The Media vs. Black Culture

 by Reem Raw

Look at Tupac. He died when he was 25. People say 'He was a thug, he was this and that.' That man was 25 years old, he was still trying to find himself. And look at his teachers, his mother, his father the Panther, Mutulu, Mumia, Geronimo Pratt. These were his elders. He was trying to follow them but bring the streets with him.

And I love Pac because he showed all of his contradictions, all his pain, his confusions. He showed all of that shit. When you're an artist that produced that much, what else can you draw from? You can't do all that if it's gonna have substance without going deep inside of yourself.

And he questioned things even within his own views. 'Even thug niggas pray. Even thugs gotta learn to take it easy.' He questioned and challenged his own peers and shit he was going through. And whatever his negative side was, when it came to the youth and the future he wanted better for them.

And the thing is, what people say was negative, he was just telling the unadulterated truth. He wasn't gonna sugarcoat it for niggas. 'Yeah, it's fucked up out here. Yeah, I gotta sell drugs because my momma's rent is late. Yeah, we pack guns. Yeah, it's niggas trying to kill me.' It's all facts.

And if that's negative to you, you should be doing something about it. 'We was given this world, we didn't make it.' He never told anybody to go live like that. But it is a fact. He's telling his story. 'Even as a crack fiend mama, you always was a Black queen mama.'

It's a negative and look at the song that he said that in about his mom. It's the truth. If he's gonna tell the truth about his mother, he's gonna tell the truth about all this shit. The truth hurts. That was Pac's power.

The only people who have a problem with those truths, are the people not affected by it, who don't wanna fix it, and who are too fucking scared and just wanna get by. Who don't want no problems. 'Let me just get by, make it through the day.' Too scared to voice their real fuckin opinions. 

 They want you to die in silence and out of view. The people that wanna keep you docile and down. 'No, don't think about that. Think about this.' You know what I noticed? Nobody in the media ever accuses anybody of people too positive. 

The streets will call you out. Look man, all this happy music all the time is not us. It's not real. All this pop shit too. What the fuck is we smiling about? We're fucked up. Yeah, we're thugs. Like Sigel 'Too many flutes in the beat! Too many xylophones!'

You gotta be able to relate. At that time, Hip Hop was more street-oriented. And Pac said it himself, 'I'm the voice of the have-nots, so I'm gonna speak upon these travesties for the niggas at the bottom.'

If you think about it, there's plenty of successful people who can speak for other successful people. They don't lack a voice. It's the bottom that needs a voice. Because we don't get on TV with the makeup on the news interviews.

Look at this Black Lives Matter movement. If it wasn't for the power of technology that let everybody publish their story by video, by text, by audio. That was the biggest story in Twitter's history. If it wasn't for that, it would've never made news!

If you didn't have the first-person perspective, the same thing that music and books do, if you couldn't put yourself inside the person's shoes with the camera to see this cop doing what he did, it would've never been felt.

And that's another powerful thing. Our art allows you to feel what we feel. This is the issue. I was in the store today. They wanna play our songs, the oldies. They wanna dance to our music, use our slang, dress like us, but they don't wanna feel us.

No. The point is that we're trying to make something that relates. They want to come as close as they can without being stung. You wanna smell the roses, get the honey, touch the nest, hear the buzzing, but you want the bee suit. You don't want the raw shit.

But if these realities are so troubling to you, ya'll got special interest groups for everything. For dogs. America loves dogs. Ya'll will do anything for some dogs. You don't want to fix these conditions but you want to consume our music.

Look. You don't wanna fix the hood, but you wanna say 'nigga.' Which one is it? And that's the issue at the end of the day, people who want to have it both ways. What do you find entertaining about my pain? Music is a form of healing. Being able to relate or articulate it to a point where you can say 'Damn, did you hear that?'

Even then, I still feel that you can appreciate it. Because these are people who are fanciful. It only tickles the ear, it doesn't go into the ear. It's like a feather. And it's also the forbidden fruit thing too. Like 'We don't make music like this. We don't go to the ghetto.'

