d been writing a lot for LA Weekly around that time, and Freeway Rick wanted me to post some video of Rap Rick Ross talking about where he got his name. In the weeks that followed, I received several more messages from him, each one a link to something Freeway Rick Ross was saying about Rap Rick Ross. I’m under no illusion that I was the only writer being sent the stuff that was being sent. Still, after I started ignoring his messages, I felt semibad about it.
♦
The difference between Rick Ross and 50 Cent, discussed only via threats against the women in your life.
Rick Ross has a song called “Walkin’ on Air.” In it, he shouts, “Pull up to your trap, strapped in my armored truck / Your mami house next, tell that bitch to duck.” Even when he’s pretending that he’s going to shoot at your girlfriend’s house, he wants you to know that it’s coming so that you can warn her to get down because he doesn’t really want to hurt her.
50 Cent has a song called “Heat.” On it, he grits, “If you was smart, you’d be shook of me / ’Cause I’d get tired of looking for ya, spray ya mama crib / And let ya ass look for me.” Hot, hot hate in 50’s heart turns the atrocious and deplorable act of shooting at your mother’s house into an ancillary activity, a vehicle meant only to drive you from hiding, so he can shoot you, too.
Hustlin’
“Who the fuck you think you fucking with, I’m the fucking boss” (0:48)
“White on white, that’s fucking Ross” (0:53)
&n
bsp; “I know Pablo, Noriega, the real Noriega, he owe me a hundred favors” (1:10)
“See most of my niggas still really deal cocaine” (1:19)
“When they snatched black I cried for a hundred nights” (1:31)
“Whip it real hard, whip it whip it, real hard” (1:51)
“José Conseco just snitchin’ because he’s finished” (2:14)
“Mo’ cars, mo’ hoes, mo’ clothes, mo’ blows” (2:34)
Confrontational, Boastful, Descriptive, Cool on Purpose, Self-reflective, Insightful, Historical Reference
REBUTTAL: “WHAT YOU KNOW” T.I.9
This feels small, a tiny monarch presiding over a kingdom in ruins. But ten years ago, T.I. was the one with heft, with presence, with girth. Rick Ross was merely an interloper, a harrumphing flab who rhymed “Atlantic” with “Atlantic.” T.I. wasn’t clever, either, but he commanded, with a lolling flow that gurgled and soared in equal measure. And there was no one who made songs soar to great heights and swing low to scrape the earth like DJ Toomp. It was with T.I. that Toomp—who cut his teeth in rap with southern mold breakers MC Shy-D, Raheem the Dream, and 2 Live Crew—realized his sense of scope and glimmering grandeur. Never better or bigger than on “What You Know,” a statement of fact and of purpose. Like all great anthems, it’s not what it’s about, but what it makes you see—a man scaling a mountain, a statue blocking out the sun, a diminutive but cocksure man rapping right into your face: “See, all that attitude’s unnecessary, dude / You never carry tools, not even square, he cube / You got these people fooled, who see you on the tube / Whatever, try the crew, they’ll see you on the news.” T.I. wins, film at eleven. —SEAN FENNESSEY
REBUTTAL: “THROW SOME D’S” RICH BOY, FEATURING POLOW DA DON
Yeah. Couple things here. First, Polow Da Don coproduced this jam with a guy named Butta, and it’s like the sun rising and setting every ten seconds. (With Rich Boy jabbering in your ear the whole time, but he grows on you.) Second, PDD also raps the second verse, which includes the line “Every freak should have a picture of my dick on they wall,” which is incredible, which is the Eleventh Commandment, which is like God himself texting you all the emojis at once. It was also the best moment of 2007, and the best moment of 2008 was Obama getting elected, if you get what I’m saying. I’m not arguing with you about this. Thank you for your time. —ROB HARVILLA
The Rap Year Book: The Most Important Rap Song from Every Year Since 1979, Discussed, Debated, and Deconstructed Page 22