TheLoop21.com

By: Felicia Pride | TheLoop21 (Add to your loop)
Fri, 07/23/2010 - 00:00

Rick Ross’ fourth album, 'Teflon Don', dropped Tuesday.

I think I'm Big Meech/Larry Hoover

Whipping work/hallelujah

One nation/under god 

Real n*ggas getting money from the fu*king start

--B.M.F (Blowin Money Fast) by Rick Ross featuring Styles P



Earlier this month, Casey Gane-McCalla, a journalist, rapper, comedian and Facebook friend, declared on his FB status: “I am an Ivy league college educated journalist with no criminal background…still when I hear this song...I think I'm Big Meech.”

The song that Gane-McCalla refers to is B.M.F, a single from Rick Ross’s fourth album, Teflon Don which dropped Tuesday. The song’s considered a heater. The summer’s hip-hop anthem.

His admission came as I started to notice more and more black male friends and associates like Gane-McCalla embrace Rick Ross with fingers thrown in the air. These are: college graduates who own all of the rapper’s albums, recite his lyrics passionately, and wear dress shirts and ties to work daily even though it’s not required. These are: corporate ladder-climbers who admit that Ross is growing on them and wonder why I don’t agree. These are: straight-laced brothers who turn up the radio and head nod hard to gangster stories attached to thumping beats. These are: Ivy-leaguers who, even just for the length of the song, feel like they’re Big Meech.



Read a critique of how the hip-hop industry thrives on our demise.

Some context: Demetrius “Big Meech” Flenory, cofounded the notorious, drug cartel BMF (Black Mafia Family). It’s been estimated that the organization, led by he and his brother Terry “Southwest T” Flenory, pulled in more than $250 million during its reign.



Big Meech lived the lifestyle so many rappers claim and celebrate. Cases of champagne at the club. Host of luxury cars. He beamed money-green and really did blow money fast. Women swooned and brothers bowed. His crew was air-tight; zero tolerance for disrespect.



The hypermasculine dream. Until the inevitable fall in 2008, when Big Meech received a thirty-year prison sentence for running a criminal enterprise.



So why would black men, who possess the legitimized American dream credentials: good education, better job, nicer salary, property in their own name, sometimes feel, as Ross has termed, “meechy”?

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“I think that many professional and educated black men feel constrained in their day-to-day realities,” says Mark Anthony Neal, professor of African & African-American Studies at Duke University. 



“Particularly,” he adds, “in relation to their performances of masculinity, where they are always conscious of how their ambition, aggression and physical presence is interpreted by white colleagues and superiors. Call it the Obama syndrome.”

Enter Rick Ross. A dream’s vessel. A movie director, shaping and crafting imagery using a repetitive script.



In B.M.F, the crime-laden dialogue and cues are laid with ferocity over a nastier beat: being self-made, versus being affiliated; building from the ground up, no renovating; penetrating claimed women.

The middle-finger American dream—one that multiple-degreed brothers can pump fists to at the club, groove to on the way to work, or listen to on their iPod at the gym.