• » Name: Meka Soul
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Slap-Boxing With Jesus

The Elementary School Dropout

Like I mentioned yesterday, I’ve spent the past few days working on set for an upcoming commercial featuring a few celebrities. For those that aren’t from around my way, working in (shit, even living in) Hollywood is always an interesting experience, and things as simple as a 30-second commercial are an incredibly long and often tiring process. Case in point: today’s “expensive” music video will cost a few hundred thousand bucks – a far cry from the multi-million dollar affairs that ran wild in the 90s – and will take a couple 20-plus hour work days to complete, excluding the editing so that it doesn’t look like a piece of shit when you watch it on your piece of shit television or computer screen. Contrary to what you muh’fucks see on the boob tube it’s not necessarily a land of fake tits and Clorox bleached hair, and – not to sound cliché here – it’s quite difficult to try to “make it” in this business.

In spite of this glitzy-less nature, a lot of potentially life-altering lessons are almost always learned on each and every set. A perfect example of this was during yesterday’s shoot, where John Legend [1] talked about the importance of education in today’s society, and while he believed that attaining at the very least the ability to properly work the cash register at a local In-‘N-Out is essential to survival, it’s pretty much a given that you don’t need a college degree to do certain jobs or, in some cases, become successful.

What makes his words that much more resounding (aside from the fact that he's a Yale graduate) is that I now know I’m not the only one who feels this way. Prior to me entering the “real world,” I believed that my freshly dipped college degree would allow me to indulge of the finest of high-paying professions when I graduated some three years ago. Fast-forward a few months later and I was pushing off pots and pans at the local Macy’s. The humps couldn’t even put my black ass in the clothing section... but I’m digressing right now.

This sentiment hits even harder whenever you see a marginally talented artists earning a shitload of money from mediocre skill sets. It would seem on the surface that it’s just an image the beak-nosed yarmulke rockers provide to disguise their own terrorist endeavors, but I’d like to think that it’s more or less who the rapper knows as well. I mean, why else would we see all these space wasters popping up all the time? I sincerely doubt it’s due to their academic prowess.

Even more powerful than that is the fact that my progress in my career – both journalistic and otherwise – has been on the strength of who I know, not what. And to my credit I’ve maintained a decent level of success. But it seriously makes me wonder if all those years (and money) I spent in college were really worth it in the long run. I’m not saying college is a bad thing, but when I’ve not really used something that took me four years to attain outside of slapping it on my résumé, I can’t help but feel gypped.

[1] A.H.L.O.T. isn’t the only one who’s been around the block.

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