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The New Yorker, one of the most highbrow magazine you can ever read, posted a profile on Rick Ross titled The Sound Of Success. It’s subheading, “Rick Ross’s Confidence Game,” reveals the gist of the story; Rozay’s drug dealing past is questionable, but he’s conned listeners into glossing over that fact.

Pop music critic Sasha Frere-Jones writes, “Ross has become a respected rapper by depicting the life style of a boss, or a don, two words that he loves. He never cares to unpack the morals of the drug trade—what he revels in is the security and relief of being fabulously wealthy. This is what his voice sells, the way Sinatra once sold an implacable but supple kind of confidence.”

 

When writing about “Triple Beam Dreams,” featuring Nas, from Rozay’s Rich Forever mixtape, Frere-Jones writes, “Ross says rather than raps, ‘It’s time to take it to the other side, the side you gotta watch A&E cable television for, homie, but we live this Isht.’ It’s telling that he invokes watching television before relating an allegedly personal story.”

Damn. Those jabs via prose might sting more than any Officer Ricky joke. But the New Yorker isn’t saying anything that many other magazines, or rappers, or Freeway Rick Ross, have also maintained.

So the question is, do you really care about how authentic the source material of Rozay’s cocaine infused, Lifestyle of the Rich & Famous Hip-Hop music is?