Underrepresented working class in rap

BLVR: One of the things over the past couple years that has helped people connect with what you’re doing is that you’re rapping from the perspective of someone in their thirties rather than someone in their teens or twenties. Do you think that older perspective is missing or underrepresented in rap right now?

KM: I don’t know if it’s an age thing for me, but it is very much a class thing. The working class is underrepresented in rap. There is something valuable that the working class has to offer that doesn’t get honored in rap music in the way that it should be or could be. I don’t drink champagne that often; I drink whiskey every day I can. That’s the difference. So I tend not to rap about champagne-type things, I tend to rap about whiskey things, things that a workingman gets off his job and contemplates. Scarface was twenty-three years old when he wrote “I Seen a Man Die.” There are rappers who are forty-three years old who will never write anything with that type of depth.

BLVR: It seems like a lot of younger rappers feel the need to rap about the champagne-type things because they’re projecting a fantasy.

KM: Yeah, and I can’t criticize the fantasy; it’s just a fantasy, though. Kids have fantasies. Kids rap about Bentleys and diamonds because that’s what they want or that’s what they think you’re supposed to do to get rich. My job is to offer an alternative, because the people I saw who got rich, they did some diamond-y things, but they also did very practical things that I saw my grandparents do. When I think of rich rappers, I’m thinking less of the guys who I see on MTV every day and I’m thinking more of E-40, who independently became rich, got big checks from rap, then diverted that into community and businesses. It’s why I tell people that one of my favorite rappers is Rick Ross. The fact that he owns a Wingstop and is in negotiations to buy twenty-five more: when I hear that I go, Wow, he’s probably going to employ two hundred to two hundred and fifty people. That’s very significant to me. That’s a reason to congratulate and to support him.

BLVR: You’ve rapped about the culpability of rap artists in terms of the values and ideas that they spread and what they give back to the communities that they came from. When did this obligation begin? Did rappers always have this obligation, or was it when rap became a global and commercial force?

KM: It’s always been. I don’t place obligations on you because you’re a rapper; I place obligations on you because you’re a man. Most rappers are black men. If you’re a black man, you owe something to the community that you came from. If you’re rapping about the community that you came from, and you’re romanticizing parts of it for the entertainment of people who don’t look like you, you certainly owe something to the community. That’s why when people try to criticize a person like my good friend T.I., I remind them that all the shit you want to talk about him, one of the first things he ever did with his money was start a construction company, and they were building houses in the community. How many rappers have the gall to do that, to build a construction company to build houses in the inner city? To me that shows a lot of forethought.

I hold rappers just as accountable as I hold the 100 Black Men of Atlanta. I hold them just as accountable as I hold Herman Russell. I know they don’t have a hundred million dollars like Herman Russell, but you’ve got twenty-five thousand dollars to open a chicken-wing stand, and to make sure that the people working in that chicken-wing stand look like you, and to make sure you don’t have bulletproof glass and the people aren’t being served like animals in cages at the zoo. You can do that instead of buying a funky-ass gold chain.

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KM: How can a black man not be paranoid? How can I look at any statistic that tells me that if you’re not an average reader by ten years old, you’re destined for prison? How can I say someone doesn’t have a vested interest in making sure the public-school systems stay fucked-up? How can I trust you when it was less than a hundred years ago that there was something called the Tuskegee experiment, which allowed black men to live with syphilis just to see the effects on the human body. As a rapper, how can I not believe in conspiracies?

That doesn’t mean I believe there’s some secret room of people who had a meeting about gangster rap, and that it was pushed. I’m talking about why public schools are truly fucked, why neighborhoods that never could get fixed, all of sudden when people start gentrifying them, we get public services like trash and regular police patrols. Why are churches getting money to shut up or push certain political campaigns through the community? Those are the real conspiracies I worry about, because those are things that are really affecting us.

I don’t have to think that there’s some grand satanic conspiracy for people to inject reptilian minds into mine; I don’t know about all that. But what I do know is that I don’t trust the church or the government, and anything the church or the government tells me I assume to be a lie or a conspiracy, until proven true.

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