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Photo: Instagram

Photo: Instagram

When Keep It Real Goes Wrong

Walking the thin like between street credibility and selling entertainment is tough. Shmurda is learning this the hard way.

It is the organizing cliché of rap: the authentic street hustler who exploits his authenticity to create hit songs, find an audience, become rich and famous. The demand for street cred is intense, and the history of the genre is filled with rappers who have felt its lack. The classic case was Tupac Shakur, the sensitive boy who played violin at a prestigious Baltimore art school. Even after he’d made it big, he aggressively sought to build street cred by surrounding himself with real hustlers—until he was shot to death on the Las Vegas Strip, his pursuit of authenticity his downfall.

Shmurda is Shakur’s inverse, in a sense. During the summer of Shmurda, as he strove to launch a career in hip-hop and, behind the scenes, struggled to break away from his old crowd, Pollard worked hard in interviews to accentuate his street cred, aware that authenticity is what would sell. He bragged that he’d dealt drugs as early as the fifth grade, that East Flatbush was like “growing up in the jungle. Gotta be hard. If you ain’t hard, you ain’t gonna stand, you gonna fall.”

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