Inside hip-hop's complex relationship with health

[Animous]

 

When Freeway was diagnosed with kidney failure in 2015, members of his team warned him not to go public with the news.

“They was like, ‘Yo, you shouldn’t do this. You shouldn’t say this. We just have to deal with this amongst ourselves,’” the 42-year-old rapper recalled in an interview with NBC News. 

“They said to keep it to myself so I wouldn’t look weak; hide it from people because I’m a celebrity. A lot of people felt like I shouldn’t be so open and letting people know what’s going on,” Freeway said.

He didn’t listen. A scroll through Freeway’s Instagram account will show the ups and downs of his life with kidney failure: his time in dialysis — four hours a day, three days a week — various doctor appointments, his kidney transplant in 2019 and his recovery since (with updates from his hospital bed).

Freeway isn’t the only rapper to speak publicly about his medical conditions. Rick Ross has consistently been open in interviews about his commitment to health after experiencing several seizures over the years; he has since reportedly invested $1 million in a Florida-based telehealth startup called Jetdoc. Such consistent public recognition of a rapper’s personal medical struggles hasn’t always been the norm in hip-hop culture.

“A majority of rappers are Black men, especially in the ‘90s and early 2000s, and Black men want it to seem like nothing can affect them, like they’re invincible,” Freeway said. “Nobody wanted to show any weakness.”

Rapper Freeway performs at Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival on April 18, 2014 in Indio, Calif.Karl Walter / Getty Images for Coachella

Hip-hop is an industry where any misfortune — like health issues, financial struggles, relationship woes — could quickly make even a beloved artist the butt of a joke. This is why only a few batted an eye when Tupac joked about rapper Prodigy’s sickle cell anemia in his famous 1996 Bad Boy Records diss track “Hit ‘Em Up,” which is still hailed today as one of rap music’s most caustic, disrespectful disses of all time. This is also likely why rumors swirled at the time of Eazy-E’s 1995 death that he died of a gunshot wound and not of AIDS-related pneumonia — likely an attempt to protect the NWA rapper’s “tough guy” image and quell any assumptions of homosexuality. 

This isn’t hip-hop’s singular attitude about health, though. In Drake’s infamous beef with Pusha T, the masses — while, no doubt, enjoying the feud — said Pusha went too far when he took a jab at Drake’s producer Noah “40” Shebib, who has multiple sclerosis, in “The Story of Adidon” rapping, “OVO 40, hunched over like he 80, tick, tick, tick/ How much time he got? That man is sick, sick, sick.” 

Even though hip-hop’s history is riddled with public health messages and campaigns for HIV prevention, healthy eating and more, it is growing more and more common for individual rap stars to both vulnerably share their personal medical ails with the world and commit themselves to raising awareness about their conditions.  

Perhaps the accessibility and instantaneous nature of social media can be partly credited for this shift. But the change is shining a renewed light on hip-hop’s — both as a genre and culture — complex relationship with medical health. Like all of Black culture, hip-hop has not been monolithic in its approach to physical well-being.

As much as a rapper’s medical condition could earn them a jab in a diss track, hip-hop has a long, rich history of prioritizing health and wellness both in the recording booth and the streets, according to Dave “Davey D” Cook, renowned hip-hop journalist and lecturer of Africana studies at San Francisco State University.

“In terms of rappers, anything that’s considered a weakness, people are gonna say something about it. Shock and awe is often rewarded. But from day one, hip-hop artists have always been about health,” Cook said. He noted that much of hip-hop’s golden age (the mid-1980s to mid-‘90s) “was immersed in the crack era.” 

“Health was in the forefront,” he said. “It might not have been on records … but we saw immediately the health implications. The crack and AIDS epidemic definitely made conversations around health unavoidable in hip-hop. I think what we’re looking at now is people paying more attention to artists when they talk about health issues, rather than artists ‘suddenly’ talking about it.” 

The complexities of hip-hop’s relationship with health can be seen throughout history. Even if artists weren’t doling out the details of their diagnoses of lupus, cancer or kidney failure on a track or in interviews, many musicians were promoting health and wellness in their communities.

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