Mike Fisher Continued

The reality is thus: Swagger or not, the average of young adolescent boys, including black boys, feel wholly inadequate in facing young women. The more attractive these women are, the more inadequate they feel. Society teaches them that the most direct way to access women is material wealth. Money=Power=Respect FROM YOUNG SEXY GIRLS."

The entertainment business is about selling dreams, about selling fantasy. Nice ones. Sexy ones. Watch the average Hip Hop video. What is it about? Some ugly guy to whom the average girl in the street would not give the time of day is sitting in a mansion throwing money at beautiful black women who coo-coo all over him."

"This fantasy in reality is attainable only by older established men after a lengthy successful career of some sort. But we’ve got to sell plastic and cardboard and we’ve got to sell them to young males who want this lifestyle NOW. So it has to be shown as achievable by the young male who is supposed to buy the plastic disk. That means a short-cut of some sort. The most logical short –cut? Rob someone or sell drugs or both.

An added bonus: the young kid can revel in the adolescent male fantasy of having power over other boys. Thus the fantasy of the thug as hero who gets all the girls. Any kid can now be Al Pacino in Scarface (not without accident the most popular movie in Hip Hop culture). Heck, even a fat ugly, cross-eyed guy like Biggie Smalls can become a sex symbol. All he has to do is sell drugs and display thug swagger. Now that’s a powerful fantasy."

This is a potent and attractive proposition to the average unformed and unguided adolescent male. Particularly when this male has little in terms of mature and manly male role models around the house.

These music videos and rhymes are mini-Scarface movies. That’s all.

Plying young women with gifts and money or a wealthy life-style is not exactly pimping in the traditional meaning of the word: It’s being a John, a Trick. Being a Trick is not a salable notion. So the concept of “Trick” or “John” (i.e. paying women for sex) was turned on its head and the term for John now became “Pimp”. So now you can call yourself a “Pimp” even though in actuality you are a “John”. Thus, in Hip Hop black males don’t “assert their manhood”. Tricks in reality and Pimps in their minds in music video after music video they can comfortably throw money at beautiful scantily clad women at strip clubs. In fact, the only Hip Hop artist playing the “real“ Pimp role is Tracy Morrow, better known as Ice-T (after legendary pimp-turned author Iceberg Slim). All the others, as their music-video behavior shows, are money-flashing thuggish Tricks.

The fantasy is a powerful one for young black males. It has become enticing for young black females as well: The epitome of sexiness to many a young black girl today is the thug. Even young adult women in their twenties and thirties look for a thuggish romance: witness the increasing popularity of the “ghetto” romance novel. Thug Love is the theme. Find a thug, love a thug, change a thug, and make him yours. It has become a vicious cycle. Boys live out their thug fantasies in order to get girl after girl to spread her legs, girl after girl spreads her legs to the enticing thug.

No wonder Biggie proclaims on his first album on Sean “Puff Daddy” Combs’ Bad Boy Records Ready to Die: “the landlord dissed us/I used to wonder why Christmas missed us/Damned right I like the life I live/Cause I went from negative to positive”.

Biggie, of course, got to show just how truly ready to die he was only a few years after the release of this record. His “negative to positive” actually was a negative - he went from negative to negativer. That’s the thug life, ya know."