Taken from NY Times
It’s hard to say when, exactly, 50 Cent crossed the line in his feud with the Miami rapper Rick Ross. The more apt question might be: How many lines are there? He tracked down the mother of a Ross a**ociate, DJ Khaled, at work, filming her sleeping on the job. He taped himself taking the mother of one of Mr. Ross’s children to buy a fur coat. He acquired and posted to the Internet a pronographic video starring another of Mr. Ross’s ex-girlfriends.
Rick Ross must have seemed an especially easy mark — it had already been a tough few months for his fourth wall. Before he was Rick Ross, the drug boss M.C., he had been William Leonard Roberts, and last summer a photograph surfaced of him from the mid-1990s, graduating from a corrections officer academy. He denied its authenticity — until The Smoking Gun got hold of his Florida Corrections Department personnel file, which included a certificate for perfect attendance.
The facts of Mr. Roberts’s life were getting in the way of Mr. Ross’s career.
To all this upheaval, Rick Ross — who, while he has been popular, has never quite been great — has replied, improbably, with art. “I see no reason to run to the dark,” he said in a recent interview in the Manhattan offices of his label, Def Jam. His songs aimed at 50 Cent have, hands down, been sharper and wittier than those of his rival. And the just-released “Deeper Than Rap” (Maybach Music/Slip N’ Slide/Def Jam), his third album, is unexpectedly fantastic, by far his best.
If albums were all that mattered, that would be that. But Mr. Ross’s persistence and the fact that though over the last nine months he’s been all but stripped bare, he’s emerged from the fray relatively unscathed, which indicates something much more noteworthy. Impenetrability of image, that old signal of hip-hop authenticity, somehow no longer seems to count.
And what a relief that is. Like all great pop music, rap is theater, and Rick Ross, now 33, is one of its most ambitious characters. He arrived fully formed in the summer of 2006: the busting-out gut, the outsize presence, the scratchy voice, the always-there sungla**es. At worst he was a Young Jeezy clone, spewing empty drug talk in comically repetitive fashion. At best he was an utterly believable and improbably charming exponent of the cocaine-rap making the rounds at the time. Clipse may have done it with more technical precision, and Jeezy with more magnetism, but Mr. Ross sounded in charge, his voice a gravelly threat.
“Deeper Than Rap” is just as certain as his first two studio albums, “Port of Miami” and “Trilla,” but reflects the view from the top, not the bottom. Now, instead of climbing up to success, he’s achieved it. Produced largely by J.U.S.T.I.C.E. League and the Inkredibles, this album is lush, erotic, entitled, a stunning leisure-cla** document of easy wealth and carefree sex. It’s a throwback to a time of sonic and attitudinal ambition in hip-hop — the Bad Boy era of the mid- to late ’90s, with its warm soul samples connoting the new hip-hop luxury comes to mind. Few rap albums have sounded this a**ured, this sumptuous, in years.
Also, unlike before, Mr. Ross can now rap, impressively: either he’s been studying or is having his hand held. It’s the only thing at odds with this album’s casual ethic; rapping well need not be a priority, but Mr. Ross seems to take his newfound affinity for polysyllabic rhyme schemes as a point of pride.
On “Usual Suspects” he raps:
“Seventeen, trying to man up
Feed the fam, boy, I put that on these canned goods
All I got was diabetes and a damn hug
People talking down, calling me a damn scrub.
What’s also notable about “Deeper Than Rap” is what’s not there. 50 Cent is a target on at least three songs, but Mr. Ross doesn’t belabor the battle nor does he touch on the aspects of his personal life that have lately haunted him.
In an age of routine tabloid invasions and the microrevelation as celebrity news, it’s become commonplace to expect access to all aspects of the lives of the famous. But in the hip-hop world, the stories behind the stories can be too grave to tell.
“Right now as we speak, I got two of my best friends that’s on the run from two separate cocaine conspiracy indictments,” Mr. Ross said. “This is a reality that I can’t glorify. The relationship I have with these people is deeper than rap.
“When I say something like ‘deeper than rap,’ that’s possibly death involved. That’s possibly prison time involved.”
The idea of “deeper than rap” has become a hip-hop touchstone of late. When the rapper Crooked I was shot, or not, earlier this year — he wouldn’t confirm or deny reports — he demurred from discussing the situation, saying, “It’s deeper than rap.”
Last month, on the MTV show “T. I.’s Road to Redemption,” that rapper calmly detailed the criminal activities that led to his arrest in 2007 on weapons charges. Coming from T. I. himself, it was shocking, an alternative history of his career that had nothing at all to do with music. (He is scheduled to begin serving his year-and-a-day sentence next month.)
Though his life beyond rap has been used against him, Mr. Ross still teases about an unknowable dark side. On the new album he name-drops Harry O, a Los Angeles drug dealer (who claimed to have provided the seed money for Death Row Records), and Big Ike, a Miami street kingpin.
Mr. Ross took his name from Freeway Rick Ross, a Los Angeles drug lord, and was mentored by Kenneth Williams, known as Boobie and now serving a life sentence. On “Gunplay,” from the new album, Mr. Ross raps “Boobie Boy still/ Boobie Boys real/ You can name a lot of lames that the Boobie Boys killed.”
Perhaps he’s overcompensating. Mr. Ross’s outing as a former corrections officer was the most spectacular and public implosion of a rapper’s self-styled tough-guy image — the hip-hop blog NahRight.com gleefully refers to him as Officer Rawse — since The Dallas Morning News picked apart the looser sections of Vanilla Ice’s biography during his rise to fame in 1990.
But Vanilla Ice’s songs weren’t filled with homage to the drug trade and its leading lights. And no one expected unvarnished truth from him. Mr. Ross must submit to a different standard.
Or at least he still acts as if he must. Of his stint on the side of the law, Mr. Ross said, “The truth is more sinister than the obvious,” suggesting an undisclosed layer to his time there.
Miami, he said, is a city where young go-getters “sell dope, buy Lamborghinis and get buried in them.” This month he filmed a video for “All I Really Want,” a collaboration with The-Dream, in Medellín, Colombia. In footage from the trip, available on YouTube, he stands outside the house where Pablo Escobar was killed, sungla**es off, soaking in history.
Whether it’s a validation of Mr. Ross’s extramusical credibility or an elaborately staged pose might not matter: creating this scene allows for a productive ambiguity in how he is perceived by outsiders. All the revelations about him get dwarfed by the question of who Rick Ross might be when he steps away from the microphone.
Asked how he’d explain to his children the more insidious of the ex-girlfriend videos 50 Cent has disseminated, Mr. Ross was philosophical: “I’d say she was an actress for a day. I love actresses.” In other words, an acknowledgment that sometimes it’s acceptable to just be playing a role.
