I don’t feel bad for Wale, per se, because he pursued a career in entertainment.  He pursued a career in the cutthroat, here today/gone tomorrow hip-hop industry that has claimed more lives than slots in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, but still, I’ve seen worse.  He could’ve been put on that Summer Jam screen.  50 could’ve rapped about him in ’03.  You know, Wale could have it much worse.

So, the fact that someone would take a moment out of their day to even begin to feel any amount of pity for the Grammy-nominated, largely celebrated, famous rapper on his second major label deal seems, among other things, preposterous.  It’s like when your rich friend–with the father that only communicates with her via Skype because he’s too busy running some Fortune 500 company elsewhere–complains about having a red Lexus instead of the pink one she wanted.  As far as Wale’s concerned, it sort of comes with the territory.

The first time I met Wale, I was observing him shoot the video for “Diary” in the Clinton Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn.  His debut album Attention Deficit–via Interscope Records–was recently released to rave reviews but had undersold so startlingly, Wale’s manager revealed to XXL the LP was severely under-shipped.  On set, Wale was extremely standoffish.  I thought he was merely focused on the task at hand, but slowly fans started trickling outside of the bar where he and Rik Cordero would be shooting, one of whom took it upon himself to start rapping, very loudly, while standing right next to Wale.  After random guy finishes rapping Wale salutes him, and heads inside to shoot the video, at which point random guy starts viciously taunting Wale, as if he was angry he wasn’t offered a label deal on the spot.  As if selling 28,000 copies of a relatively highly-anticipated, major label rap album in your first week wasn’t enough of a burden.  Wale could be the guy slapping high-fives all around taking pictures with everybody that walks by, but, maybe he’s not.  At least he wasn’t at that time.  It’s quite unfair for that to be the norm in any case, not every celebrity has that in common.

Fast-forward to 2013, after his signing to MMG completely rejuvenated his career, his many awkward run-ins with press/social media tyrants have made him somewhat of the elephant in the room any time he so much as tweets about the weather, and, most recently, his rant to Complex Magazine about being absent from their 50 Best Albums of 2013 list all just reinforced his status as the rapper everyone (really) loves to hate, Wale has penned a brief open letter.  Uploaded to his new website, Every Blue Moon, the letter isn’t so much as an explanation of his most recent behaviors, but an inquiry into why everyone finds his life and career so ironic.  On the surface, the guy who penned “Diary”–an intricate and poetic look into the mind of insecure black women–probably won’t find peace and/or solace in the comment section under his “So What” collaboration with Mac Miller, in which the DMV native raps, “these women give you they heart/these b*tches give me their throat”, but how often has that line been stomped on an obliterated that the entire concept of it is currently hinged on Wale’s discography?  Jay Z made “Big Pimpin’”, folks.

The internet is the uncommon denominator here, and Wale has admittedly colossally f*cked up in his use of it.  Consistently lashing out at fans, reportedly direct messaging internet personalities about his relations with pop stars, and, of course, threatening pop culture pubs with physical force.  It’s made him the whiny band player that doesn’t get mentioned on the playbill at the big show, and in the recent paradigm shifts rap’s “new school” has undergone, less abrasive folks like Kendrick Lamar, J. Cole & A$AP Rocky are often sided with before Wale, who infamously vaguely compared his Ambition album to Reasonable Doubt–which is an album literally no one could compare their work to and not get criticized for it.

The caveat to this is that Wale’s music is really pretty good.  If I had to rank his albums they’d go in the order they were released, with Attention Deficit being the best, The Gifted being the worst, and Ambition falling in the middle.  It sounds worse than it is, I enjoy the majority of each album, and there isn’t one that blasts the other out of the water.  His music and songwriting have progressively gotten better with each LP, but I’m a huge fan of concept rap, and Attention Deficit did it for me.  That being said, he’s bared everything possible.  His relationship with his family, the difficulty he’s had getting girls in the past, his insecurities, his struggles with the music industry and everything in between.  Transparently, he’s on Drake‘s level.  His “Ambitious Girl” trilogy has basically become a bible of sorts for women in hip-hop culture, and to his defense, not all women fall within that vein of thought.  All due respect, there are a lot of women that would prefer the Wale on “Actin’ Up”, which is a complex all rappers have to deal with, but because he’s anchored whole years of his career on either end of the spectrum, toeing the line seems almost impossible at this point.

So, when I read the open letter, I just gave up on passing judgment, because at the end of the day, he does have a point.  Here’s an excerpt:

I can’t fuck wit Wale ‘ol poetic ass.” Really? These are the same people who probably have every Pac album embedded in their head. But, I digress. I took an absence from Twitter because I started to care tooooo much. I still don’t know the root of what makes me care THAT much, but I’m quite sure it started by wanting to lead people in a direction that wasn’t as cliché as some of my peers.

I can imagine there are people that are already up in arms about the fact that he even mentioned ‘Pac just now, but that’s the nature of the business. Music is art, and good art forces you to have an opinion.  I’m not sure whether Wale would prefer people have this opinion of him and his music, or none at all–I’d imagine the latter would drive him just as crazy.  The fact that he puts so much of his personal thoughts, feelings and experiences in some of his work makes criticism of it as much a critique of him as a person as it is critique of his product, which leads to a wicked catch-22.  To avoid having your own core values and beliefs attacked, an artist generally has to refrain from putting so much of it in their music.  However, the best music generally comes about when an artist makes their work a carbon copy of the inner workings of their mind and soul.  Its an age old struggle, and the only conclusive part about this open letter is that Wale has finally realized that there’s no way around it, and that the only solution is to obsess even more over it than before, until the loud clanging of his brain interacting with his passions becomes so loud and cacophonous, he can’t hear you heckling him from the peanut gallery.  Which, I presume, was the point of penning it in the first place.

Point taken.

Keep in mind, that I’m an artist, and I’m sensitive about my sh*t. -Erykah Badu

-Khari Nixon (@KingVanGogh)