#canitalkmyshitagain

Before 2016, music was still physical. That matter. Drake’s first run from So Far Gone to IYRTITL had weight on it because people actually lived with those projects. Burned CDs in the Altima. DatPiff downloads sitting in a dusty laptop folder. iTunes purchases synced to an iPod with a cracked screen and somebody auntie baby shower pictures on it. You owned the music. Or your patna did. So the albums stayed outside longer. So Far Gone carried all through 2009 like cigarette smoke in a leather jacket. Thank Me Later had a full summer attached to it. Take Care practically soundtracked the winter of 2011. NWTS owned nighttime in 2013. IYRTITL lasted damn near all of 2015 because streaming hadn’t fully turned music into disposable content yet. Then Meek tweeted. Funny how one tweet shifted rap history more than half these fake “eras” niggas be marketing now. Drake won the battle clear, but that Quentin Miller stain never really came out the fabric. You could hear the confidence change after that. Views felt less like an artist presenting a statement and more like somebody trying to survive expectation. Hotline Bling got stapled onto the album like bonus points on a final exam. More Life came with a disclaimer before the music even dropped. “It’s a playlist.” That was the pivot right there. Drake stopped trusting his ability to present a cohesive body of work and started making projects designed for extraction. Pick your favorite three songs, throw them in your Apple Music rotation, keep it moving. Even Scorpion felt like a reaction to pressure instead of a vision. And that’s after the Scary Hours pack, after Diplomatic Immunity, after God’s Plan accidentally becoming bigger than he probably expected, after Push stepped on the rollout with Infrared and then backed a Brinks truck over the boy soul with Story of Adidon. Ever since then, every Drake project feel like it was assembled in the middle of turbulence. CLB sounded defeated before it even dropped. Honestly, Nevermind literally titled itself like a shrug. Her Loss the first time in years he sounded awake again, like the competitive spirit came back for a minute. FATD went right back to playlist energy. Bloated. Unfocused. Some records cool in the moment while you driving down 45 at 1:38 AM with the windows cracked, but no real staying power. That’s the difference people don’t wanna talk about because streaming numbers became the new championship rings. Drake still dominates attention, but dominance ain’t the same thing as impact. The old Drake albums felt like seasons of your life. The new ones feel like content updates. And somewhere after 2015, the boy stopped sounding like somebody making classics and started sounding like somebody trying to outpace the algorithm. That’s a different kind of hunger. You can hear it too. Humans really turned music into fast food and then act confused when nothing sticks to the ribs anymore.:::

it feels like somewhere along the line we stopped thinking for ourselves and started performing our thoughts instead, and it wasn’t some dramatic shift either, it was quiet, almost unnoticeable, just a slow drift into this space where everything has to be packaged before it’s even fully formed, where every idea is less about what you actually think and more about how it’s going to land, and now everything is a “take,” which already tells you it’s calculated, because a take is something you shape, something you angle, something you make presentable, it’s not raw, it’s not immediate, it’s not you catching a thought mid-air and putting it down before it disappears, it’s you polishing it up so it can survive the timeline, and then we got “hot takes,” which is really just controlled rebellion, like stepping slightly outside the line but not far enough to actually risk anything, and that’s the part that makes it feel hollow, because nothing is really on the line anymore, nobody is just saying something because it’s true to them in that moment, it’s always filtered through this invisible crowd that’s already reacting before you even finish typing, you see it in the disclaimers, people cushioning their own thoughts before they even let them breathe, and once you start doing that, you’re not really expressing anything, you’re negotiating, and the truth doesn’t survive negotiations like that, it doesn’t ask for permission, it doesn’t soften itself, it just shows up how it shows up, but we trained ourselves out of that, we started thinking publicly before we even think privately, which is backwards, because real thought is supposed to be messy first, it’s supposed to contradict itself, it’s supposed to feel unfinished, something you sit with, something you wrestle with before you decide what it actually is, but now there’s no space for that, everything is instant, thought hits the brain and gets shipped out immediately, no digestion, no ownership, just output, and that’s why nothing sticks, you can scroll for hours and it all blends together because you’re not consuming real thought, you’re consuming performances, and performances don’t echo, they don’t linger, they just pass through, and the truth is it’s not that people don’t have anything to say, it’s that they don’t have the courage to say it without a safety net, everybody wants to be right and liked at the same time, and that combination waters everything down, so you end up with the same ideas dressed up differently, same tone, same angles, same “original” thoughts that feel familiar before you even finish reading them, and the system thrives on that, because predictable minds are easy to manage, but real thought, the kind that doesn’t check in first, the kind that might be wrong but at least it’s honest, that’s where anything new actually comes from, that’s where something shifts, and right now that’s what’s missing, not more content, not more takes, just people willing to think out loud again and stand on it, no disclaimers, no softening, just letting it fly and dealing with whatever comes after, because that’s what made it feel alive in the first place, that unpredictability, that little bit of risk in just saying what’s on your mind and letting it exist as is, and maybe that’s the reset, just getting back to that, less performance, more pulse, because once the pulse is gone, everything else is just noise pretending to be something real.

