Roger Porter
July 30, 2011
In the hit record I’m On One by DJ Khaled Miami based rapper Rick Ross drops the lyric “Have you ever made love to the woman of your dreams/ in a room full of money out in London and she screams?” Every time I hear that part of the song it instantly causes me to become engaged with the music. It’s kind of baffling because it’s not like that’s the most profound thing I’ve ever heard. Although the imagery is rather astounding, for the most part it’s a pretty straight forward line. On the surface it has all the familiar elements of cultural decay that are present in every other radio friendly hip-hop anthem, but below the surface it gets deeper.
Rick Ross actually used the euphemism make love on a rap song—who else would do that. I would like to see some data on when was the last time a “gangster rapper” passed up a perfectly good opportunity to say the word FUCK on a record. And then to take it to another level Rick uses the word WOMAN. The word woman has been forbidden in hip-hop since Arrested Development broke up. Just think of all the perfectly acceptable derogatory terms that he could have used besides woman. I mean what will become of our music if this man continues to refer to women as women? This one lyric may come to symbolize the end of an era.
The audacity of this fat man who wears a long beard like an Afghani and who has an obsession for gangster cinema is absolutely unbelievable. How dare he try to change the game and be less obscene. How dare he be poetic and try to give us something to visualize. Doesn’t he know that we are struggling through an artistic recession right now?
Rick Ross needs to learn that gangster rap is strictly for gangsters— not poets, and he needs to understand that he cannot be both. I think his label representative needs to tell him to raise the vulgarity and tone down this whole respect for the feelings of females’ thing before this gets out of hand. For if this mentality was to catch on then it could be an absolute disaster. It’s scary to think about it but trust me when I say this dude has the potential to destroy everything we’ve worked so hard to maintain and all it takes is one lyric.