Master P has offered his thoughts on why he believes so many promising rappers are dying young.
In a conversation with HipHopDX, P said “it’s because of the drugs and people not being held accountable.”
“As a young person, we always say, ‘Oh, he’s young, but she’s young. Let them go, do. They going to figure it out.’ Everybody don’t figure it out,” P explained. “You either going to be a tragedy or testimony. A lot of people don’t get to be a testimony. It normally don’t work like your situation, my situation, it don’t happen that often.”
P, whose real name Percy Miller, added that younger artists dying could also be a result of them not having “the right leadership or the right older people around us to tell us that we wrong.”
“Even the parents end up being friends. One thing I love about my parents and my grandparents, they never was my friends. When I went to them, I know that I got the real. I think that people as parents, if you got a young person that’s in Hip Hop, or just in general, in life, stop trying to cheat the game… Stop trying to just have fun with your kids,” he said. “I just think that’s the only way we’re going to save this culture. Because like I said, everybody is not going to overcome all this adversity. Because I got friends that died, I know you probably had it, too. My daughter just had her friend, a 19-year-old girl that died. So drugs do kill. I think a lot of people party and don’t want to look. Look at all the artists we know that died, and then they got into beefs and all these different things. I think it is a lack of education.”
Later in the discussion, P also encouraged the new generation of rappers to take their time and “invest it into something positive,” while advising them to “educate” themselves as their money starts coming in.
“If you don’t educate yourself, you are not going to be around and you’re going to die young because you don’t care about it,” he said. “A lot of these guys really want to die young. They doing it. Think about it. You know drugs kill you, why you keep doing it? A lot of people don’t want to be it because they realize they don’t want to get older; because they don’t have a plan for the future.”
RZA also shared his thoughts on death in hip-hop earlier in the year
“Sometimes hip-hop music glamorizes certain things,” he told the Financial Times. “It glamorizes prison life, it glamorizes gangsters and thugs. I understand that, because I grew out of that. But it doesn’t give you the total tragedy of what that can end up being, nor are we being represented with a lot of alternatives.”
