Friday, January 23, 2009
5:53 pm
Aneraé “X-Raided” Brown
Pleasant Valley State Prison
P.O. Box 8501
Coalinga, CA 93210
The Authentic Article
My people sent a bunch of comments to me from the Allhiphop.com message board, about the article written by Chris Richburg, published Friday, December 26, 2008 at 2:44 p.m. I want to address some of these comments.
I understand that we are in a new era, as far as the way music is distributed, so we will definitely be giving away some new music. Me and my producer, Filthy Rich, will be doing a mixtape once we finish the music for The Unforgiven 2. My lyrics are done; we’re just building the beats around the rhymes. Filthy Rich is knocking that out as we speak. Once we turn that in, we will knock out the mixtape and get it out there, for free, as quickly as possible. But first thing’s first.
The point of Eternally Unforgiven is to show everyone that I am an influential West Coast rapper, and always have been, I just haven’t been able to capitalize off of it, because I’m in prison. Go back and look at The Source Magazine and I bet you find Dr. Dre on one of them covers holding a gun to his head, just like my Psycho Active album cover. How many of y’all have ever influenced Dre? Look at Ronnin Ro’s book Have Gun Will Travel: The Rise and Fall of Death Row Records and see that Dr. Dre tried to buy the name Black Market Records from us be we wouldn’t swell it to him, so he named his company Aftermath Entertainment. Look at my Bloc Star logo and then look at The Game’s new Black Wall Street logo. You tell me he didn’t bite my logo. Put my albums in order of release against anyone, and you will see that I was a heavy influence on what they were doing. They don’t give me my props, but they bite my swag, and the proof is in the music. I take it as a compliment. I was obviously influenced by Dre, too. Before you put that in Negro Please, do the research or you will be the one who is ignorant. Prove me wrong; don’t just say I’m wrong.
Eternally Unforgiven is going to put things in perspective, as far as where I stand in comparison to your favorite rappers. Let’s look at my story, look at my mind, listen to my music, look at my face, and then you say whatever you believe to be true, once it’s all out on the table, and I don’t care how you get the music, as long as we have the conversation of whether or not it is true that X-Raided is the dopest MC on the West Coast. Once I prove that true, we can elevate this discussion, but the discussion will be had and the assertion will be made.
I don’t have any features on the new album. It’s just going to be me rhyming, Filthy Rich banging drums, and you listening. The artwork is done, the master is on the way to City Hall Records. I will give you the single and the artwork in the next few weeks, and you will have something to test my theory against. I am the best out west, I just haven’t been able to prove it becuz I have been locked up. But I’m about to prove it now, becuz where there is a will there is a way, and I want my voice to be heard, period. I’m rapping like my life depends on it, becuz it does. This is literally all I live for.
I never talked about a murder I committed in any song I wrote. That’s what the media said, but what they said and what really happened are two different things. I wrote a song, called Still Shooting, where I said, “I’m killing mamas, daddies and nephews/ I’m killing sons, daughters, and sparing you.” The song was about crack cocaine, the way it destroys families. They alleged that, because I said, “I’m killing mamas,” that I rapped about my crime, since it was someone’s mother who perished in the case I caught. Rest in peace, with great respect. Yet no one ever asked, if the song was about my case, then why didn’t any “daddies and nephews/ sons, daughters” die that night? How do you convince people that it was a coincidence, when anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law? It was just a coincidence but the media ran with it, and I never said a word because, back then, you weren’t supposed to.
A lot has happened in my life since then, a lot of maturing, and I’m proud of that. What was I supposed to do? Just stay an idiot? Like, was I supposed to go to prison and just be an uneducated beast while I served my time? At some point, as a man, you have to educate yourself, you have to realize that prison is a joke and you are being used to feed a system that desires your ruin. Prison is the Matrix and the human beings power it, in California. Locking us up is worth billions of dollars. Who would want to be a battery that is used to power a machine that eats your kind? So you either accept the illusion that the Matrix presents to you, that all prisoners are barbaric beasts, and you fall deeper into the madness that got you locked up in the first place, or you elevate yourself by reading, learning and maturing. I’d rather be a good dude just because I realize it’s the right thing to do than to be a foul person just because I’m hopeless. Mama didn’t raise that kind of son. So what was cool then was cool then, but what’s real right now is real right now, and that’s what I represent. This is grown man music you’re about to get to hear. Nobody’s spittin and writing how I’m spittin and writing unless you revive Pac and mash him with Scarface. I am the truest voice you’re gonna get, when it comes to speaking the soul of the struggle at its core. There is nothing more underground than making an album from prison, especially when you’re telling the truth, without being corny or conscious or even positive. It’s just the truth, and that’s often ugly, so this isn’t’ conscious, I’ve changed my life rap. This is introspective, hunger to be heard rap, like Mandela felt, on some Fu*k your system sh*t, something has to give, through the eyes of a dude who spent his entire life Crippin’ and doing time for bangin the hood. I’ve got credibility through the roof, and I’m not telling no lies.
My rhymes didn’t help get me convicted. The judge didn’t allow them to use my lyrics against me. The media played my songs on the news at night and you know the jury saw it, but it wasn’t in the courtroom. They got me by tainting the public’s perception of me as we built up to my trial and once it kicked off. What was happening in the media and what was happening in the courtroom were two different things, but the media trial turned out to be the death of me. At the time, Snoop was on trial, Pac has been convicted of rape, and Tyson was locked up for rape, and on top of that, O.J. was cutting throats… so they weren’t feeling me at the time, in Sacramento, the capitol of California, which is law enforcement central, where the laws are made and passed. We were up against something serious.
