The Lame Return of Beef: Part 2 – The Times We Live In
Can you hear that?
No really, listen for a moment, what do you hear?
If your answer is “a whole lot of nothing,” then you’re exactly right. It’s been alarmingly quiet out there lately, which is a sharp contrast to only 2-3 weeks ago when running your mouth was turning into a national sport for rappers. We have the now l̶e̶g̶e̶n̶d̶a̶r̶y̶ legendarily lame beef between Drake and Meek Mill, the only winners of which were the fans who got some Drake quotables out of the whole mess. Then there was Ghostface Killer‘s annoyance with Action Bronson mentioning him in anything but a heavenly light, resulting in a Youtube video threatening him with disembowelment while Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes play in the background. Admittedly classic Wu, but such a ridiculously overblown reaction to something nobody even cared about. All these small fires going up all over the hip-hop landscape, each as lame and pointless as the last.
Those of you who experienced the ’90s and keep an ear out for signs of the times will know why. For all the tongue-wagging, chest-beating and down-talking, we all know exactly what rap beef eventually gets you (aside from album sales, press and lyrical opportunities): Killed.
Not killed the way they say it these days. Not killed the way Drake killed Meek. Not pushed into realms of irrelevancy, clowned on or made to look weak. As Beanie Sigel recently put it, “Somebody mite die over this stupid shit… it won’t be AR, Meek, or Drake… it’s going to be one of the entourage… Somebody is going to move out to prove they loyalty to something that’s not loyal to them. ‘stupidity.’ Somebody dies, somebody goes to jail for life. Over what?”
Sigel has it right. If you’re keeping score, you’ll recognize that very rarely do these tiffs end amicably, and it’s even rarer that the main artists reap the comeuppance for the things they say. Its always someone in the camp with more heart than sense who ends up paying.
Once upon a time, hip-hop was a child, watching the way of the world. Then in its teen years, it tussled with its peers, each struggling for recognition in a world that didn’t understand them. Now hip-hop is in the full throes of its adulthood, one of the most (if not the most) popular genre on the planet. Everyone with the talent, drive and patience to succeed is making their money, enjoying their lifestyle and giving back to their communities where possible. Too often people forget that one of the main reasons people started rapping commercially was to get out of the life they’d grown up into. Pride and the protection of one’s reputation was a necessity because all people knew of you was what they heard from another or heard for themselves. That mentality is a long-gone relic in this day and age. Nearly every detail about your upbringing, career and body of work is available for any and all to access, and privacy is a concept that we are rapidly having to redefine.
On a personal note, I don’t understand the need to pretend for all the world to see that you’re this hardened, dangerous individual that no one without a death wish should speak against. In a world where you’re bombarded with opinion on top of unasked-for opinion (including my own), taking anything anyone says about you personally is just a waste of your time, brain space and breath. Even worse is making threats against publicly known individuals that you have no real intention of carrying out (because that would be hilariously stupid). The worse-case scenario next to losing your own life is that someone close to you or them pays for your words. For nothing, really. Just wisps on the air, vibrations in space, fleeting moments of spewed consciousness that in the end affected nobody but those petty enough to feel offended.
If all these artists with so much to say about others would put the same effort into doing something real with their time instead of feeding into the TMZ media machine that only sees them as a story, perhaps hip-hop could shed its teenage image and make larger moves on a world stage. But as long as we have grown men complaining that other grown men haven’t re-tweeted their album, or grown men who have made a living for themselves and their family making death threats against up-and-coming artists (with families of their own) for perceived slights, hip-hop will never be taken seriously enough to garner any real change.
In 2015, beef is dead. Let’s keep it that way.