Biggie Smalls and Lil Wayne

March 10, 2010 by Jessica Acee
Filed under: Culture, News 
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Yesterday was a sad day for many hip-hop fans. It was the 13th anniversary of the death of Christopher Wallace aka Biggie Smalls. It was also the first day of rapper Lil Wayne’s one-year prison sentence for attempted gun possession.

Both men represent the huge success of commercial hip-hop over the last 15 years. The Hip-hop of MTV and BET has a very different façade than it did 20 or even 40 years ago coming up out of urban Black communities. Today, hip-hop makes billions for the major record labels and influences nearly all popular music in ways Biggie Smalls probably never imagined.

Who else would we turn to but MTV for a little context in these emotional times. The Network has called both men “arguably one of the greatest MC’s of our time”. A recent MTV article about Lil Wayne quotes rappers Young Jeezy and Diddy saying that the “hip-hop community is under attack” and rappers need to “watch themselves”. But it’s not the hip-hop community that’s under attack; it’s the entire black community.

A friend of mine put it this way “Am I surprised they put Lil Wayne in jail? No! I’m surprised they didn’t lock him up for 5 years.”

How is it possible to give someone a one-year prison sentence for possession of a weapon when the head of AIG gets off with a slap on the wrist and the ESPN stalker Michael Barrett gets just over two years for stalking and videotaping over 16 women?

Black men continue to make up half of the victims of violent crime in this country and are more likely to be incarcerated than in school. Modern hip-hop has let a powerful movement become a caricature of itself by not understanding its own power as a diverse and vibrant community. This power becomes dangerous when manipulated by the wrong people and that’s why hip-hop is vulnerable to attack. There is not a better example of this than the East Coast/West Coast split that was masterminded by record execs and ended with the deaths of rappers Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur.

When rappers like Jeezy and Diddy stop seeing these misfortunes as personal, we might finally have popular hip-hop tunes about real life instead of real fine honeys and real cold Cristal.

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