Over at The Well Versed, Tech opens up about music business, his disappointment with Black and Latino executives and why keeping it real tends to backfire on emcees.
TWV: When I listen to a lot of stuff available commercially right now, as catchy as the beat or hook might be, it feels like we’re regressing. We’re seeing a resurgence of drug use in rap. Do you feel like a lot of this is counterproductive?
IT: People do live that life; a lot of people who rhyme don’t live that life. You can make slick metaphors about shooting people or kilos but that doesn’t describe what it is to be a hustler. I’m not going to act like I was a drug dealer, but my exposure to that side of the world let me understand the differences to know what it’s like when one of my people says I can’t do this. I sold crack to a pregnant woman. My man was hurt about that. Why? Because he’s a fucking human being. At the end of the day, let’s stop pretending we’re not human beings; you want to be a big scary individual? You want to see a man cry like a baby, call him up and tell him you’ve got his kid hostage and you’re going to cut his fingers off every minute you don’t get your money.
People want to be so in character that the moment they have to be so out of character, their psychology is shattered. People need to realize that when Al Pacino plays a role, it’s different for our people. Nobody believes Al Pacino is Scarface. The police aren’t running up in his crib looking for M-16’s and grenade launchers. People think that what these rappers say is what they really live and some of you are so stupid that you are saying shit that you’re really doing.
That’s not OG behavior, OG’s are saying “I don’t know nothing about that, I don’t know who got shot, that’s got nothing to do with me.”
