Originally published via Armageddon Prose Substack:
“They lies, they phonies, they fakes,
These n***az ain’t never sold the weight
And i’m the muhfuckin’ bi-nuss…
They lies, they phonies, they fakes,
These ni***z ain’t never touched the weight”
-Young Jeezy, ‘The Realist’
In the rap game, which I have been culturally forced to observe by circumstance of my environment for huge swathes of my life, the absolute worst pejorative one rapper can apply to a rival rapper when they have a hot beef is that he is an “industry n***a”.
(I’m not allowed to write out the word on account of Equity™ because I’m white — Equity™ works by denying individuals social license to use certain words even in the context of explaining their meanings based on immutable characteristics like race, just like MLK Jr. advocated in His Dream — but you can put the pieces together.)
What the term “industry n***a” means about the rapper is that the lifestyle he purports to be about in his lyrics (usually selling drugs, shooting people, pimping hos, etc.) is a lie.
The cars in his videos and Instagram feeds are rented. So are the houses. The guns are fake and plastic (which is often obvious because of how easily they move them around). His hoes are models hired for the day, or else desperate aspiring models willing to work for free just to get some limelight. Even the $100 bills he tosses around because he’s so rich he got it like that are phony.
Video recently surfaced of Tupac, often considered the most legendary rapper of all time, looking like a super fruitcake.
I don’t actually care if he or any other historical figure or celebrity was or is gay; I don’t know if Tupac was gay anyway; what it evident here is that the hard-nosed-gangsta-thug-in-and-out-of-the-penal-system-for-gangbanging Tupac that he portrayed himself as in his rap career was not at all who he was as an actual person.
The “industry n***a” archetype, though, of the poser who doesn’t live the life or believe what he says, extends well beyond rap or the music industry in general.
Televangelists preachers — who hustle a living for themselves peddling Christ on TV like he’s some kind of commodity only to later get caught smoking meth with gay hookers in hotel rooms — practically invented the “industry n***a” routine.
In fact, conservative/libertarian/dissident media is chock full of “industry n***as” who will write and speak and say whatever it is they think will get them ahead in the game while adhering to none of their own moral guidance or living out their ideals in the real world. They are thespians in the same way Tupac and other rappers are.
I could provide of list names here, but I don’t need to because I hope and suspect you could too.
The good news is that, in the age of the internet, the frauds get found out more quickly and more easily than ever before — which is why Fox News’ average audience age is 65 and rising. At this rate, there won’t be a Fox News (or MSNBC or CNN, which have similar demographic problems) in twenty years.
Related: Dinosaurs Will Die: Fox News Hemorrhages Viewers in Post-Carlson Era
Ben Bartee, author of Broken English Teacher: Notes From Exile, is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs.
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