If you’ve been slacking on your Brand Nubian news then, first of all, shame on you. There’s no excuse for that. Secondly, you may not have heard about the recent New Yorker piece chronicling rapper and actor Lord Jamar’s complaints that hip hop has been hijacked by white artists seeking to impose their “soft” cultural values on a traditionally black, masculine genre. The article references Macklemore’s espousal of marriage equality on “Same Love” and ends with the Lord himself taking to Twitter to hail rap’s impending demise following a performance on Letterman from one Le1f, an openly gay (and black) rapper from New York. “THIS IS JUST THE BEGINNING!” tweets Lord Jamar.
But there’s no need to worry about Le1f. The Wesleyan-educated rapper was swift to respond to the claim that he is complicit in White America’s agenda to corrupt hip hop culture. And as he quickly proves in the video for “Boom,” Le1f’s agenda is his own. Between the overt sexual references, synchronized diner dancing, and Jeep hotboxing, it’s hard to make the case that Le1f is trying to take the edge off hip hop culture and make his image more palatable for a conservative white audience. It doesn’t seem like he’s trying to cater to any particular crowd at all (other than gay, black, dancing blunt smokers, of course). Le1f does whatever he wants and doesn’t give a fuck, and it’s unclear how Lord Jamar could argue that there’s anything more gangsta than that. Watch below.
Hey is available now on Terrible Records.