Touré has an excellent piece in Time about the life of a contemporary musician. Using Whitney Houston’s death as his point of departure, he looks at how the physical demands of fame are taking their toll on performers. Rick Ross and Questlove are his central examples, but their grueling routines (and the health consequences) are becoming the norm for artists throughout the music industry. As Questlove puts it, “I’m not worried about bullets, I’m worried about strokes. Strokes are the new bullets.”
This is the side of the industry that people don’t fully appreciate. The Teflon Don might make it look easy, but it definitely isn’t.
The hip hop community in particular needs to start thinking about the related issues of health and aging. Yes, a few rappers get shot/murdered, but hip hop has lost so many talents to preventable diseases, HIV-AIDS, obesity, and a lack of health care. The problem is only going to get worse as the pioneers of hip hop form the 1970s and 1980s begin to reach retirement age. There is no pension, health care, or retirement benefits in the rap game. Remember in 2010-2011 DJ Kool Herc, arguably the creator of hip hop, almost died because he couldn’t afford surgery for kidney stones. Very few millionaire rappers, fans, or record labels came to his aid.
Ow yeah. Timo has performed in New York but he was part of the team then but his eieprxence has definetly impacted greatly in the plans having the team trying to get as nuch appearances as possible outside the Cape region.Last year after Taycee’s passing we picked up and headed to the Eastern Cape to a small town called Cala. A local radio station has been supporting Alicelibo Music since 2008 when we started sending them material.They invited us over and we gave a killer performance. The\ greatest eieprxence about it all was having different artists from the samll towns around the small cities opening up the gig for us and the support they shown to these Cape borners.The challenges of having gigs outside our region is basically accomodation and transport eieprxenced by those requesting us to visit and perform in their ares.Other than than we always find a way to make the exeperience as smooth as possible.