The question?
Is hip-hop ready for an openly gay rapper?
That is hard one to really answer. In theory what or who a rapper chooses to love shouldn’t have any bearing on how it is they rap. But this isn’t a perfect world, is it? We are all caught up by our own particular hang-ups.
Hip-hop has been built up as this playground for thugs and gangstas, a culture where being hard, prison life, drugs, and not snitching is the norm. This is probably why any change to that status quo is met with such opposition. Drake, however popular, has taken a bunch of heat for his crooning and being ‘soft’. Rappers like New Boyz or Lil’ Twist tend to encounter a lot of the same because they make hip-hop that tends to be more dance oriented.
Hip-hop is different than modern life and other genres due to the fact that free speech and certain things are never allowed. Free speech, saying whatever you want is never a good idea here. Being outside of what the consensus sees as typical is all but discouraged.
So what if a male rapper loves men? Will that particular proclivity make him any less as far as a rhyme maker?
In a hypothetical world if a rapper was gay I am sure that he’d govern himself accordingly. I severely doubt his album covers would be overtly homoerotic or his video praise sodomy or fellatio (even if his heterosexual counterparts have carte blanche for that type of nonsense). Even still…
I am by no means perfect. I, like all of you, have my prejudices. But I haven’t ever been that low on homosexuals. I understand of course how the Bible condemns the act of homosexuality (see Sodom and Gomorrah). But at the same time Jesus told us to love everyone as we’d love ourselves. In that particular choice or set of choice these men (and women) have a hard enough time just being. So why would a genre predominately dominated by African-Americans, one of the poster children for discrimination be so willing to discriminate against homosexuality?
I don’t know. Do you?
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