So it's partly an investigative thing, they're exploring and inquiring. But very few it actually penetrates. And I think that says more about you than the music. Because me, I'm a human being. I can relate. Maybe you're not a real human being with real experiences and real problems, which is why you can't relate.

Maybe you can't relate because you're not real. Maybe you live a fake plastic life, which is why you can't connect. Maybe you got it too good. I can relate to anybody from anywhere with a real life. So if you can't, you should be questioning herself.

And this is one of the issues Noire had with one of her editors. Maybe 5-10 years ago. She wrote a scene with police brutality. And the editor was like 'Oh this doesn't happen in real life.' Bitch, what you mean? In your world it doesn't happen. I'm writing for my world.

And that's the key word: relate. You gotta relate. And this is how we relate to each other. Now matter how far back you go. What happens around a campfire? Stories are told. To pass the time, to entertain, to teach a lesson, and to relate. If you can't relate, it ain't for you.

And if it ain't for you, that's cool. Leave it alone. But don't say it ain't for nobody because clearly it's for somebody. Somebody's benefitting from this. Somebody's buying this. Somebody's sending fan mail. I'm somebody's favorite author.
But if you don't relate, it's like Jay-Z said:

If you don’t like it then look in the mirror, most likely you ain’t live it,
so you don’t get it,
You ain’t did it,
so you can't vision,
the picture I’m painting ain't vivid,
the language I’m spitting is so foreign to ya

He put it perfectly:
I know real niggas happen to love it,
 I just tackle the subject the flack from the public is nothing

But look at the contradictions, you'll watch Sopranos, you watch Goodfellas, you love Scarface, you watch even The Wire. But this is foreign? But you can't relate to this? How? It's too violent? How? The Sopranos got blood in the scene. This is words, written words. There's no visuals. How?

Hugh Hefner just turned 90. This culture's not foreign to this. Ya'll never called for his magazines to be burned.

Like Jay-Z said:

You probably got a couple records in your home,
Don't try to act like my track record ain't known

This is American. You can't look me in my eye and say 'I've never seen this before.' Now you might never have seen us saying it. And maybe that's what's bother you, is the speaker. But the content of the message? That's not foreign to America.

Scarface, these kinda gangster mafioso flicks, cats older than me grew up on this. So that aspect of the criticism just doesn't ring true. It doesn't resonate with me because I know America. I know my country, and ya'll been on this.

I think what you really have a problem with is the speaker. Because if it comes from Martin Scorcese, then it's a classic. Or if it's Quentin Tarantino. The Mob was Italian. You had Jewish thugs, Irish thugs, and you don't have a problem with that because those people look like you. 

But the activities are the same, so don't get mad at people who don't look like you talking about the same shit. But back to the Pac situation. Never has any relevant figure in our culture glorified this shit to say, 'This is how you should live. Or this is the way things should be.'

We all talk about getting away from this shit, 'So I can cop a Benz and get the fuck out the hood.' But it's there. So for those of you who have a problem with us talking about it, how about you put your money where your mouth is and do something about it. Then we ain't gotta talk about it.

Like Jay-Z said:

Tell em I'll remove the curses,
If you tell me our schools gonna be perfect

That's my motto. At the end of the day you just can't have it both ways. You can't allow these situations and vote for policies that perpetuate these situations, don't do anything to stop these situations, but want to stop the conversation on the situations. 

You want to dictate these situations that you're not subject to and you don't do anything about. Can't have it both ways. You gotta pick a side. And either way it's fine with me. It's like they say, put up or shut up.

Either you shut up, and stay out the hood. You're never gonna speak for us, but you can speak in support of us after you got some skin in the game. Without that, you're just talking because you haven't invested anything. What have you invested?

Invest something. Put your money where your mouth is. We did. We went through it. We lived it. We can speak about it. You didn't.