Fans of rapper Mad Skillz may know him best for his annual Wrap Up freestyle series, through which he's given a breakdown of the year in review dating back to 2002. Over the weekend the prolific wordsmith gave a generational assessment that gave his followers on social media some insight into how he sees the difference between old school and new school music, and how rappers of today approach drug culture differently than yesterday's emcees did.
"The generation gap on the music is actually really simple. We were in a era making drug dealer music... These kids are making drug user music," he wrote on Instagram. In the caption of the post Mad Skillz elaborated on how he gathers that the because the potent crack-cocaine was the drug of choice during rap's rise in the 1980's, it wasn't the kind of vice that one could juggle with their artistry. "crackheads couldn't make music," he wrote, before counterposing that, "these kids can function on the drugs they're using and still make music."
Drug culture in hip-hop has increasingly become a concern, particularly to older listeners. Back in May, Floyd Mayweather Jr. made headlines when during an interview with DJ Whoo Kid he said that it seems to him that in today's hip-hop "it’s OK to be a junkie.” Since then such artists as Russ and Wiz Khalifa have called on rappers to put down pills and lean.
