50 Questions

The poverty rate of Fuller Park is 54.5%, the unemployment rate 24.4% and the per capita income is $16,779. The median household income is roughly one-quarter of the citywide median. This is literally one of the poorest areas in Chicago, so why would a rapper be shopping for snacks here? If you were born after 1996, you are fully aware that being a rapper is one of the deadliest kinds of celebrity there is. We saw Tupac die, then Biggie, then Big L, then Jam Master Jay; 50 Cent gets shot, TI gets shot at, Lil Wayne shot himself...- there was an absurd amount of gun violence attached to rap music. Nothing compares to the emergence of 'drill' music.

There have been too many young black men killed for the sake of entertainment in the South Side of Chicago. It is almost as if the Devil surrounded the area with a hellish Coliseum arena. They call it the streets, and these streets fuel content for armchair detectives and YouTube bloggers. People all over the world stare down at their phones and view the chaos like Roman citizens gazing at dying gladiators. When Chief Keef first came out, it felt like there was a dead body every week. Someone the internet knew or could create a narrative on was being murdered, which only fueled the interest. The "smart one" Chief Keef got out of the way, realizing his life was more valuable than his 'street cred.' It's always so patronizing when someone calls it 'street cred' because that's not what the young dummies see it as. When entangled in that pain and poverty, 'street cred' is the only thing that feels real. "Nobody finna play wid me" is the only possession young men think they have until someone finally does and ends their life. The egoism that comes with identifying as someone people "ain't finna play with" leads to flawed emotional character. The seeds of this toxic weed can grow in any soil. A young man can have both parents in his life, have a great upbringing, but once he adopts the "on my dead [fill in the person], I ain't no h*e" persona, he may have shortened his life by forty to fifty years.

That brings me to the reason I'm writing this. The "killer" rapper, Bloodhound Q50, reunites with his deceased compatriots. Two years ago, he stood dazed as his "killer" tag teammate was liquefied to the pavement on a failed hit. The slow walk toward his fallen homie shows how devastating the death was. The shellshock of a WWI veteran who watched his best friend — the one he shipped out with — get blown to bits. A month after witnessing this, his other friend gets shot and killed while trying to get with a broke teenager. Someone who valued life would take a step back and Michael Jackson into a new life. Q50 was influenced to dig deeper into the trenches, thus providing himself an early grave. He died at a Shell gas station on the same day Tupac succumbed to his injuries. Ironically, there was a Shell at the site of Tupac's murder. When will the cycle end?