Talib Kweli prevented someone from being wrong on the Internets, or tried to anyway
Whew!
Internets,
Talib Kweli is on Twitter at quite literally all hours of the day and night arguing about race relations and what have you. I don’t think he sleeps.
If you go on Twitter at night, all you see is people in furrin countries talking about soccer, or Brexit or whatever (I still don’t know what that is), and Talib Kweli correcting people who are wrong about race on the Internets.
Sometimes in the morning, on days when there’s not a BET Awards, names of what I’m assuming are soccer teams or players are still trending. Years after I brought this to their attention, Twitter hasn’t seen fit to make it so that people in the US don’t have to read about things going on in other parts of the world. . . and that’s just one of the reasons their stock is in the toilet. For other reasons, check a past edition of Life in a Shanty Town, called “Twitter can’t go out of business soon enough, as far as I’m concerned,” or something to that effect.
But I digress.
A few weeks ago, seemingly apropos of nothing, Remedy asked Talib Kweli if he was pro-black, racist or both. Personally, I’m all of the above, but this isn’t about me. Let’s stay focused here.
Remedy, if you’re not familiar, is one of the white people from Wu-Tang, along with Scott Isbell, Cappadonna’s manager, who turned out to be an FBI informant, and Ghostface Killah’s tour DJ, who once famously explained to XXL why he’s allowed to use the dreaded n-word. As I recall, Remedy had a song on one of those Wu-Tang Killa Bees albums, about the Holocaust, called “Never Again,” and later talked obscure Wu-Tang weed carrier Holocaust, who had a strong verse on the first Bobby Digital album, into changing his name to Warcloud. If you didn’t spend as much time in your mom’s basement in the late ’90s as I did, you’ll just have to take my word that all of these things really did happen.
Kweli went back and forth with Remedy about who’s the real racist here, as is his wont, and this somehow led to him beefing with Diabolic.
Diabolic, according to the wiki, in which he does in fact have an entry, was on a song on one of those first Immortal Technique albums, in the early ’00s, and is a well-known battle rapper. I used to fuxwit Diabolic back in the ’00s, but I hadn’t so much as thought of him in years, not because I don’t like his music anymore, but because when I stopped reviewing albums back in ’09 it freed me from having to be at all aware of the shitshow that is modern day rap music. I consulted the Google re: Diabolic posts on my blog, and the most recent one was from ’09, a year before his first album was released. According to the wiki, he may or may not have released two albums since then. One has a 2016 release date, so it could be forthcoming. The other one is the album funded via a Kickstarter campaign in which Diabolic is accused of having absconded with the money. How diabolical of him.
Why in the world Diabolic decided to get involved in Kweli’s beef with Remedy I’m not sure. How did he even know Talib Kweli was beefing with Remedy? I took a look at Kweli’s Twitter just now (nullus), to try to research this newsletter, and quickly realized that–like all of these people’s careers–that shit was a lost cause. Talib Kweli has tweeted over 100,000 times, and I’m assuming most of those have been within the past few months. You’d be all day trying to dig through that shit. I pieced this together based on what I know from having skimmed an article Kweli wrote for Medium on “white fragility” in hip-hop.
On Twitter, Diabolic accused Kweli of talking about white people in generalizations, which, even if that’s true, should be allowed. Because history. As Malcolm X once put it (and I’m paraphrasing), the cracka-ass cracka is the greatest thief! There isn’t a place in hip-hop for anyone who would (openly) deny that. That may or may not be what Talib Kweli was getting at in his essay. It would be impossible to say without having read it.
Even if he was right, Kweli ceded the moral high ground by calling Diabolic a bitch. In his essay, he explains that he calls guys bitches to rob them of their power, similar to how black people have reclaimed the dreaded n-word. Arguably, this is even more sexist than calling a woman a bitch–but let’s stay on topic. I think what happened here is that Kweli was so agitated from arguing with the kind of misguided white children who would seek to interact with Talib Kweli via the Internets in 2016 that he flipped out on Diabolic, who really didn’t do anything but point out the absurdity of Kweli’s relentless campaign to prevent people from being wrong on the Internets.
This all culminated, this past weekend, in the world’s most anticlimactic rap battle. Diabolic dropped a song called “IneKwelity,” and Kweli responded with a song called “You Tried It.” The Diabolic song was a better song, albeit just barely, while the Kweli song presented a stronger argument, which is neither here nor there in a rap battle. Neither of them belongs anywhere near the canon. Kweli’s ongoing argument with himself has only continued apace, and as a result it’s likely that this particular beef will eventually be forgotten, buried beneath a pile of other such bullshit, like those tweets I was looking for.
Somewhere in that pile lies a metaphor, if not for life in general, then at least for the career of a once-prominent underground rapper. I’d attempt to locate said metaphor, but it’s not in a black man’s nature to work that hard on a holiday weekend. I’m sure Remedy would agree.
Take it easy on yourself,
Bol
Originally published at tinyletter.com.
