Writer-Shaming, Part 1: The Non-Issue of Ghostwriters

Jason Tougaw

Kanye performing with a bunch of faceless ghosts behind him – wow, symbolism! (image credit: Flickr)

On September 14th, rapper/singer/producer/actor/apparent Renaissance Man Kid Cudi was in a storm of feelings, and, like most people who have Twitter, he let his followers know it via a Twitter rant. Although most of his tweets consisted of empty boasting and vague proclamations such as “The days of the fuckery are over”, some of Cudi’s more lucid comments struck a nerve with many in the hip hop community.

He would clarify who “everyone” was when he added:

Kanye West (affectionately known as “’Ye”), is a surprising target for Cudi’s unprovoked attack. Kid Cudi was inseparable from Kanye in 2008, when Kanye’s manager Plain Pat introduced the two and Cudi’s then-unheard-of blend of melodious, introspective rapping (sometimes known as “emo rap”) was a major influence when the pair worked on Kanye’s album 808’s & Heartbreak. Cudi released three highly-successful albums under Kanye’s record label GOOD Music before amicably departing from the label in 2013, although the pair remained friends and collaborated earlier this year on two songs from Kanye’s The Life of Pablo album. In an April interview with Billboard, Cudi said, “I’m really happy to be back working with my friends”.

Having recently rediscovered the importance of friends, Kanye was understandably shocked, responding, “I feel so disrespected. Kid Cudi, we two black men in a racist world” during a concert only a few hours after Cudi’s tweets.

Drake, on the other hand, hasn’t had much of a collaborative relationship with Cudi, although his trademark emotive sing-rap style is an obvious descendant of Cudi’s influence. Nonetheless, he dismissed Cudi’s statements by noting that he and Kanye “both got sold out shows”. So Kanye invoked racism and African-American solidarity in order to extend an informal olive branch, and Drake used his commercial success as an excuse to ignore Cudi.

Unsurprisingly, they both side-stepped the actual issue Cudi was bringing up, which was that they had “people write songs for them”. Perhaps realizing this (or simply having given more thought to it), Kanye has since tried to put the issue to rest, saying to an audience at a concert less than a week later, “Kid Cudi is my brother”. He even sang “my brother” in Auto-Tune, so you know he means it. But Drake, of course, is no stranger to these kinds of accusations. We’re only a year and a few months removed from Drake’s heavily publicized beef with Philadelphia rapper Meek Mill last summer, which began on July 21, 2015, when Meek alleged that a ghostwriter named Quentin Miller had written the rap lyrics for Drake’s guest appearance on Meek’s song “R.I.C.O.”

Hold up, hold up. What’s a “ghostwriter”?

If you’ve ever started to write an essay (or a blog post for QC Voices) the night before it was due, you’ve probably glanced over a couple of Internet advertisements for ghostwriters as you were scrambling for sources to fill up your Works Cited page. They’re people you can pay to do your writing for you, and they let you put your name on the finished product.

Okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay! So when Drake used a ghostwriter, he was in violation of the CUNY Policy on Academic Integrity! So he got expelled, right?

No, Drake didn’t go to CUNY. And Meek Mill isn’t a CUNY administrator, he’s a rapper. Ghostwriting is totally legal. But hip hop holds itself to a higher standard, or at least Meek Mill thinks it does. Although adamantly denying the allegations, Drake’s longtime collaborator and producer Noah “40” Shebib sympathized on some level with Meek, tweeting:

The root of Meek Mill’s issue with Drake was that by using a ghostwriter, Drake had committed a sin against what Meek believed was hip hop’s unspoken rule that the artist be genuine by using his/her own words. It was a violation of hip hop that Meek wasn’t willing to stand for.

As it turned out, the feeling wasn’t mutual. Days later, hip hop stood by and watched complacently as Drake violated Meek Mill for the entire world to see.

Fans of Meek Mill are still agonizing over Drake’s summary execution of him on “Back to Back”, a noncommercial diss track that was so soul-crushingly good it out-sold any song Meek has ever done. It even got nominated for a Grammy. The final nail in the coffin was when Meek buried himself alive with the misguided response diss track “Wanna Know”, trying to refocus the argument over Drake’s legitimacy as a writer when audiences had already stopped caring. Not only did Meek lose the battle, he lost the war.

But the truth is that, while rappers often stress the importance of being “real”, and despite Shebib’s heartfelt statement about the supposed “stigma”, hip hop has never had much of a grudge against ghostwriters. Eazy-E, Puff Daddy and Dr. Dre were all regular patrons of ghostwriters. At the same time, none of them have denied this. Drake, on the other hand, cleverly avoided leveling with Meek on the issue of ghostwriting during their beef, consistently dodging the question. It was only after he had been unanimously crowned the victor that he conceded in an interview with The Fader that, “Music at times can be a collaborative process”.

Well, no shit.

Drake’s recent album Views has over 40 credited writers on it. “Credited” means, of course, not including any uncredited ghostwriters. And that number’s not even close to Kanye’s, whose The Life of Pablo has over a hundred credited writers.

cudi

So Kid Cudi’s “30 people” does, in fact, have some weight behind it. But he’s still making a familiar mistake by assuming that people care how many writers it took to make a song – and he is assuming that people care, because he just tweeted it out to all of his followers. And he just made enemies out of two of the biggest rappers of all time: one who helped build Cudi’s career, and one who has a reputation for ending careers.

 

Kid Cudi autographs a magazine (image credit: Flickr)