The six slugs from the ghetto blaster missed the target. Another emcee who made an EP for the charts, yet found himself out of his depth as his rhymes were too abstract and the music too conceptual for the mainstream.
He’s not looking for the underground, but the underground is looking for him. They just wanna see him. Check out his style, see if he can free flow, and maybe find out if he’ll fit in with a certain collective.
And he knows they’re looking. Not knowing what to expect from this world of hip-hop alternativa, he’s unsure whether to fear the unknown or to face the music with a swing and a chop, and stop rhyming for (currently unseen) furnishings of his bank account.
There is an inbuilt sense of needing mad cash money and a fly ride in order to get love and respect. After watching all those American rap video clips and attending all those RnB nightclubs, this is simply how he thinks.
But we know better.
We intend to find him when he realises his dream has failed him. When his confidence reaches its lowest, when he can no longer face the same old songs at the same old nightclubs with the same old pretensions, we will open up to him.
Of course, we must begin the inauguration with a front. Tell him we relate to each other coz we’re all fresh out of rehab and living off a diet of coffee and cigarettes in order to not gain any weight after finally giving up the life of a pimp with a crack-whore girlfriend and start earning some real money to eat with. People say its all about the phatness and realness, but its really about keeping it skinny and unbelievable.
You know, fish for some kind of reaction.
Chances are he’ll be too depressed from witnessing the dream shatterer unravel his hopes and fears to react. The minimal response will develop the scene into a situation of minimal rapport between the two parties. Before he decides to become a part of the underground, there needs to be some dissecting of the street team in waiting.
These cats know how to play this game if only for the fact that they made themselves the exception to almost every rule that applies to it. They have been known to publicly despise the gangstas and thugs that dominate an industry desperately in need of a makeover. Not a take-over, that’s for the fake flow-er. That dude had to leave his mind at the front door.
Someone buys him a beer and ushers him to a dark corner of the small smoky hip-hop joint in order to let him re-find his mind. A touch of the philosophy of consciousness, a dash of musical eclecticism, a pinch of social science theory, and we can now observe the transformation as the seeds sown grow into the thoughts of maturity.
Welcome to the family.
