When it Pays to Be a Hater; The Catalyst for Me to Stop Listening to a Hip-hop Artist

Too many hip-hop artists are whining and complaining about things that do not matter in the general scheme of things. Whatever happened to hip-hop artists setting themselves apart through good rhymes and storytelling? If there is anything that I cannot stand, it is a hip-hop artist that needs to use drama to differentiate themselves from the next rapper. It is cool at first, but it can get old quick and often the artist will continue to talk out of the side of their mouth when they really need to move on and give us something different.

The way that the game is the artist that the rapper is hating on is inevitably either going to come back into their own (if they were on top when all of this began) or will be the latest "it" person in the distant future. One has to take a lot of what artists say with a grain of salt, because they can do you a favor if you figure out how use it to your advantage. Why Ja Rule was not able to revive his career when 50 Cent came after him is beyond me.

All of the ethics and morals that hip-hop had at least pretended to have at one time are now a distant memory. Rap music is immoral not just through the lyrical content of the artists but in the way in which artists tear each other down in order to advance their own careers. When someone calls you a hater it could be that you are simply are not doing your job well enough. A real true hater is someone that everyone agrees with that people like because of their charisma. See it is one thing to hate because you are jealous and you have nothing else to do and feel powerless to advance your career. It is completely different when you are talented and are upset because it is not your turn.

There is a difference between what 50 Cent did to Ja Rule and what Tupac did a lot of artists on the East Coast. Tupac knew that he had to change the status quo and keep the focus on the West Coast because in doing so he could open up the playing field for other artists out West and it was also imperative that he stayed ahead of the curve and fire the first shots. He had been shot before, and if they could not kill him they were going to marginalize him and change the playing field in that people would not be interested in hearing him out. That was the biggest threat that the rappers that Tupac Shakur spoke out about posed to him.

It was never a question of talent. With 50 Cent, he knew that if he did not seize on the opportunity that he had it may never come to him again. He needed to change the landscape into one in which he could remain on top. None of the other New York rappers were going to do this because everything was working to their own advantage. Once everything had changed Jay-Z took note of it, and attacked 50 and other artists he was working with. Now you had the Diplomats, who were enjoying the new gangsta rap climate that 50 had helped to bring about because that is what they were all about; Jay-Z attacked them as well as Mobb Deep who were affiliated.

Hip-hop is never what it appears to be. Everyone that says that they are their own man, their own individual, are never above attacking another man for no apparent reason in order to stay on top of the game. It is a game filled with paranoia in which mainstream artists attack each other for reasons that seem strange at first. However once you take a deeper look into their actions it is clear why the shots were fired. These are the same office politics that you will find in corporate America, and for reasons that hip-hop can be interesting when it has nothing to do with being artistic it just makes it that much easier for me to change the dial ...