The Rapper vs. Journalist War is Coming, Pick Your Side Carefully Posted by Nathan S. on 02/17/14 | Filed under Top Stories, Opinion

Over the last month, and certainly over the last year, it seems like new rapper vs. journalist fueds have been happening more frequently than Justin Bieber DUIs. Let's take a little stroll down conflict lane: 

* Wale threatens to roundhouse kick Complex in the face over a list. 
* Kanye vs. the world. 
* Sun-Times writer prompts a growing R. Kelly boycott, Kelly fires back. 
* TDE pulls its support for GQ profile of Kendrick. 
* Drake boycotts magazine interviews. 
* Rick Ross cancels interview over date rape questions. 
* Kanye backs Drake, advocates laying the smack down for a price, more Kanye vs. the world. 

On one level this kind of conflict is nothing new. Rappers have been storming into publication offices and roughing up journalists for decades now. But it really does feel like we're at a turning point. Like the music industry, journalism has been shaken to its core by the explosion of the internet, mostly because it refused to innovate and adapt until it was too late. But artists are increasingly using the same tools journalists do themselves, cutting out journalists in the process.  

Here's why that's dangerous. 

I don't want to be idealistic. Journalism, like any business, is about numbers. If enough people don't read your work, you're out of a job. And that job can be about pure shallow entertainment, but it's also ideally about something more. So many writers forget it, but the only thing a journalist should really care about is their reader. It's not our job to be liked by politicians, celebrities, athletes or rappers. It's our job to serve as a bridge between the readers and people in power, to ask those people the questions they'd like to ask them, and to give readers information about those people; even if, especially if, those people don't want the readers to know it. At its best, great journalists hold people in power accountable to the masses. On one end of the spectrum that means reporting on the NSA, and on the other it means asking Rick Ross about date rape. 

And that's really the core of the problem. For years artists put up with journalists asking them all sorts of questions they didn't want answered because journalists connected them with their fans. They risked losing fans over an unflattering interview in the name of hopefully gaining fans through a flattering interview. 

"Journalists aren't your fucking friends, and they're not your fucking publicists." - Ernest Baker

But in 2014, those artists don't need journalists to make that connection. They can go straight to their fans via Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc. At this rate we're about five years from Drake being able to release self-produced documentaries about the 10th anniversary of "So Far Gone" straight to your brain via embedded microchip. There's some real good there, especially if it allows an artist to put out better work they way they want (Jean Grae comes to mind). But when that kind of perfectly manicured and manufactured future is an artist (and publicist's) dream, but it's a journalist's nightmare, the average fan should be worried too. 

I'm willing to bet Drake's fan base rallied to his side against Rolling Stone, but they really should have been thanking Jonah Weiner. If they really care that much about Drake they should want to know what he really thinks about Macklemore and Kendrick Lamar and Kanye's lyricism (and his obsession with residential pools). Weiner put them as close to the "real" Drake as they'll ever get precisely because he wasn't primarily concerned about making Drake happy, he was primarily concerned about giving those readers what they want. 

But ironically, all those people cheering when Kanye (obviously not particularly seriously) suggested writers should catch a beat down for things like the Rolling Stone profile are their own worst enemies. Do they really want to live in a world where artists can perfectly manage every second of how that artists appears to the public? Maybe they do, they probably do, but that kind of fan-dom is a very shallow fandom. I want Kanye to actually answer the questions Charlamagne was asking him about his possible hypocrisy not because I want to see 'Ye get "got", but because I really do care about his ideas and I want to understand them better. And maybe, if I knew the truth, I shouldn't be a fan of someone at all. I'm not proud of it, but I don't think I wanted my R. Kelly bubble burst - still, I'm grateful a journalist forced me to confront the truth. 

That doesn't mean we can't be as critical of journalists as we are of writers. If they're unethical, they deserve to be blasted. If they care more about pageviews than actual human lives, they deserve to be blasted. If they obviously don't know very much about their subject, like the GQ profile of Kendrick, they deserve to be blasted. If they de-contextualize a quote or take something out of context, they deserve to be blasted

But in the growing battle between artists and journalists, don't be so quick to pick up (figurative, hopefully) arms on behalf of your favorite artists. It may not seem like it in 2014, but I'd like to believe it's still entirely possible to be a thoughful person who understands just how complicated the media and artist relationship can be, for better or worse. If artists do succeed in cutting us out of the picture, the world of "journalism" is going to look a lot less like that RS profile of Drake and a lot more like a continuous MMG commercial.

That's not a world I want to live in. 

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