Countless other artists have had their potential murdered by drug abuse, including the rapper Chris Kelly from the group Kriss Kross, DMX (an extraordinary rapper whose life has become a complete mess) and others. Also, for every artist who dies or shows public symptoms of a drug problem, there are numerous others who suffer in silence, living on the brink of fatality.
Standing with the artists are the hundreds of thousands of young people who are on the receiving end of a barrage of marketing messages that encourage them to spend their lives in a liquor bottle or dope spot. “Purple Drank” is now very popular in the south, mainly because of messages being delivered to young people via death merchants like Clear Channel and record labels who profit from selling weaponized psychological genocide to young black men. When a black boy is born, there are two things built for him: A jail cell and a casket – That’s how prisons and record labels feed off of one another and get so rich in the process.
Anyone who thinks that this is just harmless music is naïve and obviously hasn’t studied marketing. The reason that corporations pay artists millions of dollars to wear their sneakers and clothing is because they know that whatever the artist does, millions of young people are going to emulate that act. Even the rapper 2 Chainz (the college-educated, 36-year old man who dresses like a teenager and deliberately lowers his IQ) stated clearly that hip-hop artists are better at selling sneakers than the athletes who actually work in them.