Tribute to the Overweight Lover...

Cut down by pneumonia. It reminds me of the verses during Job’s travail:

Job 8:9 (For we [are but of] yesterday, and know nothing, because our days upon earth [are] a shadow:)

Job 14:1 "Man [who is] born of woman Is of few days and full of trouble.

Job 14:2 He comes forth like a flower and fades away; He flees like a shadow and does not continue.

I have the unique recollection of being in high school (yes, I wasn’t born an adult) when the first rap song “King Tim the III: Personality Jock” (You Tube here; Wikipedia here) and the first rap album “The Sugar Hill Gang” (You Tube here, Wikipedia here) came out. It made my senior year in high school absolutely crazy. Everybody was rapping; everybody had a “beat box”; people were breaking their necks/winding up in ER break dancing.

It’s conventional wisdom that Sugar Hill invented rap. No, it had been around in Be Bop and Beat Poetry: The Watts Prophets; The Last Poets and Gil Scott-Heron.

It originally meant “Rhythm And Poetry.” Hip-Hop wasn’t a lifestyle or a culture: it’s what you did when the song played (as in danced). It had nothing to do with guns, gangs, sex or drugs. It did come out in 1979, 11 years after the death of Martin Luther King: I think we were trying to find our way as a culture, with grace and dignity.

As Heavy D described it once, Rap was our Opera, because like Opera it originated from the streets. It was meant to be our version of CNN, telling the real deal going on in the ‘hood without becoming a minstrel show. That ended when the record executives got hold of it; warped it and made it the parade of clowns dragging their pants below their waists it is now. (See the Real History of Sagging)

Heavy D was the “Overweight Lover,” giving dignity to plus sizes. He was losing weight for his health I heard this morning on the Tom Joyner Morning Show. But notice at the BET Awards: he’s not cursing, he’s not demeaning women, he’s not representing his ‘hood, he's not flashing sets; he’s not acting at all like a gangster: he looks as if he’s enjoying himself. Nobody's asking young people not to enjoy themselves. If you practice acting like a gangster, you will eventually be one, and part of the prison industrial complex. According to the Thirteenth Amendment of the Constitution: that makes you a voluntary slave.

Before you buy another CD or download another song: think about what you’re filling your minds with. You become what you meditate on:

Pro 23:6 Do not eat the bread of a miser, Nor desire his delicacies;

Pro 23:7 For as he thinks in his heart, so [is] he. "Eat and drink!" he says to you, But his heart is not with you.

Rest in peace with the Prince of Peace, Heavy D!