Why We Shouldn’t Care Rick Ross is a Fraud

I've been listening to Rick Ross' new mixalbum "Albert Anastasia" - which, by the way, I've been enjoying like crazy - and other than the eardrum shaking beats, one thing keeps running through my head as I listen to Ross: how incredibly fake he is.

I'm not writing this to call out Rick Ross, I'm writing this to call out our own hypocrisy. The concept of realness has been paramount in hip-hop for years, and most of the pressure for rappers to demonstrate their realness, and by "real" we almost always been criminal, has come from the fans. This pressure has created a paradoxical universe where rappers are forced to exaggerate their exploits to absurd lengths in order to prove they're realer than the competition. In order to sell rappers have to lie. In order to sell rappers have to be real.

At this point I can't imagine anyone treats Ross' raps as fact, but just to make sure we're all on the same page. I won't even touch on the whole Officer Ricky thing (50's already detailed his previous employment in depth), so let's just concentrate on the music. Now I'm not a drug dealer, but I do know this much: no one as famous as Rick Ross is running a massive cocaine selling operation. Despite his declarations to the contrary, Ross is not making millions pushing blow, and it's insane to think so. He may have sold drugs at one point in his life, but there's no way he is now. No....way. People running actual criminal enterprises which could land them in jail for life don't tend to broadcast that fact on the radio.

The fact that Ross remains as popular as he is can only mean on thing; we don't really mean it when we say we want out rappers to be real. Like the movies, 90% of rap is entertainment, a fantasy. (Something, by the way, Diddy understands better than anyone). No one thinks "The Godfather" is a documentary, so why should Rick Ross be any different? Why should it be a problem to openly admit that his music - and I'm only using him as a prominent example, but there are thousands of others - is completely fake, and then go on listening to it anyway. Hell, not even the most hardcore WWE fans think wrestling's entirely real. It's only hip-hop fans who cling to this naive demand that their preferred medium for entertainment also be completely real. Let it go people. Let it go. In the end, we're only lying to ourselves.