The recent photoshop beef between Fat Joe and 50 Cent have got me thinking…what’s up with rappers and photoshop? I mean since Master P and the old Cash Money were putting together the most photoshop’d album covers ever, niggas have been fascinated with the idea of taking a picture of you in your mamma’s kitchen and making it seem like your in front of a mansion, surrounded by half naked women in fur coats, sitting on a Bentley, and have, for no reason, two huge Facob diamond watches coming down from the sky (and let’s not forget the addition of stacks of cash, machine guns, tanks, and other army paraphernalia). Remember that song by The Roots? Pretty much.
If it’s not doing a photoshop over-glamorizing their coolness, it’s photoshopping the rapper you have beef with to look like they have been severely beaten up (i.e. a black eye is so cool in photoshop) or extremely homo (i.e. wearing g-strings, having sex with other men, wearing make-up, wearing dresses). It’s like if you can get a photoshop of your enemy doing something mad homo, it’s instant street cred. Remember the whole Jim Jones vs Tru Life photoshop beef? That feud of the minds took photoshop beef to a whole new level as it eventually turned into myspace account hacking beef. Very g’d up indeed. [sidebar: It’s good to know Biggie and Pac didn’t die in vain.]
If anything every rapper should either make sure their photoshop skills are up to par just in case they get into photoshop beef or make sure they rolling with a hardbody graphic designer. I know, instead of having silly rap battles, we’ll have photoshop battles. Haha I made you look like there’s Jay-Z’s pee-pee in your mouth, I win. There’s no reason why we should have freestyle battles anymore, that shit’s played out, why should we sharpen our lyrical skills when we can belittle each other over photoshop? Ah man my blending brush is mad deadly, niggas better recognize, I will put a really bad black eye on you and make it look like herpes on your lip! All of this of course is the elementary school equivalent to drawing a penis in a text book and pointing it at the picture of the Asian guy riding a bicycle (wasn’t me, I swear).
The sadness of it all.
