by Paul D. White
Rapper Nipsey Hussle’s recent murder in Los Angeles was tragic. The reverent accolades bestowed since then by celebrities, glorifying his life and musical work, have been absurd.
Hussle’s rap messages were cancerous to our nation’s youth, and showcase the morally sick culture of the rap universe that has infected society.
Singer Bruno Mars’ postmortem praise highlighted this fact more than he realized when he stated, “It was very obvious that (Hussle) had so much more to offer than music.” Indeed he did.
Misogny
Guns, money, and bitches, that’s the way that we do it…” (from “Hussle in the House”). In Hussle’s rhymes, women are one-dimensional “bitches”, useful only for sex-on-demand. They are always available to the unemployed, violent, and substance abusing young men his songs glorify. Love, marriage and monogamous relationships are not mentioned.
Gangs
Hussle was unashamed and proud of his gang affiliation: never denounced it, praised other gang members, and spoke constantly about the manly, heroic nature of the cowardly and pathetic gang life. Hussle obviously knew nothing about real manhood, and therefore was unable to write about it.
Tax Evasion
“Couple mil’, tour the world, dawg, my life crackin’…cook the books, bring it back so it’s no taxes (from “Young Nigga”). Hussle repeatedly promotes a big advantage of drug selling and getting paid in cash: the opportunity to break federal laws by lying about your income. This type of lifestyle leads not only to no values and prison, but also to the kind of idiotic money management that keeps poor people and poor neighborhoods from being able to take the financial step-up Hussle wanted for them.
Violence and Guns
“Got my chopper (machine gun or assault rifle) in the trunk…” (from “Hussle in the House”). Hussle’s songs imply that illegal guns are a natural part of life, and brags about his indifference to innocent people getting shot (“splatting them with blood”) if they get in the way of the #! killing targets – other gang members.
Drug/Alcohol Abuse
“I been driving, I been smoking, Almost forgot what I was doing, Almost forgot what I was drinking…” (from Status Symbol 3″) Nothing in the boastfully irresponsible and immoral lifestyle advocated by Hussle’s music is done without first numbing your conscience with drugs or alcohol. What he fails to describe is the unescapable, soul-crushing guilt that accompanies ruining human lives, and has to be faced sooner or later, in the sobering light of day.
Racism
Hussle’s musical anthology would almost disappear if the words “nigga” and “f_ _k” were removed. His songs also racially insult Whites (e.g.: “crackers”, “white boys”), while periodically inserting hypocritical pious references to “slave ships”, slaves, and racism.
No Moral Values
“Movin’forward with speed, all your morals will leave…got infected with greed…” (from “Double Up”). You have to look hard to find even one moral value in any of Hussle’s music that any parent would want their child to have. The irony of Nipsey Hussle’s life is that he made the money he incessantly bragged about by selling songs promoting the very things he claimed to want to remove from his neighborhood: crime, violence, poverty, and hopeless lives.
All of this, and more, makes beyond ludicrous the twitter eulogies of NBA players like Steff Curry and LeBron James who said, respectively, that , “(Hussle’s) message tried to inspire people,” and “I told (him) how proud I was of (him).” But nothing tops the idiocy of LA Police Chief Michael Moore, who was planning to meet with Hussle to “…talk about ways (Hussle) could help LAPD stop gang violence and help us help kids.” Hussle couldn’t have done more to PROMOTE gang violence and HARM kids if he’d tried.
No Apologies
“Damn right, I like the life I built….” “This is all I’m tryna do: hustle and motivate.” (from “Grinding all my life”) Nipsey Hussle was definitely a happy, successful hustler: making his millions promoting a false, mesmerizing picture to innocent children and immature adults that glamorized unemployment, drug abuse, murder, misogyny, racism, and incarceration as worthy goals and a part of real manhood. Sadly, his Crenshaw neighborhood and young Black men – the place and people he claimed to love, who swallowed and followed his highway-to-hell message – will be paying the price of believing him for generations.
Paul White has spent most of his life working with young people whose lives and families were ruined by believing the self-destructive messages promoted by rappers like Nipsey Hussle.
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