Stop fronting! Be yourself!
This one is about something that alot of artists have issues with. Especially beginners because usually when you start off you have alot to learn and you usually start off by immitating what you see and most of the time its the stuff that you see coming out of the Music Industry.
Hiphop culture has kind of a competitive vibe to it with the rap battles, diss tracks, raw lyrics, etc. and being bigger than life is kind of part of the culture's reality. Now as time went by, the industry mingled with the artform and they created some kind of a monster that only reflects the shinny aspect of hiphop reality. A reality of gangstaz, pimps, playaz, bitches, Hoes, dons, bosses, thugz, etc. A big spectacle where everybody shows of their bad bitches, jewlery, clothes, cars, money and all the rest of that materialistic crap the industry sells to people. For the average young joe starting off it can be quite confusing to understand where they stand and how to project themselves to the world, especially if they're not about that life.
But I say, stay optimistic, because you dont have to be all that to be an interesting artist. This is gonna sound cliché but, all you gotta do is be you. Now what I mean by that is, show off your qualities. For example: if your a funny guy, rap about funny stuff! There's no point in you going out rap about serious issues if 80% of the time your all about comedy. I mean...we all have serious shit go on in our lives but what I mean is, use those events to talk about serious stuff. The trick is to take what you got and make the best of it.
And lets say for example you wanna talk about stuff that hasn't really happened to you in your life you can always go the "Story Track" way and write fictional stories where you can go crazy and make your charaters do anything.
So whatever you do, its better to stay you and understand that if you leverage your qualities, skills & true stories, properly you will never have to put on a front because the real you will be out there and that is the authentic you and authenticity, my friend, is bulletproof.
