10 Rap Conspiracy Theories

NEW YORK - JULY 23: (L-R) Rapper Tupac Shakur poses for a portrait at Club Amazon on July 23, 1993 in New York, New York. (Photo by Al Pereira/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)

Based on an old handwritten letter on a tumblr page called "Dr. Dre Started Burning Man," some people believe that Dre stumbled on an early version of Burning Man while scouting for video locations with director Hype Williams. In a letter to his girlfriend at the time, he writes, “We met a bunch of crazy, naked motherfuckers in the desert today, they were putting up some type of giant wood man.” Then he adds, “Someone should get behind this shit and make some loot off these fools.” So, the theory goes that Dr. Dre helped turn the small gathering into the massive event it has become today, and he continues to profit on it to this day. Someone in Dre's inner-circle denied the rumors in 2015 and told The Daily Beast, “Dr. Dre had no idea what Burning Man was.” But that hasn't done much to quiet the conspiracy.

"The Secret Meeting That Changed Rap Music and Destroyed a Generation" is one of the more pernicious myths in hip-hop history. The story discusses a meeting held in 1991 between "industry insiders" who had invested in private prisons, and decided that gangster rap would be the perfect style of music to promote criminal culture and shunt the country's youth into prisons—thus leading to greater profits.

The worst part about this myth is that it propogates the notion that our current incarceration rates—which are completely out of control and higher than any other country in the world today—are the result of the culture of those incarcerated, rather than a systemic effort to contain an entire class of citizens. Our exploding prison system doesn't need a conspiracy to operate; it works out in the open, and it's called the War on Drugs. For more on the American Prison system, you're better off reading The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness than some extremely suspicious internet rumor.

Conspiracies surrounding the First Illuminati Family have grown in recent years, particularly since that family itself grew. JAY-Z's daughter Blue Ivy? Fake!—suggest conspiracy theorists who could spot false pixels in moon landing photos.

The rumors were really kicked off by a Beyoncé appearance on Australian TV where her dress appeared to fold, as if she were wearing some sort of prosthetic baby bump. Of course, she appeared in Croatia with a top that showed off a real baby bump, but the skeptics remained unconvinced. 

The first posthumous 2Pac album, The Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory, was recorded under the name Makaveli. This was a reference to Niccolo Machiavelli, the famous Italian politician, philosopher and historian. Machiavelli was also a proponent of faking one's death to retain power. Combined with cover art depicting 2Pac as a resurrected Black Jesus and how the record coincided with his death, theories that Pac himself had faked his death proliferated.

Sightings and rumors that he'd escaped to Cuba, that Pac was spotted in a video rocking sneakers that were only released after he'd passed, that he'd been caught on camera flourished. 

JAY-Z will undoubtedly go down as an all-time great in hip-hop, but could his success be attributed to his allegiance to the shadowy organization known as the Illuminati? There are an awful lot of videos and articles that allude to this conspiracy being real and in plain sight.

Hov has vehemently denied any connection to the Illuminati on many songs ("Free Mason") and interviews, yet he then turns around and gives us a video like "On To The Next One" or the recently released "Holy Grail," packed with symbolism that leaves tinfoil hat-wearing hip-hop heads furiously tapping away on their blogspot.

Let's face it, it's not incredibly hard to brand Memphis horrorcore-turned-crunk group Three 6 Mafia as devil worshippers. Their name pretty is the biggest indictment against them already, as is their penchant for wacked out, murderous lyrics and horror movie samples in some of their biggest underground hits. Many hip hop forums in the golden age have made their own theories, because hip-hop forums are of course the number one source for satanic conspiracies.

No conspiracy was more famous than the rumors surrounding the group's "Stay Fly." The song, which sampled Willie Hutch's "Tell Me Why Our Love Turned Cold," supposedly would reveal a demonic message if played backwards.

Of course we haven't tried this, because accidently summoning Beezlebub isn't worth proving some internet theory.

Hip-hop legend Big Daddy Kane has one of the most storied careers of the early days of hip-hop. However this particular conspiracy is one that reached a fever pitch in the early '90s.

The AIDS epidemic was in full force, and many people in the African American community were scared and pointing fingers out of fear. One of the unfortunate people at the end of this AIDS witch hunt was Big Daddy Kane, who allegedly addressed it in front of a studio audience on Oprah after the public outcry got too loud. There is of course no actual video evidence of this, and Kane is alive and well. 

The year was 2001, and the hip-hop power struggle in the Tri State area hit a fever pitch. JAY-Z and Nas were going at it. But the lyrical scuffle between State Property and D-Block was almost as memorable.

Beanie Sigel and his rowdy crew of street MC's took on D-Block and their extended family on what seemed like every mixtape from 2001 to the tail end of 2002. But the crux of this conspiracy lies in a little heard freestyle from Styles P. The conspiracy: Styles, rapping over a instrumental of "Jigga That Nigga," dissed Aaliyah after her death as a shot at Roc-A-Fella CEO Dame Dash, with whom Aaliyah had a relationship. The bar that goes around in most rumor circles is:

"Rock da boat, rock da boat/ That's one less bitch in a Rocawear coat/ D-Block motherfucker, man who better than us?/ If your man die tomorrow you can bet it was us/ Who the fuck is you trying for/ A bunch of pretty faggots you can die on a tour."

While many forum dwellers and tape traders have claimed to have heard the freestyle in question, no one has ever actually coughed up the audio.

Troop Clothing was a company created by two Jewish men and one Korean man. Despite this fact, and a heavy LL Cool J cosign, rumors quickly spread that the company was run by the Ku Klux Klan, and that the word Troop stood for "To Rule Over Oppressed People." 

Soon, a rumor spread that the company was putting hateful messages into the linings of its jackets. Even after African-American marketing director Wesley Mallory "sliced open the linings of five such jackets in a store in Montgomery, Alabama, to prove such messages weren't hidden inside," the company went out of business in under five years. Sometimes rumors just take on a life of their own.

Suge Knight, mastermind of one of the greatest dynasties in '90s hip-hop, ruled his empire with an iron fist. Controlling forces of nature like 2Pac and Snoop Dogg is no ordinary feat, and it was not surprise to anyone the type of power he held added to his mystique and intimidating nature.

The greatest conspiracy surrounding Suge and his shadowy effect on the East Coast/West Coast beef of the '90s is that he is responsible for the deaths of the major architects of that period in hip-hop history.

His first victim—so the conspiracy goes—was Eazy-E, who had just split with Dr. Dre, the producer who would become Suge’s golden goose at Death Row. The split wasn’t amicable, and Eazy owned Dre's publishing and was questioning his gangsta status. Suge didn’t like that, so—as the rumor goes—Suge had him "dealt with."

It’s said that his next victim, his protégé Tupac Shakur was even more sinister. There are many stories, pictures, and diatribes that implied 2Pac was tired of the stigma of being on Death Row Records and was ready to leave. Many astute listeners attribute the intro to 2Pac’s fatalistic Makaveli album as proof, arguing that 2Pac said “Suge shot me” at the very beginning of the album. 

A similar rumor was that Suge was responsible for the death of the Notorious B.I.G. As the conspiracy goes, Suge was out to cut his losses and end the East/West beef, and the final piece was B.I.G. himself.