I just found out from PerezHilton.com that rapper, Warren G will be a participant in the latest season of VH1's "Celebrity Fit Club"! Just how much extra fat is Warren G carrying to make this humiliation worth his while? Most hip hop fashion flaps at muumuu like proportions anyways.Back in the 1990s, when Warren G released classics like "Regulate" and "This DJ", I never would have imagined that the smooth rapper would end up on a weight loss reality show.
Warren G is just the latest example of the gentrification of rap. Black men from the projects don't look so threatening when they worry about their paunch and create entertainment for the whole family. For example:
- Diddy (or whatever he calls himself now) used to hang out with Biggie Smalls and other individuals of ill repute. Now, he throws parties in the Hamptons with his pal, Ashton Kutcher.
- Snoop Dogg used to look mellowed out by the permanent haze around him. Recently, Snoop made a public declaration that he no longer indulged in the weed (a short lived refrain according to a recent drug arrest) and turned to self-parody in Starsky & Hutch and Soul Plane.
- Ice-T use to be a self-professed "Cop Killer". Now, he plays a good cop on "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit".
- Ice Cube used to scare parents when they heard him advising their kids to "fuck tha police". Now, he embraces the whole family with films like Are We There Yet?.
I am not in favour of keeping black rappers in the margins of society but is looking harmless the only way to bring them into the mainstream? The transformation that seems to be required of hiphop artists in order to be accepted is comparable to the famous Saturday Night Live skit where Natalie Portman became a 'gangsta rapper'. Portman's transformation was played for laughs in that we would never seriously consider her having street cred because of the skit. Yet we're supposed to believe that Ice Cube is now a children friendly entertainer because he's helpless against kids in a family comedy?
Well, at least Ice Cube was clearly comfortable with his weight when he ate his way through xXx:State of the Union.
3 comments:
I believe it's all about the filthy lucre. I'm pretty sure most of these rappers are now making much more money catering to the Walmart crowd then they ever did catering to the "cop killa" crowd. Just look at Queen Latifah, she's a "Cover Girl" now. Those cosmetics contracts are quite lucrative.
Actually, Ice-T wasn't a self-proclaimed Cop Killer. He was one of the few rappers in the 80's and 90's who deliberately used violent rhymes in a subversive way to get his message across: this shit is stupid. Get out of the gang life. Sure, he has a few songs in there that are just him being silly or talking about doing women in this bit or another, but he never wanted to make people more violent. He wanted kids to use their minds to break out of the systems they were in (and said that the only weapon tha matters is one's mind repeatedly). Also, since he played a cop in New Jack City, before Bodycount came out, I don't see that him being one now is a bad thing.
Plus, you forgot his brilliant role in Tank Girl.
The ideas behind "Cop Killer" obviously go beyond wanting to simply be violent but I base my description of Ice-T on the lyrics from the song.
However, I acknowledge that Ice-T is consistent in his acting choices. At least he's not pulling funny faces at bratty kids for laughs.
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