How to Self-Destruct Your Rap Career

There's actual money in Hollywood, whereas hip-hop artists—one imagines—spend a fuckload of time editing ID3 tags on MP3s and sending albums to LiveMixtapes, hoping to up their show prices by a few hundred. A good way to make everyone forget you were ever a rapper is to become an actor, cf Mos Def, Ice Cube, Queen Latifah, et al.

Time keeps on slipping, slipping. Into the future. At a certain point, it will piss you off. It doesn't matter how vital and important your contributions: eventually, history will leave you behind. Some suffer this fate worse than others, kicking and screaming the whole way. Some—say, Ludacris—will ride it out as long as they can, even popping back up again for moments of temporary relevance. A scant few—say, Jay Z—will ride long waves, shifting carefully as the winds of history blow. And most rarely, a couple legends have simply timeless styles, and will remain relevant as long as they stay busy—think Scarface. But in order to truly self-destruct in incredible fashion, refuse to adapt to changes technological or otherwise. Stick with what you've known, and run it into the ground as long as possible, like the former high school football player who can't forget that blessed senior season.

Haters like to say that gangster rap is so authenticity-obsessed that nothing could be better for a street rapper than a jail sentence. This is only true up to a point. Shyne's debut album was, in retrospect, pretty solid front-to-back. The Barrington Levy assisted singles "Bad Boyz" and "Bonnie and Clyde" were both fire, and album cuts like the Whodini-sampling "It's OK" have dated surprisingly well. The main thing that jammed up his rap career, though, was going to jail for a decade after a shooting incident involving Puff Daddy. Another way to sideline your rap career is being deported the second after you're freed.

Pro tip: drugs are not a long term, sustainable source of creative energy. They have, in fact, derailed many a career prematurely, occasionally in deadly ways. You don't need to be told this; you know it. It's always been true. Before he died prematurely, after years of drug abuse, Charlie Parker—the alto sax-playing genius of bebop—said exactly this: "Any musician who says he is playing better either on tea, the needle, or when he is juiced, is a plain, straight liar...I may have thought I was playing better, but listening to some of the records now, I know I wasn't."

Twitter is a great time-waster. It's also a great way to keep your name in the headlines. Ditto to frequent arrests, drug problems, reality television appearances—honestly, if you're trying to keep from being recognize for your musical output, becoming known for a bunch of bullshit that has nothing to do with your actual music is definitely the way to go.

Rap fans definitely treat hip-hop like every single one of them is backseat driving another rapper's career. "See what he should do is..." There's a cynical mind at work when hip-hop fans compare opening week sales numbers as if it says something real about buzz or marketability. Hip-hop heads think they're in the boardroom. As a result, they'll forgive a lot: corporate deals, unnecessary beefs, calculated collabs. But if you're trying to sabotage your career, there's a quick way to do it: completely reinvent yourself. OK, so it could work in the past, to some degree; few knew that "Hard Knock Life" Jay Z was once "Hawaiian Sophie" Jay Z, because one wasn't so successful, and there was no YouTube. But nowadays, if you're interested in turning your career into a trainwreck, make it look like you treat hip-hop as an angle rather than an art.

If you find yourself getting just a bit too successful, a possible solution is to beef with someone who is much more talented and secure in their position than you are. For example: two bubbling newcomers—let's call them "Lil Clip" and "B.I."—were arriving on a mainstream stage around the same time in the early 2000s. "Lil Clip" was from Texas, and had a funny punchline rap style; B.I. was from Atlanta, and was a scrappy livewire/dopeboy. Clip dissed B.I., B.I. spit back, and Clip never recovered. Around the same time, something similar happened with two rappers who were even bigger—at the peak of their respective fields. Let's just say that things were never the same for Da Rule after 60 Cent had his way with him.

Speaking of Lil Clip—oh hell, it's Lil Flip—for many artists, abandoning your local support can be the kiss of death. Not that Flip didn't have other problems (beefing with E.S.G. and T.I., probably drinking too much lean, and generally releasing weaker material). But he was an artist who built his reputation in his native Texas, recording classic punchline freestyles on Screw tapes like Southside Still Holdin' and generally being a wry, locally-oriented star with a particular talent for funny, familiar imagery and references. Fame distorted his potential; he rapped over Heatmakerz beats, collaborated with Dipset, and made pop jams like "Sunshine" (sample lyric: "I'll treat you like milk, I'll do nothing but spoil you"), ultimately abandoning his core fanbase. There's nothing inherently disastrous for a career "going pop." But doing so without recognizing ones own strengths is a good way to veer off the path to stardom.