In the ghetto but not of the ghetto

This goes out to popular culturists, particularly artistes that have navigated out of the ghetto to the front page. Your songs play on our radios and your videos beam on our screens everyday while your concerts draw multitudes. Well, I’m challenging you today to use your influence to help the lost generation.

Artistes like these can use their platform and appeal to transform lives

Let me begin by saying I'm not going to congratulate you on that popular video in which you are surrounded by half-naked women taking turns to rub their bums on your crotch. You are swinging and swigging on a hard liquor bottle only pausing to smoke a Cuban cigar and exhale its smog through your nostrils. You are wearing a buggy t-shirt with words "Baad Boy" below the picture of a man with a pointed pistol. I'm not congratulating you because that projection may seem right to you but it actually is destructive.

I know you have got to hunt your meat, you know, put food on the table. But there is a better way of doing it than promoting alcoholism, drugs and debauchery. If the ghetto is colourful like you glorify it in your songs and videos, why do you live in a mansion and drive a Lexus while your ghetto friends have nowhere to lay their heads?

Before his spiritual metamorphosis, a friend of mine then known as Badda was so obsessed with Tupac Shakur that he smoked weed and started the Anti-Bitch Club (ABC) at school because his icon was a dope head that cussed and called women bitches. Just like Tupac was to Badda, you are role models to many and your conduct on and off stage has a profound positive or negative impact on your fans for which you’ll continue to be celebrated or disparaged.

I know it has been tough and the haters are many but that is life. Since the fall of man, the world has known nothing but violence, poverty, disease, unfairness and death. The rich and the poor alike commit suicide or get ravaged by all forms of intoxicants and substances. But your success and survival is testimony that even though you were born in the ghetto, as Jesse Jackson once put it, the ghetto was not born in you.

It is therefore your moral duty to use the platform and massive talent God has endowed you with to inspire the uninspired. Beef is not helping us. Give us love and encouragement, and we shall sing along into a better world and future.