Wayne's New World: Rikers Island

via The Beautiful Struggler - Me, Myself and Eye

It looks like everyone's favorite "goblin" (his word, not mine) is going to be ghost for about a year. Lil' Wayne plead guilty to charges of gun possession here in NYC and is expected to serve up to a year in prison.
There are a TON of jokes I could make about Wayne and how he wears his jeans and who he kisses on the mouth and how he may fare in prison. I'll leave that to the gossip bloggers, as I am sure they'll have a field day with this one. I'll just stick to my honest feelings on the matter.

Na na na na, hey hey hey...ok, inappropriate...

Oh, Wayne. You have all this money, being famously gifted with a million in cash by your "daddy" for your birthday. Working more and harder than most of your peers and being handsomely rewarded. And yet you choose not to go the legal route when it comes to protecting yourself? That's your bad, son.

Wayne's a couple of years older than me, but I see a child when I look at him. A misguided, clever little manchild who was asked by his mother to have a baby when he was just 14, because SHE was lonely at home. Someone who's "father figure" is a thug only 13 years older than Wayne himself. You cant criticize Wayne without critiquing the circumstances that created him. And you can't criticize him for his influence on young people without criticizing the culture that allows someone like him to be an icon and an influence on others.

If I could incarcerate Wayne for the disgusting impact he has had upon youth culture, I would. For the past few years, we've been subject to his barely coherent, drug induced ramblings. White folks and middle class Black folks have waxed poetic about how brilliant he is, though he's often times talking about absolutely nothing. Someone who has been in the public eye since he was 14 years old has sold this fantasy of hustling and being a Blood, along with the standard Hip-Hop odes to bitches, money and power. Between Wayne, Rick Ross and others, it is more obvious than ever that Hip-Hop fans are interested in tales Black pathological behavior, but they don't care at all the the stories or story tellers are real. Hip-Hop defenders love to point to the other violent and sexist imagery in American popular culture. I ask that they point me in the direction of some examples of other such images having as large a cultural impact as 'the bad parts' of Hip-Hop. They can't show me any.

Lil Wayne had three sons in the past 18 months. This is heartbreaking to me. While these little boys will likely grow up with all the money and jewels they could wish for, as far as I can see, they don't have a real man to be their dad. That is, unless Lil Wayne has a completely different personal at home and even with that...no. This is someone who has made his fortune peddling tales of drugs (while publicly abusing them), misogyny, violence and consummate materialism. And now, it seems like he will also have a year away from them while he toils in jail.

It's depressing to see these unraised young Black men becoming icons and representatives of Black manhood and masculinity in the eyes of our own community and others watching. As much as the Obama effect can be a countering tool, the POTUS's story is so singular that a lot of young people don't quite relate. Whereas it seems they now feel that A Black man can achieve the things that he has, they don't feel that THEY can. The Waynes and the Jay-Z's still speak to something more tangible to them: ghetto life. And these two men, and others have profited greatly off of our pain.

That said, I am glad that someone who committed a crime is being punished in a way that seems fair and reasonable. I don't like seeing Black men railroaded by the system, nor do I feel celebrities should get a free pass. I hope that Lil Wayne spends his time productively and that perhaps he can have a Malcolm Little moment, though confidence is very low on that end. Perhaps some of these other rappers will at the very least learn a lesson from this.