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Following the release of his new album, The Emperor’s New Clothes, Raekwon, a famed member of the Wu-Tang Clan, appeared on the popular talk show Nightcap.
One of the topics that Raewkwon discussed with Shannon Sharpe and Chad Ochocinco was the state of the hip-hop genre. During that discussion, music star Post Malone was brought to the forefront.
Raekwon Gets Honest About Post Malone
Malone’s 2016 smash hit, “White Iverson,” catapulted him to superstardom. He has collaborated with some of the top artists such as Young Thug, Doja Cat, and Quavo. But despite collabing with some of the top artists in the genre, Raekwon isn’t considered that Post Malone classifies as a rapper.
“Prime example, and this ain’t s******g on nobody. Post Malone, right?. I love him as an artist. And if you look him up in the dictionary or Google or whatever, they call him an American rapper. Now my thing is, when I think of Post Malone, he’s singing all the time. Not taking anything away from him. Or saying that he can’t rhyme, but all of that is something else,” he said.
“You see what I’m saying? See how the white boys do the rock? You got contemporary rock, punk rock, you got all these different types of rock. But when it comes to hip-hop, everything ya’ll n****s is calling hip-hop, it ain’t hip-hop, bro.”
Rap Star Gets Honest About Album Inspiration
Raekwon also went on to say that the misclassification of artists like Malone was part of the inspiration for his new album.
“This is why I call my album The Emperor’s New Clothes. My new album is called The Emperor’s New Clothes because, you see, The Emperor’s New Clothes is a Dutch folktale about deception. The king got hoodwinked. He got hoodwinked. He’s sitting there with all this vanity, and vanity turns into ego, and next thing you know, you become weird,” he said.
“You start to forget the roles and principles because your ego is so big that you, at the end of the day, these guys came to sell you some clothes that weren’t real. But you knew they weren’t real. But your ego allowed you to sit here and try something that wasn’t right.”
He also added:
“So the bottom line is what I’m saying is we gotta stop falling for sucker s**t. For stupid s**t. For s**t that ain’t hip-hop, that we classify as hip-hop.”
