Urban Radio is a Job, The Ghetto is a Lifestyle, One in the Same?

… it’s no different than surviving the ghetto..
Kevin Ross

The other day, I was in a rush to make it to a meeting when I stopped off to pay my past due electric bill. It was just one of those things that you know you have to take care of but for some reason you wait until the last minute and it always ends up costing you more, then you have the nerve to complain about YOUR mistake (laugh)

In the Ghetto.. Nobody’s Smilin’

Growing up in, what I like to call the EPITOME of a ghetto taught me my survival skills and it also destroyed future opportunities for me. The Towne Garden Apartments in Buffalo, New York is a place that I would have shock therapy to forget.

I learned early on that the world was against me and every day was a fight for survival: personally, spiritually and physically. The minute you walked out the door, you were walking into a war zone and being friendly, kind or against the grain were grounds to be destroyed. I leaned to have an edge with my personality that served to protect but moreover harm me in future.

Many of us grew up the same way; we learned to always be on guard and to never express gratitude or kindness, as they are traits and signs of weaknesses in the ghetto. I say all that to say we have been mislead, lied to and bamboozled by our OWN thinking. Thinking this way will not only lead to but will guarantee failure, frustration, cynicism and bitterness in the short term AND the long run.

Top 6 Rules of the Ghetto I learned in Buffalo:

1. Doing anything besides selling drugs, being a ho/stripper, in a gang, a pimp or doing jail time is unacceptable.
2. Success is only permissible as a rap artist and a football or basketball player who maintains his ghetto mentality, thug lifestyle, poor communication skills and who spends his money mostly on cars, jewelry, clothes and quality drugs and guns.
3. A college degree, high school diploma, volunteer work, job, eating salads, vegetables or fruits is completely unacceptable. As a ghettonian, you are only allowed to eat fried food loaded with saturated fat, pork, fatback, cereal, sweets and artery-clogging triple cheeseburgers and you have to be unemployed and live with your mother, grandmother or girlfriend after the age of 18..
4. A positive attitude, smiling or helping an old lady across the street is grounds for death.
5. If you are a success, you must keep cousin “I-was-Shot-10-Times,” Jewquisha, Crackella, Murderonnie and Man Man as your management team handling and destroying all your business deals. Their goal has to be to drag you right back to the bottom of the barrel by helping you spend your money and advising you of all the people who are out to steal from you to take your attention off of them.
6. An added bonus is to get arrested WHILE you are a success. This ensures your ghetto dedication and retardation for giving up a Ritz Carlton hotel suite for a pissy smelling jail cell where you can live a secret lifestyle that you will oppose and speak out against when you are freed. Your acceptance as a true ghettonian is in your ability to be extremely negative, cynical and to give everything up in order to come back home to the wonderful ghetto lifestyle described above.

OK, the above might be a bit over the top, maybe not

I visited an urban radio station the other day for the first time in four years and while it was exciting for me to see black celebrities walking around, music and aspects of the industry that I have always loved, there were traces of that old familiar attitude that I so well recall as a kid growing up and my early days of working at the former mom and pop black stations.

Black men looking at other black men suspiciously as they got off the elevator and black women going through the motions of having a source of income and a job (sans a “career”) not smiling and bitter. There were certainly exceptions to the rule but the energy that prevails is the energy that sets the tone.

The negative energy was strong. There will be people pissed at me for saying that but if you get pissed at me for saying it, it’s most likely that you are one of these people. That “edge”immediately made me a bit tense and I felt compelled to turn on MY edge to assimilate within environment. To say the least, none of us like to feel uncomfortable and when we have to become accustomed to these environments, there is personal hell to pay.

When I sat down to talk to these people, the brother was optimistic, had great communication skills and he was on-the-job politically savvy, the sister was a bit unfriendly and edgy.