Year: 1982
In verse 5 he speaks of the “jobs” that people of the ghetto might have chosen to gain money. He says, “You'll admire all the number book takers/Thugs, pimps, pushers and the big money makers / Driving big cars, spending twenties and tens/ And you wanna grow up to be just like them, huh, / Smugglers, scramblers, burglars, gamblers /Pickpockets, peddlers even panhandlers” (Verse 5, Lines 9-14), They look at these jobs as a way to obtain “easy money”. They make twice as much money than they would with a regular job in half of the time. They also don’t have to deal with some of the struggles of regular jobs such as taxes, bosses, and they do what they want. They only have to worry about getting caught by the police. Now when the children in the neighborhood, which is who Grandmaster Flash is referring to, see the drug dealers and pimps making all this “easy money” they end up wanting to be like them just as he illustrates in verse 5, lines 1-8.
It’s really easy to fall into the illegal activity in the project houses because it takes over the community. These drug dealers, pimps, prostitutes, and stick-up kids are everywhere so it is difficult for the kids in the community not to see them. The kids aren’t being given any form of encouragement as he illustrated in the poem, “My son said: Daddy, I don't wanna go to school/ Cause the teacher's a jerk, he must think I'm a fool” (Verse 4, Lines 1&2).
Grandmaster Flash displays how people survive living around the urban areas. In “The Message”, “Crazy lady, livin’ in a bag / Eating out the garbage piles…”(Verse 2, Lines 1-2) illustrates that the lady was literally living in a garbage bag and eating leftovers from the garbage to garbage to survive. “…used to be a fag-hag” (Verse 2, Line 2) portrays that the woman has a sense of beauty, and would be comfortable around homosexual men than straight men. Grandmaster Flash used the slang term “fag-hag” to show what the woman used to be and whom she would prefer to be with but others would make fun of her. It can be a result of how she became insane and started living on the streets. “She went to the city and got so so seditty / She had to get a pimp, she couldn’t make it on her own” (Verse 2, Lines 7-8) illustrates that the woman went to the city for her everyday living to become a prostitute. However, she could not survive by herself so she ended up getting a pimp to survive and get to places. To the peoples’ opinions, having to resort to prostitution, being homeless, etc., was a way of their cost of survival.
Rap/Hip-Hop
The Truth in the Message
Continued
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