It’s all fun and games until somebody gets hurt, right?
Multi-platinum New Orleans rapper Lil Wayne was hospitalized last week after suffering a seizure. After being cleared by doctors to leave the hospital, Wayne endured another seizure Friday that put him back in the hospital.
And that’s where the story gets weird.
Once Wayne was rushed to Cedar-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, TMZ starting reporting that his condition was worsening and that he was close to death.
They even went so far as to report that Wayne’s mom was on a plane to L.A. because her son was being read his last rites.
Seeing that Wayne is one of the world’s most popular musicians, when this news was reported, it sent Twitter into a frenzy.
To give an idea of how chaotic Twitter became, when Wayne gave a glimpse of his condition by tweeting that he was “good” and thanked fans for their prayers, his tweet became the third most “re-tweeted” item in Twitter’s history. Let’s us know just how much the news has changed.
While Wayne was busy tweeting from his sleep, TMZ reported that Wayne was sleeping while his tweet was being sent, his friends and family were quickly building a case against the big, bad TMZ.
Rapper Clifford Harris, better known as T.I., was the first to call the infamous news organization out on their supposed lies. In a tweet to update fans on Wayne’s condition, T.I. said that he spoke to Wayne and that he was “skraight.”
Skipping over the wordsmith’s obvious disregard for propriety, T.I. went on to toss an arsenal of tweets laced with graphic language and racial epithets aimed at the heart of TMZ’s offensive “reporting” of Wayne’s condition.
After that, a chorus of fans and others within the music industry co-signed Clifford’s words of anger, saying that TMZ’s discount for Mr. Carter’s family was unforgivable.
Am I the only one who is thinking that this situation is a little… melodramatic? The act of death can never be over played because it has no sequel. But when a rapper who speaks about death in almost every record, scorns an organization for falsely reporting the failing condition of another rapper who does the same, you’ll have to excuse my inability to empathize.
Maybe I shouldn’t say empathize because death is so final, but the hypocrisy intertwined in this story stops short of laughable.
I’ll refrain from taking the traditional route of proving how reckless these men can be in their songs by quoting lyrics because, if you’re reading this article, you either know of these two or you’ve heard some of their songs.
But don’t level criticism about reckless reporting when your life is a direct representation of irresponsibility. Wayne is already in trouble because of a lyric he spat defaming the name of Civil Rights hero Emmitt Till.
Bottom line is that I didn’t like the situation; more so on the side of the criticizers than the organization reporting the news.
Maybe this is a lesson in how Twitter should be an unofficial source of reporting or that we shouldn’t believe every single thing that comes out of the mouth of entertainers or an entertainment organization.
Or maybe I’m just a stubborn fan of rap who is just tired of hypocrisy and inanity, and shouldn’t expect so much from those that I give my time and ears to.
-JH
