Wale, The Iraq War, and the Art of Deception

The Iraq War is so old even its protests are dated.

A lot of jokes were made when President Obama announced that all U.S. troops would leave Iraq by the end of the year. The game goes like this. Think of one of your favorite things from the year 2003 and revel in the manic depression that arises when you realize how dated everything else from 2003 has become. The Ipod was fresh and new (without a click wheel) and the Detroit Tigers were busy attempting to avoid being immortalized for baseball ineptitude, Jay-Z released The Black Album as his walk-out music, and T.I. was still rapping about the trap with his album Trap Muzik before he became a mega-star, stopped rapping about the trap, and THEN got locked up twice for guns and drugs. Needless to say, times have changed since 2003 and it's depressing to think one of the more constant presences of my life has been the Iraq War.

While plenty of things have come, gone, and been completely forgotten in the time it took America to fight the Iraq War, some things have just changed shape, and one of the perfect examples of this in hip-hop is the transformation of Wale from a hyped member of XXL's Freshman Class in 2009 to a disappointing debut album to a member of the Maybach Music Group.

In 2007, Wale released The Mixtape About Nothing and to this day it's one of my favorite mixtapes. Everything about it made Wale stand out. It was lyrical while avoiding the pitfall of appearing to try to hard and it was conscious but in a way that was truly genuine and creative. I still believe 'The Kramer' is a masterpiece that many rappers would be hard pressed to match. In essence, I thought Wale was J. Cole before J. Cole.

Wale "Nike Boots" video (Directed by Chris Robinson) from Elitaste on Vimeo.

On 'The Roc Boys Freestyle' Wale showed off all of his capabilities and rapped about everything under the sun, but for the purposes of this topic one line always stood out.

And they never going to leave like the troops in Iraq.

Burying a line speaking out against the Iraq War is nothing particularly special in hip-hop for this time period. Even Jay-Z was questioning it as early as 2003 in 'Beware of the Boys'. But the stretch of tracks on Mixtape About Nothing that spans from 'The Freestyle' to 'The Kramer' perfectly encapsulated why I was sure Wale was destined to be one of my favorite rappers of the next decade.

But when you're wrong you're wrong. Attention Deficit, all label missteps aside, was a disappointment. It wasn't 28,000 sold in the first week terrible, but let's just say I hadn't given it much of a listen outside of the week it was released until I wrote this.

Many, myself included, thought Wale would drift into obscurity. More About Nothing failed to recapture the exuberance and freshness of its predecessor, and Wale sounded more intent on telling everyone they were failing to recognize his talent than actually displaying that talent that everyone knew was there. And in comes Rick Ross.

If there is anyone who knows something about fabrication, it's Rick Ross. When Wale signed to Maybach Music, it signaled the end of the Wale that many of his early fans were interested in and ushered in a Bawse'd version. This version has become more focused on telling everyone how great he is rather than creating evidence to back that claim.

The title of Wale's new album and it's subsequent content is a perfect description of what kind of rapper he has become. Wale certainly thinks he's fantastic. I know this because he keeps telling me. Like I told George Bush and Dick Cheney, you can't just keep telling me something and expect me to believe it. At some point you have to actually prove what you claim. You're either good at rapping, or you're not. Iraq either has weapons of mass destruction or they don't. Same thing, right?

As is par with course of Wale in the past few years since he joined the self-aggrandizing universe that is the Maybach Music Group, Wale keeps telling everyone how great he is and at times he's right. 'DC Or Nothing' is actually one of my current favorite songs. The line: 'Seen it over a dollar/Got him under a flower' is a gem. And its no coincidence that the strongest song on the album is a song where Wale turns the lens away from himself and points it outward. What was great about Wale was that his personality was strong enough that he didn't need to be the focus of his music to give it a stamp that was unquestionably his. This certainly isn't the rapper I saw in 2007 at The Shelter in Detroit who made a joke about how all the light-skinned girls were at another venue for a Drake performance nearby.

It's clear that Wale still has the potential to be great and to be fair on Mixtape About Nothing, he was cocky. But he was also bent on proving why he was cocky. Today, Wale seems more bitter that with Attention Deficit he took a shot and missed. In many ways he's still trying to escape that failure and his attempt to completely reinvent himself with Ambition proves just that.

But at least now we know a hip-hop career can rise, fall, reinvent itself, and rise again in the course of half the time it takes to fight an unpopular war with false justification.