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  • » Name: Meka Soul
  • » Location: Los Angeles, CA
  • » Member Since: 04/09/07
  • » Bio: Providing clarity in hip-hop since 1981.
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Beef: It’s What’s For Dinner


July 28, 2008 | Tags: none
A while back I decided to cut red meat out of my diet for a year. To this day I really don’t exactly why I did it, but going cold turkey on something I used to eat on an almost daily basis for a year was a somewhat interesting experience. In the beginning there were moments where I almost instantly jumped ship to enjoy a sirloin steak - or at least a double cheeseburger from McDonald’s – but slowly I weaned myself off of it, and after a while I got accustomed to not having it at all.

Eventually the yearlong self-prohibition came and went, but the urge to avoid red meat remained.  And when I did take my first bite into a steak I became nauseous and couldn’t finish it; after not eating it for so long, it was almost as if my body rejected the very taste of it. Nowadays I only indulge in red meat sparingly, though my dependency on all things poultry (since I don’t eat pork at all) is at nigh-addictive levels. But I think that’s just a Black people thing anyways.

In a sense, my apathy towards red meat is only matched by my indifference with rap music’s pension for squabbling for the sake of garnering press. Granted I prefer this saccharine style over people actually pulling out blammers and ending lives, but damn if I don’t miss the days when KRS-One was throwing people off the stage of their own show sometimes.

We can all point fingers from everyone from rappers yearning to make a quick buck by picking on their rivals to attention-hungry publicists wanting to get interest for their client’s inevitably shitbag new album, but let’s be honest and place the blame on ourselves - the average hip-hop listener/buyer/Internets thief. Similar to how most 90s babies would prefer to shuck and jive to new-millennia blackface rap, a good chunk of us prefer to listen to fake threats and imaginary gun tales instead of some duke trying to “kick knowledge.” I know I’ll take the Byzantine crack raps of Clipse over anything personally.

And think about it: how else can a rapper gain a semblance of street cred without mentioning how they would want to punch their rival’s moms out? It’s not like being an actual criminal is in style anyways; just ask Officer William Roberts or, most recently, Algernod, about their supposedly fraudulent backstories. I may not be liked much (over the Internets that is, but we all know how insignificant that is), but at the very least you won’t catch me glorifying a past that never even existed in the first place. Rhyming about vowing violence on your enemy is pretty lame as is, but actually lying about a violent past is just sad... and a little quasi-homosexual to boot. But I’m straying from my point.

Most of us can bitch and whine about how rap is in the shitter for this, that and the third reason but ask yourself this: why do you think the supposed problems are still lingering around? I once challenged opponents of this section to sign a self-made petition to get me fired from this site, and as you can see that worked about as well as Lesane’s jersey trying to stop the bullets from making his shoulders touch twelve years ago. So unless every average fan decides to go cold turkey and avoid the shit like the plague, this beef shit is still going to remain the same: a prevalently irrelevant sound of music.


The views and opinions expressed in this blog are those of the writer and not necessarily those of HipHopDX.com or Cheri Media Group.

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