• » Name: Meka Soul
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Slap-Boxing With Jesus

Old Heads, Please Sit Down

The other day I was thumbing through my folder of interviews, album reviews, random notes and blogs I’d written over the past few years, and I came across a quarter-finished piece about The Source that I never got around to work on because honestly, it made me upset at how Benzino and Dave Mays turned the magazine from probably the most well-respected and highly regarded rap publication into a faux counterterrorism unit determined to purge the rap world of its evils, essentially turning into that very thing itself.

And I quote:

“I was a huge fan of The Source. One of the first large-scale hip-hop publications, it was the most exciting and influential magazine I ever read… I found it amusing yet sad at the same time when the magazine filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy, and both Dave Mays and Benzino were locked out of their own office. I guess it didn’t help their financial matters when Benzino proclaimed he’d come back on a white horse. I think that quote alone drove half of the magazine’s subscribers away.”

What’s interesting about that never-completed piece was that when I wrote it, all I could keep thinking was, “These old heads are running this rap shit into the ground.” Mind you, this was during the whole hubbub when platinum-selling artists like Method Man and LL Cool J were selling wolf tickets because their former boss was supposedly spending their album budgets on overpriced trips to a part of the planet I’ll likely never see in my life rather than publicity for their eventual flops of records. But then all that “Crank Dat” madness rolled along and for a minute reformatted my train of thought.

The more I surmise though, the less I actually believe that – perhaps much to the chagrin of Ice T – Soulja Boy is single-handedly responsible for destroying hip-hop. Granted duke is from a part of the States where doing hood rat stuff could land you on “Judge Judy” – or at least a slot on YouTube – but it almost always goes without mention that the person who had the harebrained idea to sign him in the first place was likely an old head, under the silly yet ultimately accurate guise that Soulja Boy’s jigaboo theatrics could make a shitload of money.

On top of that, the old heads honesty can’t ignore the glaring fuck ups their own generation had. I mean, “Pumps And A Bump” and that Crucial Conflict song weren’t exactly classic material in their respective days, not to mention that most of that music was only targeted at the younglings back then who were only concerned about basketball during PE class and trying to bag our prom dates, with the only difference being that we weren’t as stupid as today’s youth, and even that disturbing fact could be attributed to poor school budgeting and a bunch of old heads not wanting to teach them in the first place thanks to poor school budgeting.

If anything, the old heads are acting as much out of pocket as the younglings, and aren’t contributing to the so-called “save hip-hop” game plan. At the very least, there are some old heads that are doing something beneficial to hip-hop.

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