Thursday, July 24, 2008
Just another day in the life of the goddamn boss
I have always had a somewhat suspicious view of thug rappers who brag about all the crimes they've committed and continue to commit in spite of being rich celebrities. I just don't believe that Jay "Young Jeezy" Jenkins is taking time out from recording club bangers with the likes of Usher and Christina Milian to cook crack in his microwave and sell it down at his local trap, any more than I believe that Dwayne "Lil' Wayne" Carter and Brian "Birdman" Williams earned those teardrops tattooed on their faces by murdering a combined five people or I believe that Sean Kingston can show me about the slums of the city from which he got his surname without having his fat ass robbed of his ridonk Crayola crayon chain. Like the vast majority of people who listen to gangsta rappers and R&B thugs, I find all the macho posturing incredibly entertaining but not necessarily believable. It doesn't matter that Khaled "DJ Khaled" Khaled probably only has occasion to outrun DEA strike teams at 60 miles per hour in reverse in his Bentley for the sake of music videos rather than actual major league drug trafficking. I enjoy watching it and listening to it and it's fun.
However, the lack of veracity backing many of these dudes' claims to major case perpetrator status has not gone unnoticed, particularly by The Smoking Gun. A while back, they discovered that Aliuane "Akon" Thiam's claims of running a notorious interstate stolen car syndicate were inspired more by playing Grand Theft Auto than any actual personal experience. Now, they've followed up on a photo from MediaTakeOut concerning William "Rick Ross" Roberts's inflated criminal past.
In case you don't know who Rick Ross is, he's cornered the niche market of cocaine kingpin rap. His stage name was appropriated from a famous Los Angeles cocaine trafficker named Freeway Ricky Ross, and he routinely refers to himself as "the boss" and claims to run something called the "Carol City Cartel," as though he's some type of morbidly obese Floridian version of Pablo Escobar. This might seem kind of believable, since he always has a really menacing expression, he's always smoking a cigar, he pays a lot of lip service to staying trill (which means "keeping it real" with regard to thug exploits) and he looks like Suge Knight's long lost twin. I will, however, say that I think his intimidating air is somewhat mitigated by his absurd self-portrait yellow diamond pendant:
Anyway, I was a little suspicious of how Rick Ross managed to find the time to build an international drug trafficking operation when he was busy attending Albany State University on a football scholarship, so I wasn't terribly surprised when MediaTakeOut posted a picture featuring Rick Ross working at his first job after college...as an officer for the Florida Department of Corrections.
Yes, I'm sure that on his graduation day from prison guard school, the biggest boss that I've seen thus far was keeping it trill, indeed. To recapture some of that trillness, Rick Ross responded by claiming that these were Photoshopped, and that he's never worked keeping his colleagues in the drug-running industry confined in the clink. Unfortunately, The Smoking Gun decided to get in on the story, and they managed to dig up old personnel records for the same "William L. Roberts" in the photo above with the same social security number belonging to Rick Ross. I can see why he got out of the DoC business, since he was hardly able to blow 15 million in one week (one of his favorite hobbies according to his lyrics, although I would interject that it's not the most sensible financial planning strategy) making 23 grand a year as a corrections officer.
I can't hold it against Rick Ross too much for simply trying to stack that paper. And again, it's not like I really believed his criminal CV, since all you have to do to suspect him of not being quite the trilla he claims is watch one of his videos. For example, the video for "Speedin," which is one of my favorite Rick Ross jams because the hook is sung by a certain ROBERT SYLVESTER KELLY. I defy you to watch this video and think that Rick Ross is entirely truthful about his legendary exploits in the criminal underworld:
I'm not sure what is more absurd, the notion that Rick Ross could actually escape the police by leaping off a Miami bridge and swimming to freedom (while callously leaving DJ Khaled in the Maybach with their slut masseurs to bribe the police), "Kells and Ross on the Hollywood scene" after engaging in some kind of Fast and the Furious-esque street racing, or Ross asking Kells to "meet me at the helipad" in order to evade pursuit by some law enforcement types. Hell, it might be completely ridiculous, but it sure is fun.
Labels: hilarious shit, rap, ridiculous absurdity, Robert Sylvester Kelly
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