The media did say that the gun from my Psycho Active cover was the gun used in the commission of the crime, but that was not alleged in court. They never found a weapon. We were convicted without a gun and without anyone ever really saying who committed the crime.
The song that they used to arrest C-Bo was Deadly Game, which I wrote and taught to him. He was my celly at the reception center and he heard me spittin the song and liked it. He asked me for it and I gave it to him. It was to be used on Unforgiven 1, but I felt like C-Bo was about to explode, he was fresh off killin it with Pac on All Eyes On Me, and he promised to take care of me while I was down. I didn’t know if I would ever be able to make any more music at the time, so I gave him my entire rhyme book and he used a lot of different things from it. But, as far as that song that C-Bo was arrested for making, I wrote every word of it. It was an X-Raided song that C-Bo recorded, not a song I wrote for C-Bo. Like I said before, if you do the research before you just say Negro Please, you would know that I speak the truth. I don’t know what else y’all would want from a nig@a in this game. I’m being honest with you.
I came up in Hip Hop in a time when your real life was what you presented to the public. There wasn’t a stylist and a publicist or someone renting a house and car for your videos. Having a broad in your video or on your cover that wasn’t your people was blasphemous. Now, it’s like a big fantasy. Almost everyone’s lying to the fans, and it’s like, the fans will fight you if you try to wake them from that dream. People defend their right to be bamboozled. But when I came in the game, the homies in your video and photo shoots weren’t actors and models, they were the homies. No snitching, no lying, no betrayal, it was life and death. I’ve had a lot of learning experiences, coming to find out that people were only as serious as they could get away with being. They didn’t want to go so far that they gave their lives for this sh*t. I didn’t understand that then, that I expected more from them than they were capable of providing, but right now, these dudes are ridiculous. What happened to the nig@as speakin on the conditions in the hood, for real, speaking on the conditions of the families, speakin on the homies being dead and locked up and how senseless it is? No advocation, just observations and reporting about these facts of our lives? I didn’t know how much of an asset I could have been to my community until years after I was removed form it. My prefrontal cortex where recklessness is at in the brain wasn’t fully developed. How intelligent are you, man? Do you understand this sh*t?
Whoever buys the new music, praise God. I’m more concerned about knowing I said what I needed to say. These ain’t rhymes, these are the last words of a man intending to die for what he believes who wants to be heard before he goes. I’m releasing these albums and it’s like you are walking with me to the lethal injection table and as we go I am telling you, “Please stay out of trouble. Please be a good due. Please educate yourself. Please be a good father. Please stay free. Prison is bullshit, don’t listen to them dudes, they’re lying to you.” I am trying to tell you, before they kill me that this is a joke and all of us who have eve believe in it, are the butt of it. All of us who ever put a gang before our families, who ever died over something less important than being there for your blood relatives, all of us who chose fast money over plain old hard work, we are the butt of the joke, and before they kill me, I want to be able to say to God, “I told them, Lord. I told them all.” Selling records is collateral damage. I’m trying to say something that can be dug up and heard and someone can say, “This nig@a tapped into something real.” I am about to prove it, with Eternally Unforgiven, just to start it off, and after that I’m not playing games. I give good interview because I have a brain and I use it, and I give good rhyme because I have been blessed with an antenna that is picking up something your favorite rapper can’t hear because I have more solitude and silence to hear it than they do. Mark my words, I’m about to kill it lyrically, and Filthy Rich has my beats banging. I am out-rhyming and out-writing everyone in 2009. My right palm on the Qu’ran, left hand on the Bible, it’s true, on some hood sh*t, for my nig@as in the streets to ingest in the only form they can accept it, from one of their own, and for everyone else to bear witness to because they are invited to participate as well.
I’ve heard it said that I “blasted somebody’s grandmother or some beef sh*t.” That is incorrect.
May she rest in peace, a woman named Mrs. Patricia Harris was murdered by one out of a group of 12 men who ran up in her home looking for one of her sons, who were supposedly Meadowview Bloods. About six 29th Street and six 24th Street Crips, representing Garden Blocc. That’s real, real talk. I did not kill her. Four men were found guilty of killing one person who was shot with one bullet out of one gun. We couldn’t all have killed her, God rest her soul. No one does something like that on purpose. You dudes think in terms of fantasy, from your experience with video games and violence in movies. When things like this happen, I don’t care how much the perpetrators believe in what they represent, it is tragic, and we’re talking about people making huge, huge mistakes. If you kill a 25 year old woman accidentally and she has a child, you killed a mother. Let’s not get lost in semantics and syntax. A tragedy is a tragedy regardless of who it was that dies. If the Meadowview Blood boys died that night, it would have been a tragedy and a waste of human life and potential, and that’s not cool under any circumstances. Now, does that make me “soft” because I am telling you the truth? Or would you rather I lie and say how great it feels to kill a man and to be a murderer? How I’ll shoot 50 people over 50 cent in 50 songs for 50 minutes. Would you call me gangsta? If so, then you just need to go ahead and go back to sleep. You’re dreaming.
You all can tell me if Eternally Unforgiven is gangster. In the world I was raised in, gangster is a tricky thing. I’ll give you the artwork and the first single in a few more weeks, and you can tell m what you think as we go forward from there.
Thanks to everyone who commented. Ask all of the questions you want, I’m not biting my tongue. Whoever “aJ22” is, I need to hear form you. REST IN PEACE MARLENA BROOKS, no doubt.
Salaam
By Aneraé Brown ®2009
