Nettspend - "nothing like uuu" / Lazer Dim 700 - "Tony Dim"

 Listen here and here.

Is anybody looking out for Nettspend and Lazer Dim 700? I truly hope so.

I legitimately worry about these boys. I actually lose sleep over them.

And I realized recently: my male colleagues mostly sleep fine. They have not read the book that they helped to write, which I now get the sinking feeling I am starting to read again.

My first awareness of Lazer Dim 700 was not his actual music: it was a video of the mattress that he sleeps on, pushed up against the wall in a basement, so to make just a little bit more room for him to breathe in just a little bit more of the damp moldy air that provides no relief to the lungs. 

I have seen too many teenage boys suffer for your clicks. It is easier to feel for boys than men: they are still children. They have not yet fully chosen to willingly indulge in the original sin they were born into; perhaps they can still be saved.

Why does a 14-year-old need a publicist? That's not to say he should not be making music for his own enjoyment. But at what point does viral rap bleed into actual child labor, and maybe even reckless endangerment? 

I feel similarly about freelance writers who are younger than me. Maybe they hate me. Maybe they do not acknowledge how I helped to engineer their reality. Maybe they don't actually know me like I think they do.

But I still feel a guilty weight, and sometimes I wonder if Yung Lean feels a similar weight.

I wonder that if by putting up with so much suffering myself, simply for sharing my voice in public, encouraged impressionable youth to think they could only ever sign their life away, because that's all I thought I could do.

I want the children to make money, but I want them to have it for themselves, because I worry about what vultures will arrive to take that money once they have it, and what they might do to their flesh.

Is it so wrong to say that I feel for Bobby Shmurda dancing on the table?

Is it so wrong to say that I see the faces of Lil Peep and Lil Shark and 6 Dogs and Speaker Knockerz and Juice WRLD in so many of these just being born?

Is it so wrong to worry that every street rapper we elevate, claiming we are helping to lift them out of material struggle, will just be another Pop Smoke, making it out of those streets, only to lose his life in the rental property of a Real Housewife whose husband owns a fucking security company?

Every time a rapper fights to earn their freedom, I worry that the celebration will turn to mourning, as it did for Drakeo.

Every time a rapper shouts out a small business in their hometown on Instagram, I worry that the wrong people are tracking their location, because that's what happened to Young Dolph. 

He just wanted you to buy some fucking pastries. And you killed him for it.

So I have to worry about what good deeds will be done in the future, because of the cruel and unusual ways they all-too-often go unpunished, and because none of the men who claim to know this world so well even seem to consider how easily silver linings turn to pitch black.

So I must pray that Nettspend and Lazer Dim do not lose their lives, before they get the chance to really live them, because no one else seems to think about them as human beings, and not just living memes.

And I hope—if only to myself—that they do get to actually live, in whatever way that means for them, no matter what anyone on the Internet thinks, no matter who gets to click on it or consume it.