I've read many discussions around the flood of rap related violence this year, starting with the attempted murder of Obie Trice on New Year's Eve, and continuing with the murder of T.I. and Busta Rhymes' weed carriers. The Source even chose this topic as their cover story this month, which makes sense, because it's such a huge problem in hip-hop.
Only it's not.
I don't believe that people in hip-hop are shooting or getting shot this year more than last year, or ten, or thirty years ago. What has increased though is the news coverage of these events.
It wasn't that long ago where you could be an obscure mixtape rapper, get shot 9 times, get one write-up, then be forgotten about. Now, any dude with a demo or connection to a rapper gets full coverage of his shooting in dozens of hip-hop news sites, with daily updates on his recovery or death.
This cluster bomb of news coverage for every shooting creates a sick illusion that there's more gun violence in hip-hop than ever before. The reality is that gun violence is not a hip-hop thing, or even a Black thing. It's an American thing, word to "Bowling for Columbine".
And violent crime has declined for the past decade all around the country. So in reality, there's probably less people getting shot in hip-hop. But you wouldn't know that from reading Allhiphop, SOHH, HiphopDX, and XXL.
Back in the day, you had to wait to read the R.I.P. section of an album's credits to find out which entourage member died recently. Now names like Philant Johnson and Izreal Ramirez are propped up as major news stories, deserving days of coverage.
Rafi Kam chin-checked the hip-hop media yesterday with a devastating blog post that examined the negative skew being pushed by our favorite sites, which exposes the low brow opinion they have of their readers. Because he's a good blogger, he did some research and found that a third of SOHH's pages that are indexed by Google have the word "beef" in it.
I'm sure their defense will be, "negativity sells", but as I've said before, if a reporter only knows how to use sex and violence to make a story pop, then they aren't much of a writer to begin with. And maybe that's the problem.
Continue reading "There Is No Hip-Hop Violence Epidemic aka The State of Online Hip-Hop Media" »

