Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/05/12/rapper-bow-wow-got-caught-lyin.html
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this reminds me of something that actually ticked me off to no end. I do a lot of home cooking and post much of it on my Instagram (that’s what its for right?). A former friend uses their Twitter account to do a food fest day once per week wherein he posts all day long amazing and mouth watering dishes and meals and food pics. He doesn’t make any of it…its just he finds on the interwebs.
Never once did he ask to use my pics of food I actually make. And he was always lauded with “You have the best food pics ever”
Yeah…anyone can if you use google to make your food.
This fake stuff grinds my gears.
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I used to do a lot of album covers for indie rappers, and there was so much fakeness going on.
My favorite was one dude who sent me a photo of himself leaning on a Rolls Royce. It was clearly inside a car museum, and he even had a visitor pass hanging around his neck, with a security guard behind him yelling to stop leaning on the damn car. He had me remove everything in the background and replace the visitor pass with gold chains.
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Fake it till ya make it.
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Guy in the art department where I work had to photoshop guns into the hands of one hip-hop producer we were working with. I think he literally still lived with his mom in the Queensbridge projects, but he was probably more embarrassed that he lived in Queensbridge and didn’t actually own a gun (or could even borrow one to pose with.)
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That’s kind of amazing.
There’s one dude whose album is still on iTunes, I think, who sent his photo and said “hey, I didn’t have time to get a haircut or shave, so here’s a photo of Jay-Z when he was young, can you just take his hair and his chin and put them on my face?” So he’s a hip hop producer with Jay-Z’s scalp grafted on.
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+1 <3. That was a solid bit of grousin’!
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So is this alternative travel or a private plane with a few exceptions?
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And yet I love the idea behind the actual original photo (if it had been shot well). The music artist would need a sense of humor, play it very tongue in cheek. But yeah. We know most of the luxury cars in the rap music videos and crib visits are rentals anyhow.
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Seems like Rap as a genre is filled with one hit wonders, charlatans and generally people trying to cash in on the flavor of the moment. Every time I’ve seen a record store go out of business, when every other genre is 25% off, Hip hop/Rap is generally 50% off. Makes for a great time to stock up on the actual good stuff, which there is a significant amount of.
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And there we go. The music biz in a nutshell.
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I would have LOVED a cover using the original photo! But he was literally rapping songs about his huge cars, sexy women, and gold chains… and he was about 18.
I’m no hip hop connoisseur, but in my work with hundreds of musicians, there was definitely a much larger crap-to-listenable ratio with rappers. I’d say the majority of the indie rappers I did work for were just guys who’d plugged a microphone into a laptop and rapped some bars about their awesomeness atop some ripped-off beats. Some would even sample popular songs illegally so they could credit their song to “MC FakeRapper feat. Jay-Z” as if pretending to have Jay-Z on their song gave them legitimacy.
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Just got done watching this great compilation of smaller scale fails…
The very last one is just fantastic. Wait for it…
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Did you mean to post this over in the tipping crane thread?
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Oh, that’s always been the case in the music business. Lou Reed started out writing one-off novelty tunes for made-up dance crazes like “The Ostrich”, and Zappa did much the same before The Mothers got a record contract. When I started collecting records years ago I was amazed at just how many forgotten “blues rock” bands there were in the early 70’s, while the 80’s had tons of REM-soundalike bands and cookie-cutter hardcore bands. A guy I went to college with had a band in the 90’s, I went to see them once and they were imitating the Spin Doctors perfectly, a couple years later they got a record contract. . . as a heavy grunge band.
You are right though: it’s easier to make a rap song in your bedroom on a computer than just about any other kind of music, so a lot of untalented people think they are rappers because they made one song in Garageband.
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In a way I wonder if this is not what’s keeping the top of hiphop so consistently innovative. The constant biting and the weak rappers are a sort of contemporary equivalent to the huge mass of garage cover bands in 1960s suburbia - a critical mass that’s necessary to sift out the gold. The low entry level makes more people try, and more talents come though.
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He’s one of the singers in this?
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I wonder how many richkidsofinstagram posts are … real.
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I couldn’t resist…
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