In Which I Quasi-Debate Immortal Technique on Realness in Hip-Hop Posted by Nathan S. on 08/29/12 | Filed under Opinion, Immortal Technique

You can always count on Immortal Technique to spark a conversation, although frankly I'm not that interested in digging back into this ghostwriting mess. Instead, it was his comparison of rappers and actors (starting at around the 2:30 mark) that got me thinking:

"No one's going to come up to Al Pacino and say, 'Yo Tony, how many kis you got?' They know he's playing a role."

That's an excellent point, I've made the hip-hop and movies comparison a thousand times myself. At this point hip-hop is so versatile, so broad, that saying "hip-hop is dead" or "I don't like hip-hop" or "hip-hop was better in the '90s", is exactly like saying "I don't like movies." Really? You don't like any movies? Or you just don't like a certain kind of movie? Hip-hop's the same.

However, if I can be allowed a quick rebuttal, when Tech points out no one expects Al Pacino to actually be "Scarface" the way they expect rappers to actually live the images they portray, it's not really a parallel comparison. If the only role Al Pacino played in every movie was Tony Montana, and in every interview he acted as Tony Montana, and he was constantly talking about how he really does the shit you watch him do in the movies, then a lot of people probably would start to believe Al Pacino sold massive amounts of coke and racked up body counts.

Hip-hop's unique in that it's built on the double-edge sword that Tech mentioned. Hip-hop loves larger than life characters, loves to live fantasy lives vicariously through rappers. At the same time, it espouses a cult of "realness" that demands rappers live the lives they portray in their music. It's a paradox that forces rappers to either not touch the fantasy life at all, thereby losing out on a huge part of hip-hop's audience, or rap about a fantasy life and insist that fantasy is reality at all times.

Follow that realness paradox to its inevitable conclusion and you get, well, Rick Ross, a rapper who pretended to be a rich Bawse for so long he actually became a rich Bawse. At this point I'm firmly convinced that trying to figure out exactly what's real and what's fake about Ross' life will rip a hole in the space-time continuum. What happens when you live a lie for so long it begins to resemble the truth?

Ultimately, I think the best thing that could ever happen to hip-hop is for audiences to drop their obsession with "realness". If rappers felt free to admit they were just playing characters, and we could enjoy that shit just like we enjoy watching a movie, a lot of the problems that plaque the culture would be over. There wouldn't be more "fake" hip-hop in the game, rappers would just stop pretending the fake hip-hop they're already making is "real".

But I don't know if that will ever happen. There's just to much money and respect to be made trafficking in "realness", and if we know anything about hip-hop, it's that rappers will be hard pressed to leave that money on the table.

See Also: The Immersion: Immortal Technique Raises a Fist for “The Third World”