Wale has got very candid about the reality of longevity in hip-hop, explaining that being a rapper is “not a normal life.”
Speaking in an interview with Cam Newton, the DMV spitter was asked about the longevity of rappers. “It’s hard, man,” he admitted.
“I mean there’s so many things that throw you off. I lost a lot of friends in the streets or just otherwise, but jumping in the industry, being here for about 16 years… The amount of friends that I lost… It’s not a normal life to live.”
He said that over time, the mentality of artists can change and they can get more paranoid, and he generally described the industry as “not the brightest place to be.”
“You could be the greatest rapper of all time, but everybody could be like, ‘Oh I don’t like you, you’re not good,” he explained. “So that can just throw you off … The longevity is no joke, man. And the game done change, it keep changing.”
He argued that another aspect beyond the changing nature of the industry, and the arrival of new artists, is how tough it can be to have your art noticed with everything going on.
“There’s so much stuff going on right now,” he said. “So much distractions and so much… Everybody is bloodthirsty right now in hip-hop. So it’s like, how many people’s attention can you get, you know what I’m saying? How do you enter the zeitgeist? How do you enter the mainstream, the algorithm? It’s busy. It’s tough, it’s a tough game.”
He also said that he’s not too interested in chasing trends, and has always been a fan of “evergreen music,” the type of art that could have been released at any time and sound just as fresh.
“I had to grow up a little bit before I understood how great Reasonable Doubt was,” he said. “I didn’t understand how good it was in middle school. When I got older, I was like, ‘Oh snap.’ Everything he’s saying, I didn’t get. That’s why I got to try to make the music evergreen, because it’ll catch up eventually.”
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