With over three decades in the music industry under his belt, Too $hort has seen it all. He's climbed the charts, toured the world, watched as his songs and albums have turned into classics, and has engaged in a Rap beef or two. As Hip Hop evolves with the help of social media, the way the tensions between artists are communicated has also shifted. The egging on of fans and trolls can intensify animosity, and while visiting Shannon Sharpe on Club Shay Shay, Short Dog dropped a few thoughts on Rap beefs of today.
"If a rapper is promoting beef, in these days, with the social media—you’ve got a crew of thirty to forty people, and there’s only one popular face in your crew—that’s you," he said. "So, your guys do this and that, and y’all incited some stuff, and then you’re provoking it with your song. When they see you all around the town, they only know one face."
"And that’s why I think we’re losing a lot of rappers, because, you know, chop it off at the head. That’s the bread and butter," Short added. "When you gun down the rapper, you just gunned down five other employees' income; you just gunned down school kids’ clothes, Christmas, a dope birthday that was going to happen."
He drew a similar parallel with jail. "When the rapper do so much dirt with his homies and he ends up catching the case and going to jail...you locked up the income! You feel me?" Too Short believes that people need to look at the big picture before getting themselves entangled in rifts that could be damaging to not only themselves but everyone around them that they've helped support, as well.
"Like, man - you’ve got a rapper that’s making fifty grand a weekend—not a month, a weekend. Every weekend he go out and make fifty grand. That money goes to the crew, we share. You know, you my road manager, you my hype man, you my DJ...we from nothin'. And all that stops while you go do six months, a year, three years in jail. All that stops. So, I’m like, we ain’t thinking about the big picture."
Watch Too Short chop it up with Shannon Sharpe below.