Between a fact and an asshole, by Bayo Omisore

By Bayo Omisore

Almost a decade ago, I was with my friend Ayeni Adekunle at Tunde and Wunmi Obe’s crib. He’d had designs for a newspaper that would report entertainment and they were talking about journalism in general. At some point, I told them something that I’d freestyled at the time but eventually built up as a mantra. I told them I was not a journalist and that I was a writer.

There’s always going to be a difference between a Michael Crichton (Jurassic Park) and Fareed Zakaria (Newsweek). Michael had this fantastic idea that leaned heavily on prehistoric animals that once ruled the world. He brought them back to life through his book and it was eventually taken to the big screen by Steven Spielberg earning hundreds of millions of dollars at the Box Office. Fareed, on the other hand, as a writer, has written extensively about the Middle East and, despite being an authority on the subject, I doubt any of his writings is being made into a movie.

The point I’m trying to make here is that with fiction or opinion pieces, there is a lot of head room, legroom and wiggle room. Not so with fact or non-fiction. The problem I have with most Nigerian blogs and bloggers is that nothing is sacred anymore. Nobody does any research, they are fucking armchair journalists. Strange enough, right there where you sit with your laptop and your modem, you have the Internet at your beck-and-call. Google, unlike the Nigerian Police, is truly your friend.

So I’m thumbing through my phone early Tuesday morning doing my regular morning Twitter ritual when I saw a tweet from Noble Igwe. Apparently Kendrick Lamar had caused uproar with a verse on a Big Sean’ song and 360nobs had been nice enough to write about it. Being a Hip-Hop head and an institution, I clicked on the link and started to read. I could have read the entire thing and moved on with my life if my eyes hadn’t caught the phrase ‘core rap may have slowed down compared to other genres like pop and hip-hop’. I was thoroughly confused. There’s a genre called core rap and another one called hip-hop?

I come from an era when the Internet was a luxury. I got all my information from magazines, music, rare interviews and MTV. So what would it take for this writer to do his due diligence before acting all intelligent on blogosphere? I quickly assumed this was plain ol’ naivete, even though I’m not one to condone such laxity. But at the end of the day, I found out, to my annoyance, that the same ignorance that is killing us as a nation had reared its ugly head again.

I buzzed his boss Noble Igwe, who just so happens to be my dude, and asked him to copy the writer of the article so he could explain himself on the one hand and get an education on the other hand.

I couldn’t understand what he meant by ‘The days when rappers sold millions are no more’ when Jay Z just moved a million units without printing a CD barely a month ago. What’s worse, he said, ‘Hip-Hop is rap with more singing and more bounce’. And his examples of practitioners of this ‘art’ according to him are Chris Brown and Pitbull. (There’s more. Please check my timeline @bayoomisore and his @Wana__.)

I couldn’t take it anymore so I begged his oga Nobs to rescue me from him.

And then, Noble, someone I’ve respected for some time now, who has lent a helping hand even back when it was short notice and he didn’t have to, said something that caught me by surprise.

‘Bayo, what’s wrong?’, he asked. ‘He’s just a writer who has put down his PERSONAL opinion and posted same.’

Which brings me to my destination. Since when did an opinion become a fact or a fact an opinion for that matter? If, as a writer, I opine that Mr. Igwe’s first name is Rufus, will the fact that I’m a damn good writer change Mr. Igwe’s name from Noble?

Back to the matter, the FACT of the matter is that, Wana’s opinion is laden with fallacies and falsehoods. There is no such thing as core/ pure rap. Modenine is probably a pure rapper and M.I a Hip-Hop rapper in Wana’s books. That is pure garbage. Hip-Hop, my dear friends, is not a genre. It is a culture; a way of life. It includes rap, the mouthpiece of the culture. If you don’t know, get an education and cease from confusing people.

I, Adebayo Omisore, an authority in Hip-Hop, have spoken!