CHICAGO, IL - When a 13-year-old boy shows up in a
rap video cursing like a grown man, flashing money and posing with a gun, his
parents and other adults involved are morally bankrupt.
Unfortunately,
there has been no public outcry over a raunchy video titled “Lil Mouse Get
Smoked” that debuted on YouTube on July 4, and has since Blo wn up the Internet.
Nearly 300,000 people have viewed it, making the 13-year-old the latest rap
sensation to come out of Chicago.
Known as “Lil Mouse,” the baby-faced
rapper repeatedly drops “Fuck” and “Nigger” bombs in a music video that
glorifies sex, drugs and violence. At one point, an adult male gets behind the
teen and makes it look like the teen is holding the gun. On popular music video
sites, the teen, who allegedly lives in Roseland, is being promoted as the
“13-year-old rapper from the Wild, Wild Hundreds.”
The gangster-style
music video is even more profane when you consider that Chicago is desperately
trying to reduce gang- and drug-related violence that helped push the homicide
rate up nearly 40 percent and claimed the lives of so many of the city’s
children.
Here’s just a sample of what “Lil Mouse” has to
say:
“I’m rollin’, all my niggers rollin’
.30 clip and them hollow
tips have his a-- sitting in Roseland
Floating off a pill, pussy bad’ll
kill
My niggers in the field; you might get killed….
Melly got the
.30 on his hip, he gone need some help
I’m a gangster, nnigger, and I
could do this suck my fucking self”
When this kind of filth comes out of
a child’s mouth, there’s no one to blame but the parents. Obviously, in
neighborhoods where people are struggling to get by, having a kid break into the
music industry is huge.
Still, there is such a thing as going too far and
“Get Smoked” is a good example of where too far takes us. When young black males
were exploited by the music industry to promote the gangster lifestyle, most of
us said nothing.
Now the industry is hooking teenagers.
“This
warrants an investigation,” said Che “Rhymefest” Smith, a Chicago rapper who ran
a spirited but unsuccessful campaign for alderman in the 20th Ward.
“This has clearly crossed over into child pornography when you have a
13-year-old child rapping about sex and about violence and drug selling. They
are probably already under investigation,” he said.
P. Noble, the
videographer who shot the video in Roseland, claims “Lil Mouse” wasn’t holding
the gun.
“I made sure of it. When I got to the set, I made sure that
Mouse did not have any guns or drugs on him,” he told me.
Noble claimed
not to know the names of any of the adults involved in making the video but said
the boy’s mother and adult uncles were on the set.
“I was hired to do
video direction. Somebody called me and I showed up. I didn’t realize a gun was
in the video. So much was going on and there were a lot of people behind him. I
wasn’t trying to glorify anything,” he said.
The gun is clearly visible
in several scenes.
“But a lot of young people in Chicago live and survive
in that subculture. It is a sad reality. It’s an epidemic,” Noble
concluded.
Chase Davis is listed as the producer of “Get Smoked.” Davis
did not return several phone calls.
Rhymefest claims Lil Mouse
represents a new “culture of rap music from Chicago that is glorifying violence
and drugs.”
“We find that artists who glorify death in Chicago are being
rewarded,” he said.
For instance, Chief Keef, another Chicago teen who
raps about violence, recently landed a deal with the Interscope record label
that is reportedly worth millions.
But last December, the then
16-year-old wasn’t much of a celebrity. In fact, he was a big part of the
problem that continues to make life unbearable in some neighborhoods on the
South and West Sides.
Keef was arrested in the Washington Park
neighborhood when police arrived on the scene and found a suspect pointing a gun
at them. Chief Keef was one of two young men arrested. The rapper was charged
with unlawful use of a weapon and had to do 60 days of house arrest — at his
grandmother’s house, no less — according to a report in the Beachwood
Reporter.
“Record labels are exploiting the violence in Chicago at the
expense of young people who are being used to do it,” argues Rhymefest, who has
publicly taken Chief Keef to task, calling him a spokesman for the “prison
industrial complex.”
“This is new for rappers in Chicago,” he
said.
“We have to go after the producers and labels and create some way
young people can express themselves and be heard,” he said.
“But if guns
and bitches is the only thing that is getting attention, then that is what young
people are going to do. I am trying to save those artists before they cross over
to the dark side.”
To that end, Rhymefest is spearheading “The Pledge
Mixtape,” a CD that brings together rappers in Chicago to produce positive music
about life as opposed to death.
“We want to highlight positive artists
that tell the truth. The majority of young people are not selling drugs. They
are not killing each other, and they have aspirations,” Rhymefest
said.
“Everybody has a rap and a dream. “Clearly, you don’t need a lot of
talent, just a hustle,” he said. “There is some adult barricading these teens,
and you have to get around these adults.”
Because of “Get Smoked,” Lil
Mouse is not on the corner or hanging on the street, said Noble, who claims his
phone has been ringing off the hook with inquiries about the young rapper.
Still, what’s taking place in “Get Smoked” is child exploitation and
depicts behavior that is detrimental to the moral development of a child. That
can’t be ignored.
