If Shit Hit the Fan Is You Still a Fan
Live honest. In the other twelvemonth, how numerous "Yelawolf meltdown" articles have you clicked connected? How many "Lupe is losing it" tweets did you preferred after the lyrical legend refused to release any more music amidst that head-scrape racism controversy? How many Kanye Westernmost memes have you chuckled at and DM'd to your homies?
If you throne resolve with a clear sense of right and wrong that you've resisted whol of the timeline clickbait, TMZ-style celebrity "news media" and mean-spirited internet tomfoolery that has swirled around the hip-hop meme-o-sphere in the past few months, congratulations. Kendrick Lamar is smiling to himself somewhere in a studio in L.A.
"When shit make the fan, is you still a fan?" —Kendrick Lamar, 'Earthly Man'
For the rest of us, it's time we take a deeper expression at how we've treated our culture's stars and heroes when they've faced public hardship. It's time to follow honest virtually what part we run, as rap fans and medicine lovers, in the media crucifixion of ex-serviceman recording artists like Yela and Lupe.
For starters, information technology isn't all TMZ's fault.
Just consider Kanye. Everything Yeezus does is larger than life, and his increasingly erratic public behavior and resulting total meltdown in late 2022 was no more exclusion. Pretty quickly, Ye's flair for the dramatic and his emotional reputation turned from a Twitter punchline to a genuine concern over a moral health crisis that landed the superstar in psychiatric care. And predictably—disgustingly—knap media at large added plenty of fire to the fire equally Ye suffered, happy each the agency to the bank patc a revolutionary artist who has given so much to rap struggled in real ail.
But that media frenzy doesn't exist in a vacuum cleaner. We Ate astir all newspaper headline. Ad revenue feeds off of tabloid-trend journalism; those sites only thrive, and stay to Post sensationalist slop when we click the links and buy into the hype. Information technology's only if we abandon artists and throw them under the bus amongst a tirade of memes and net confabulate that the cycle of clickbait and media vulturism perpetuates itself.
For artists in our era of social media connectivity, that lack of loyalty has real and meaningful implications. I'm sure Ye and others aren't ignorant to all of the web's savagery, and I'm sure that getting ridiculed and downright bullied by the very people who call themselves "fans" didn't act much to ascent Ye's spirits or remind him that he has true friends in his corner. If you're depressed and looking for a intellect to keep going, acquiring constantly cooked past the culture you've given everything to can't be easy.
When the artists we love have needed us the most, too many of us bought into the spectacle. You crapper see it on Chitter and Facebook and Reddit every time Kanye "flipped out," which, in review, looks more like symptoms of tragedy than fuel for funniness. You can come across it in the videos of Yela's on-stage collapse when "fans" in Santa Cruz tried to fight Catfish Billy instead of handsome the dude space to breathe and figure himself out.
Information technology's every last around us: the abandonment of the artists that we revere when they show signs of their humanity and buckle under the pressures of stardom.
So what's the response? As usual, Kendrick has close to insight. Two years ago, when he released "Sou Man," Compton's sweetheart posed this oppugn: "when shit hit the fan, is you still a fan?" The media clusterfuck surrounding Kanye's struggles and our part in eating that frenzy reads like the common collectively answering, "sorry, nah, not really" to Kendrick's incitation. But IT's not too late for us to heed his call and turn over a New leaf.
Real, arrant loyalty for an artist care Kanye, nobelium thing what helium says on Twitter or in an interview, means memory what every artist that we idolize has given us. It means seeing these artists as people, and understanding that creating from the heart while living in the limelight privy be a heavy cross to bear for the fragile hearts and minds where true genius often blossoms. And it means extending our empathy in a meaningful room when artists struggle with that pressure level.
Maybe next time that one of our favorite recording artists shows signs of suffering from a mental breakdown, don't give the clickbait monsters your aid. You can establish your empathy for greats like Ye by sharing some incontrovertibleness to residuum out all of the mudslinging. Or don't engage in the least, remembering that your favorite doorknocker is also a human WHO might vindicatory motivation some blank space to battle their demons.
Next time the shit hits the fan, piss Kendrick haughty, and "make room for mistakes and depression."
As fans, it's the to the lowest degree we can coiffe. Atomic number 3 decent earthborn beings, it's a chance to arrange the ethical affair for another human who has cooked a whole Lot for us.
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Past Cassidy Kakin. Follow him along Twitter.
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If Shit Hit the Fan Is You Still a Fan
Source: https://djbooth.net/features/2017-01-17-when-sht-hit-the-fan-is-you-still-a-fan
