I write on Medium because I enjoy writing. I don’t care much if anyone reads what I write; this is practice for me. I don’t get paid for my musings and I don’t make an effort to promote my articles. I have no interest in developing a following. I just enjoy writing about whatever it is that strikes my fancy on a given day, and I write primarily about the things I know best which are:
- Hip-hop: to be upfront with you, I hate a lot of today’s hip-hop, but I can’t call the hip-hop I grew up around in the ’80s and ’90s “old school”, because to me, that term is still used to refer to crews like Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five and pioneers like Afrika Bambaataa and Kool DJ Herc. Suffice it to say, I love hip-hop from the ’90s and ’00s, so you wont’ catch me writing about Lil Uzi Vert, Lil Pump, or any of these other Soundcloud clowns.
- Sports: my primary interests are the NFL, the NBA, and college basketball and football. Sorry, I loved baseball once, but that shit is boring. And hockey…naw.
- Business: I don’t love business the way some people do. I don’t read books by famous business leaders and I don’t subscribe to business magazines or resd the business section of the newspaper (please note, I do realize magazines and newspapers are not really much of a thing anymore, but I still refer to them when I really mean online shit). I also am not some stock market junkie. But I do know business pretty well, having served as a business consultant for a well-regarded consulting firm, worked in upper management at a large company, and attended a top-tier graduate school of business
This series “Businessman or Business, Man” looks to explore the intersection of my three interests, obviously taking its name from Jay-Z’s classic line, “I’m not a businessman, I’m a business, maaaan”. It was, like many of Jay-Z’s best lines, a masterful, timeless lyric that many recite to this day. Oh, how I miss the old Jay-Z.
The most influential period of my life was the 1990s and early 2000s, which I will always consider the golden age of hip-hop, as well as a tremendous period for sports, with transcendent stars like Jordan, Bird, and Magic in basketball, the dominant Yankees in baseball, and Barry Sanders and Bo Jackson in football. Back then, I had little interest in business, and it seemed many of my favorite ath;etes and entertainers had a smiliarly limited interest in business.
And then something changed, and every rapper and athlete seemed to become just as focused on business as they were their “primary” job (which are of course themselves businesses). I don’t blame them. If there is one thing it seems rappers and athletes have in common, it is relatively short careers (or peak years at least). And if there is another, it’s poor financial management abilities. I’m glad to see so many moving beyond that.
Michael Jordan may have been the one that changed the game. He was both a businessman and a business, man, and he became the model for many rappers and athletes to come. To this day, many aspire to realize the business success he achieved. I hate to break it to the starry-eyed kids of America though, the Ball family ain’t getting there.
But there are businessmen, men that are businesses, and there are also frauds. These days, every athlete, and especially every rapper, wants the world to believe they are business gurus, swimming in money like Scrooge McDuck, the money pouring in from the comes from a variety of well-constructed revenue streams. While I love the fact that there are many athletes and rappers that are managing their business affairs more effectively than ever before, I detest the fact that so many of them are straight up fronting. Why does it bother me so much? After all, many of my favorite rappers have been fronting for decades, be it about the drugs they sold or the people they killed. Why do their inflated claims of business prowess bother me? I don’t know, to be honest. In some regards, I think it’s because I don’t believe it’s good for kids to be mislead by their idols in such a manner.
Then again, maybe I shouldn't complain about bad business examples when the examples we used to get were more focused on drugs and violence. There is of course as much of that as ever, only now it seems it’s cooler to be fiends than to serve the fiends, at least to have 21 Savage tell it.
Maybe I’m just getting old and have to pick everything apart. That could very well be it. Please hold, there is a cloud I have to go shake my fist at.
I just think it’s funny that we give our favorite entertainers credit well beyond what they deserve for their business prowess, without ever critically analyzing their bsuinesses. And maybe what bothers me most. It isn’t that a rapper leads people to believe he owns a vodka company or a basketball team, but rather that so many today are so naive and gullible that they don’t even question things. Seriously, kids seem to think if they see it on social media, it’s real.
Case in point, the other day, there was an IG post that Lavar Ball had entered into a partnership with a Lithuanian bottled water company. The comments blew my mind. Kids assumed that Ball had acquired the company and owned it. And then, when I commented that I didn’t think the deal would prove lucrative for Ball, a kid told me Lavar would “be on the Forbes”. I asked him to clarify whether he meant Ball would be on the Forbes List or in Forbes maagzine, two very different things, and I think he’s still confused by my question. “I said he’d be on the Forbes, idiot”, he’s probably yelling while playing Fortnite.
So I’ve decided to look at the three subjects I hold most dear, as outlined above, in an effort to analyze some of our favorite celebrities and determine if they are businessmen (or women), businesses maannnnn, or just frauds. And here is how I define each:
- Businessman- a business man or woman makes intelligent, strategic decisions and investments in order to build his or her net worth. Perhaps at one point n time, this person was the hottest thing out, but they found a way to make intelligent business decisions in order to transform that temporary shine into a long-term business platform.
- Business, maaan- someone who is a business, maaaaannnnn, may very well just be someone who is hot for a moment in time. This person is smart to capitalize on their moment, as they know it may have an expiration date, but being hot for a minute is very different than being a good businessperson. It’s very possible, in fact even likely, that this person made a number of bad business decisions and investments while they were hot. And now, maybe they are still getting by…or maybe they aren’t.
- Fraud- someone who is a straight-up front. This person loves to connect their name to a business every chance they get. On every radio interview. On every social media platform. However they can get it out there, they will, and they will be the first (and loudest) to tell you about their business. They’ll be the ones posting inspirational messages on IG or maybe “profound”, “empowering” messages such as “If you work hard on your job, you can make a living. But if you work hard of [sic] yourself, you can make a fortune”. Yes, the grammar mistake is included, because it’s almost always in there (though it usually falls under the “your/you’re” or “their/there” category). But if you take the time to critically think about this person and their claims, you’ll quickly realize they’re frauds.
In this series, I’ll examine several celebrities. I won’t choose them at random, though. They’ll be celebrities from my world, so don’t expect an analysis of Donald Trump’s business ventures (as if that hasn’t been done enough already) or of Tiger Woods’. Like I said, I write about what I know, and the segments of this world that I have an interest in, so you can expect to see my take on Jay-Z, Puffy (he’s still Puffy to me), Cam’ron, Lebron James, Lavar Ball, Young Jeezy (yes, he’ll always be young to me), possibly DJ Khaled, 50 Cent, and more. Maybe I’ll take on Kanye, but don’t expect me to anlalyze any of the Kardashian crew. Maybe I’ll tackle Rick Ross, but I won’t go after the cast of Shark Tank. And of course there are some people whose business acumen I won’t dare question, starting with Michael Jordan and Magic Johnson.
I’ll let you know who I think is a businessman, who is a business, maaaaan, and who is, simply put, a fraud. At times, it may sound like I don’t respect or like any of these celebrities, but that’s not the case. Not at all in fact. I just like to be critical of people and nobody is off-limits. Maybe that’s why I like Michale Che so damn much.
But I’m old now and I’m cranky, and I miss the old hip-hop, where rappers didn’t rap about their investments, unless they were buying kilos of coke to flip. Cam’ron math. Foxy and The Firm math.
I like my athletes like Iverson, not like Lebron. My rappers like Scarface, not like…well almost any of today’s rappers.
Nowadays we’ve got Lebron talking about his movie studio’s next venture rather than talking shit like Gsry Payton, and we’ve got Young Jeezy talking about his investments in bottled water and healthy smoothies, when all I want to hear is what he can turn seventeen-five into.
So let’s get to it.