Hip hop is dying and the influence of 2pac on the urban music business will be the name of this cancer that is killing it slowly. This stronghold was first strengthened by the glory and fame that 2pac had received from his gangster tales of life as a thug from his music, plus this thug persona in his real life. Which helps every real life non rapping thug idolize and identify with some one from the hood that is loved and respected, but really this trend started to become a problem way before 2pac started rapping.
As this started with N.W.A where their tales of drug dealing gangs and murder gave a voice to real thugs every where.
But it gets extremely complicated now as the popularity grew for N.W.A and they went on to sell lots of records and gain lots of respect and when you grow up in the hood or basically any where that is considered poor, respect is the most important thing because even if you still don't have money you can still have respect and my point is if you dont know how to earn respect in life or music, alot of people just copies the person with the most respect and do what they did to earn the respect they got.
Its Greatly understood and agreed upon that imitation is the greatest form of flattery, but reality shows us that it can be the easiest way to make money, but only to a certain point as you seen people loved 2pac for all his tattoos and now you see every single up and coming rapper with tattoos, even LIL Wayne has tattoos on his face, so lets all copy that cause 2pac was the greatest and we all want to be the greatest right? Plus he smoked weed all day, so imma smoke weed all day, he was starting music industry conflicts or beefs, and so im gonna start music industry beefs but, the down side to this is that when Tupac was alive there was only one Tupac. So that made him interesting and respected and loved by the real rap fans, but now you have at least 85% of the rappers that are rapping to some sort of degree affected by this negative 2pac influence on there music plus at the same time the music they are recording is mostly bull crap, but trip this, even Jay-Z as of this last year, had to go back and do a drug dealing record because he knows that he has lost the respect that he probably never even had, in an attempt to gain the respect that Tupac had and probably still has. Now the effect that the thug/ drug dealer/ murderer image has on hip hop in regards to sales for the simple fact that in this day and age the actual people that are buying records in america and over seas are not gang members, they are actual hard working people as this style of music is just merely a form of entertainment where the thugs/gangbangers in real life are only 1 percent of the united states population and a majority of these thugs do not buy CDs from out of the stores any way, so why do rappers and record companies produce these types of records still to this day, after countless amounts of artist continue to see a fall in sales. Hip Hop needs to die and when i say that, I mean this current state of hip hop will not make it into the next decade and i'm talking about the tupac influence on hip hop, where the fans are ready for something new and real and something they can relate to because for every rapper to have had killed somebody, been shot, sold drugs, and have smoked and/or drunken drugs is stupid and needs to be laid to rest, before it affects any one else. But in 2007 we have seen the desire for change first hand with the CD sale competition between 50 cent and Kanye West, where Kanye Wests clean cut image out sold 50 cents gangster watered down 2pac image, that we do want a change and if our uncle hip hop cannot get well and fully recover from the Tupac infection that has spread through out 85% percent of his body. Then we need to pull the plug, let him die peacefully, and make way for the next generation of hip hop.
Keishon Martin is the owner of KeyWorldWide Inc. which owns www.GetRichinMusic.com, www.GetMoneyMoney.com, visit these websites
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