by Natalie Hopkinson
By any objective measure--moral, legal, ethical, the eyes of his horrified mother--the hip-hopper Wale screwed up. Management for the gifted artist best known for his duet with Lady Gaga contracted him to perform at D.C. Black Pride, a 20-year-old festival--for 45 minutes and $18,000. At the last minute, his team backed out, claiming they did not realize Pride was a gay and lesbian event.
Whooops!
Furious Pride organizers put him on blast in the local media, vowed to explore their legal options, and quickly arranged for another artist, the tatted-out R&B crooner J. Holiday to take his place. In the middle of J. Holiday's Memorial Day Weekend performance, I watched Wale make an unpaid appearance to do a little damage control. He said once his mother informed him of the controversy which aired on local TV, he immediately came back from his trip to Miami to make things right.
''One thing I stand for is hip-hop music,'' Wale, the son of Nigerian immigrants, told the crowd. ''Hip-hop music knows no race, no color, no age, no gender, no sexuality, none of that .... But I will say, in this business, sometimes you get aligned with people who don't understand that, or who don't necessarily have the same belief system as you do. And I apologize for not putting my best foot forward and not understanding the people I'm in business with. And I'm gonna do better--as we all do. People, every day we gotta get better.''
So what exactly did we just witness? Was it a step forward for compassionate understanding of our friends in ''the life''? Did Wale just avert a boycott/lawsuit or discrimination charges? Is this the beginning of the end of folks tolerating homophobia? Could it be signs of actual--*gasp*--maturity in popular hip-hop?
Read the Full Essay @ The Root
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