The guardian on the West Coast hip hop fulfils the impossible task of being honest, sincere, and just when discussing a conflict between two rap giants.
Crook stopped by On The Line Podcast and, among other topics, was prompted to share his opinion on the ongoing tension between Melle Mel and Eminem, which Em addressed on the “Realest” feature.
Melle likes to get on all these different podcasts and talk shit. It was funny to me cause he’d be like, “This motherfucker would be easy to destroy. That motherfucker ain’t shit”. I was like, okay, that’s just Melle Mel. Melle Mel wrote “The Message”. His name, his contributions are in concrete when it comes to hip hop. He’s forever in the books. You can’t move that. I was talking to some of Eminem’s fans, they hit me up on Twitter sometimes, and they talk to me, and one of them was talking about Melle Mel, like, “He just made a big mistake. He’s about to be erased from hip hop”. I’m like, are you crazy? That will never happen. I don’t care what kind of song my homeboy Marshall Mathers made. Melle is in concrete, his legacy is straight.
With that being said, I knew that there was not really a way that he could outclass Eminem lyrically. Not at this point of time. Em is one of the greatest wordsmiths to ever put words together into every rap. I already knew that was not gonna happen.
Then, KXNG Crooked proceeded to explain the technical meaning behind some terms people often use unreflexively:
Some people are going to tell their story in this way, and then some people are going to tell a story in that way. It might be the same story, but this person is telling it in a way that’s very easy to understand, and this person is making it a little more complex to understand. But they’re telling the same story. Rapping is not hip hop. Hip hop is the culture, and rapping is something that the culture produced. We just talk about rapping, we’re talking about rhyming words. If a person knows how to rhyme ten words in one sentence, but this dude only knows how to rhyme two words in one sentence — this first dude over here is superior at rhyming words. The listener might not like to hear a nigga rhyme ten words in a sentence. But he’s still superior to this nigga when it comes to technical writing. I think what happens is a lot of the people who are listeners, they listen with a subjective ear. They say, “Okay, but I don’t like how that sounds”. And it’s okay. I could look at a painting and say, I don’t like that painting. But the technical skill that it took to create that? I understand that he’s more advanced than the person over here that might make a song that we all love. We’re not talking about what we like, we’re just talking about technical skills, writing tools, metaphors, punchlines, cadences, syllable rhyming, all these different tools that’s in the writer’s box.
Eminem has commanded great craftsmanship over the tools in the MC’s box. He has downloaded the art of rhyming. And he represents that. Melle is a pioneer who did the same thing in his day, and I would even say it was harder for Melle to get where he was at because he’s was an original thought. Like on the streets. When you are original, that’s different. He didn’t have nobody to build off. It came straight from him. Now, we all got him to look at and say, alright, that’s how you did your sixth floor, now I know I could do mine better ’cause I see how you did yours. We could build off of that.
So, there are two legends on the field, and Crook respects both. He and everyone in the game. The diss track Melle Mel shot at Eminem later? Crook was not impressed by it from the start. He let it out publicly with a short tweet:
Not feeling it 😑
Not feeling it 😑
— Crook 🏴🏳️🏴 (@CrookedIntriago) August 8, 2023
On the podcast, Crook expanded his assessment a little bit:
[Melle Mel] made a diss song, and that diss song didn’t have the impact that he wanted to.
Then KXNG Crooked said that he was disappointed to learn about the apology Melle Mel allegedly published. A competitive MC in him was not happy. The competitive MC in him shouldn’t be worried. The post with the text of this “apology” was so much out of Melle Mel’s character and so short-lived that we must consider it either an ill-advised move from somebody from Melle Mel’s team or a vivid hallucination of those three people who had time to make screenshots and spread the news over the Internet. His Eminem diss is still up there on YouTube, so Melle Mel is clearly not apologetic about what he has done. At least, he is consistent in his beliefs.
Watch the video below:
