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— by Shaheem Reid
"Crack" as a complimentary adjective
In the 1980s, Nancy Reagan told us all to say "no" to drugs, and by the end of the decade, no narcotic had a stronger chokehold on society than crack ("highly purified cocaine in small chips used illicitly usually for smoking," per Merriam-Webster's dictionary). Drug kingpins had visions of being like Nino Brown (Wesley Snipes' infamous character from "New Jack City"), who had small armies of foot soldiers selling the drug to their customers, whom they called "fiends." Alas, thousands of lives were lost or damaged by crack before harsher laws and heightened enforcement brought the epidemic under control in the late 1990s.
In 2005, however, crack is back stronger than ever in the hip-hop community — fortunately, just the word, not the drug. You have the Roc-A-Fella recording artist Peedi Crakk, Fat Joe using the nicknames Cooked Coke Crack and Joey Crack, and then there's Juelz Santana putting out mixtapes called Back Like Cooked Crack and Back Like Cooked Crack 2: More Crack.
Leave it to hip-hop to flip the meaning: Now, instead of crack being "wack," as Whitney Houston used to say, crack is a metaphor for something you can't live without.
If your hat is stylish enough, or that TV show is funny enough, someone just may call it "crack." If your music is so exceptional that listeners keep pressing the rewind button after every song, then it's crack.
"We ain't talking about rock," explains Peedi Crakk of the new slang. "We're talking about that freaky flow that Peedi got."
"Me," is how Santana defines crack. "I am crack right now. I took my music to where it's just crack. It's been cooked up and it's freebased now. You know what crack is on the street and how effective it's been on the street, and you know how effective I'm trying to be in the game. Crack took over when it first came out, that's what I'm trying to do with this music. My next mixtape is called Fiend Out. I am human crack in the flesh — a walking kilo. I added the cold water, I formed that cookie shape, I'm ready to be chopped up and sold."
"F--- n---a" and "F--- boy" as uncomplimentary adjectives
You may have been listening to albums such as Lil Jon's Crunk Juice and T.I.'s Urban Legend and wondered what in the world "f--- n---a" or "f--- boy" mean. Both terms are very popular in Atlanta and other regions of the South.
Lil Jon yells, "We ain't scared of f--- n---as!" on "White Meat." "If I said it, then I meant it/ And what, f--- n---a," T.I. says on "Stand Up." Well, the King of the South says it's plain and simple what they are talking about.
"You know how in New York, y'all would say a 'herb'?" T.I. asks. "Well, that's our meaning of a 'f--- n---a.' He's just a bitch-ass n---a."
Still confused? Music Geek will break it down for you even more. A f--- n---a is lame: Someone who really has nothing going on for themselves but is jealous and hates to see you progress. A f--- n---a may even try to impede your success.
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Illustration: Karl Heitmueller
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