So I'm sure that a lot of hip-hop bloggers who are much better writers with much keener insights than me have already written about this, but I just want to say something about this. So on Rick Ross' current big hit track, BMF (Blowin' Money Fast), he evokes other legendary gangsters to describe his own awesomeness. Obviously talking about how awesome you are, and comparing yourself to others with greater status than you is nothing new in hip-hop. But is it me, or is Rick Ross the most explicit rapper when it comes to comparing himself to others by way of openly referring to himself with their names?
Big Meech and Larry Hoover are two notorious gangsters and drug cartel kingpins from Detroit and Chicago, respectively. I guess it's just interesting to me since most rappers ascribe their awesomeness precisely to their own essences. Or at least they repeat their own names enough so that whether their awesome or not, you know their names and you know how awesome they think they are. (Think Mike Jones or how DMX's method for proving his awesomeness is having other people adopt his name.) Even when a rapper compares himself to another, it's to say that he is better than the other person, different from him, or next in his succession (as in Jay-Z's brilliant line in Snoop Dogg's "I wanna rock": "It's no Biggie/I'm just the king now"). Rick Ross just straight up takes the names of the person he's comparing himself to. His moniker, Rick Ross, itself is the name of an infamous drug dealer.
I guess we all want to be someone else sometimes. And assuming a persona transcends musical genres. The "biggest boss that we've seen thus far" is just really honest about it.
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