Phoenix Ready to Rise

Our friend(ster) Jean Grae reacts to the feedback generated by her last allhiphop column:

Jean Grae: Responds & Freshens Up

I go through the feeling of being at the end of my rope with this career path much more than I would have publicly admitted before. My usual way out, being the music, just wasn’t cutting it that day. So I vented. Not for sympathy, not for the sake of bitching, just for me to get it out.

It was like suppressing a scream for years and finally allowing myself to be loud. A couple of times since it’s been up and reading responses, I started questioning whether or not this was a reeeeaaally bad choice. Really bad. I couldn’t go to bed tonight without it on my head, so I’m doing what I usually do, write about it. It still has two sides to it for me, but ultimately I’m glad I got it out. If it wasn’t in a column, it would have been in a song. So either way I would have made it a public vulnerability I couldn’t avoid.

Funny that, the responses were what made me realize how lucky I am to have this job. To have the luxury of being able to say what I’m feeling to a public audience and have it open for criticism is an incredible opportunity. Yeah, sometimes it’s crazy to just have an opinion of your day, or your experiences and have strangers either relate or be adverse to your words. In either case it is still an extremely powerful media that is unparallel in freedom.

The importance of language and technology being used as a means to spark thought is especially becoming more apparent to me with every day I spend pursuing this game. I was thinking no one was listening, or no one really cared to even try and step out of his or her train of thought to hear something else for a second. But y’all proved me wrong. There wasn’t music behind it, there was no packaging on it, but it made a little ripple. That really shook me. No, no, not “shook ones” shook me...”I will still stab your brain with your nose bone...” Naw, not that.

It made me snap out of the anger and keep sh*t moving. If words can have that kind of effect, then it’s worth talking. It’s worth fighting for, it’s worth getting bruised up and falling down and getting back on again...