Podcasts used to feel like something you stumbled into, like you had to care enough to go looking for them, and that part mattered more than people admit now because it meant there was intention behind it, it meant you were choosing depth over noise, and the people talking weren’t trying to be everywhere at once, they were just in their lane, speaking because they actually had something sitting on their mind long enough to shape into a thought, not something they rushed out to keep up with a schedule, and somewhere along the way that whole energy flipped when the money got involved and the platforms got bigger and suddenly podcasting wasn’t a thing you discovered, it was a thing you were expected to have, like if you didn’t have a mic you were behind, so now everybody talking, same setups, same recycled conversations, same breakdowns of the same topics like we not all hearing the same three angles over and over again, and it’s not even that people are saying the wrong things, it’s that nothing has weight anymore because nobody is sitting with anything long enough for it to mean something, you can hear it in how people talk now, everything feels slightly edited before it even lands, like there’s an invisible audience in the room policing every sentence, or on the other side you got people saying whatever they think will travel the fastest, not because it’s true but because it clips well, so it’s either over-filtered or completely performative and both of those kill honesty in different ways, and once honesty leaves the room the whole thing just turns into noise, just voices stacking on top of each other with nothing sticking, and I think that’s really the core of it, we stopped respecting the process, it used to be you lived first, then you thought about what you lived, then you spoke on it, now it’s speak immediately, figure it out in real time, adjust based on reaction, and call it content, and yeah people don’t like hearing it but not everybody needs a podcast, having a mic doesn’t make you insightful, being able to talk doesn’t mean you have something worth hearing, some people just need to go live more, gather something real before they start explaining life back to everybody else, because when you skip that step it shows, everything starts sounding identical, no silence, no space for anything to land, just constant output, and that silence part is important, not forever but enough to sharpen your thoughts so when you do speak it actually hits, because when everything is loud nothing carries, and that’s why the word people hate keeps popping up in my head, gatekeeping, not in a corny or elitist way but in the sense of having standards, having some kind of filter that forces people to think before they broadcast, because right now it’s just access with no discipline and that combination always turns into noise, but the thing is podcasting itself isn’t dead, when it’s done right it still cuts through everything, you can feel when somebody actually lived something and took the time to understand it before they spoke on it, that feeling hasn’t gone anywhere, it’s just buried under too many voices trying to fill space, so it’s not that we need more podcasts, we just need fewer people talking and more people actually having something to say when they do.

I remember when Twitter felt like somewhere you arrived instead of somewhere that was already watching you, like you walked into a digital block party and everybody was just… there—jokes flying, random thoughts, people reacting to life in real time, no script, no strategy, just vibes and impulse and a little bit of chaos stitched together into something human, and now when I open it, it don’t even feel like people talking anymore, it feel like people auditioning, like every tweet got a hidden agenda, like somebody sat there and engineered it to hit a nerve instead of tell the truth, and you can see it too clearly now, the bait, the vague statements, the “say just enough to spark a fire” energy, and the algorithm eats that up like it’s starving, pushes it out, turns it into the main event of the day, and now everybody circling it like it’s required participation, arguing, quoting, performing intelligence instead of actually thinking, and the wild part is the originality that used to define the whole space got flattened into templates, like the same thought just wearing different outfits all week, and somewhere in that shift the culture got mean in a way that feels less like accountability and more like surveillance, like every opinion comes with a background check, every thought gets cross-examined with screenshots and timestamps, “this you?” echoing louder than whatever you were even trying to say, and now people don’t even think out loud anymore, they think through the algorithm first, pre-editing their own minds, chasing engagement like it’s oxygen, confusing attention for connection, and it turns the whole thing into a loop, not a timeline but a system that trains you how to react, how to feel, how to exist online until you forget what your unfiltered thoughts even sound like, and that’s the part that really sticks with me, how something that once felt like freedom slowly became a place where everything you say feels like evidence, like you’re always on trial for a version of yourself that had five seconds to exist, and maybe the real flex now, the real rebellious move, isn’t saying the perfect thing at the perfect time, it’s not saying it at all, it’s keeping something for yourself, sitting with your own thoughts before they get packaged and fed into the machine, because not everything real needs an audience, and not everything true needs to go viral, and maybe that’s how you take a little piece of your mind back in a world that’s been quietly renting it out.

#donttestmygangsta #13yearveterantalkingtruth #truthbeyondtruth #canitalkmyshitagain #youcanhurtmyfeelingsbutillexposeyouifyoutryme #yalltheonestogodown #sorrynotsorry #401comeup #fuckyourfeelings (at Providence, Rhode Island)