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Why the ‘Hood loves Future.

The ‘hoods across America, and even in other countries, like England and the different islands of the Caribbean, love Future Hendrix.

The common emotion that colored men and women, who live in “the ‘hood,” feel is pain, which is evoked in Future’s music lyrically, on top of beats that are infused with trap sounds, that make colored people’s innate rhythms run out of our body parts.

Sometimes, on the Internet, you’ll see rap fans who are very bias, but also contradictory. Some people will say “Kendrick is better than Future,” or “Future is better than Kendrick,” but they don’t listen to both. So their argument is bias. A fan can only make that type of statement if they listen to both artists with the same fervor, since Kendrick & Future, for instance, make different kinds of rap music.

The reason that it’s OK to like both #DS2 & #TPAB is because both artists respectively follow Black oral traditions, just in different ways. #DS2 is from a Southern artist, which is where slaves and most of our ancestors predominately were, before they were able to make a move. Slaves made Negro Spirituals, chants and anthems, to remind them of home and also to help them pass the time when doing labor. Basically, they made music from pain. Future’s music is criticized lyrically, but it’s about the feeling. “March Madness” and other songs are modern day Negro Spirituals, and you feel them, even if you don’t know all the words.

Kendrick Lamar is more of the oral tradition of literature, using words to deliver a message, more of a lyricist, preacher, or “abolitionist”. We as rap fans, criticize other MC’s (NaS, Lupe, etc) for rapping too much and not letting the music hit. Obviously, on #TPAB, K Dot found a way to rap, while being able to infuse music like funk, soul, jazz, spoken word, etc., which are all of the Black oral and audio tradition. He also lyrically touched on painful subjects such as self-depression, black on black crime, institutionalism, double consciousness, survivor’s guilt, and very personal Black feelings that many Black people feel but cannot identify, or articulate, especially if they lack education, which goes back to these uneducated people more than likely choosing to be bias and only listening to one kind of music, or music sub-genre.

The additional reason that Future may be more beloved in the 'hood though, is because the pain he raps about is more tangible and transparent. Youth are doing pills and sipping lean, which is like marijuana during my prime (late 90’s - 2000’s), and cocaine during my parent’s prime (late 70’s- 1980’s). Drugs were never OK to do, but people in “the 'hood” do them, to cope with trauma, depression, anxiety, behavior issues, mental problems, and all kinds of pain that is seen and felt by other people in their ‘hood and even other ‘hoods. Drugs are also the main source of the underworld in most cities, at least in the Western Hemisphere, as far as how poor people make money and get themselves out of poverty, a disease whose symptoms can still traumatize a person, even if they work their way out and become well-off.

Hidden even deeper under the drug talk in Future’s music, and how it connects to pain in the “’hood,” is the fact that Future caught his hot streak after his break-up with his ex-fiancee, Ciara. In the beginning of the break-up, Ciara made it seem as if Future cheated on her, but in the public, their split was kind of abrupt, and she never came out with a public explanation (not saying she had to).

After their split, Future made the mix-tapes “Monster” and “Beast Mode,” and began to touch here and there on what happened between he and Ciara, in his music. At times, it did sound like Future cheated, but other times, he made it seem like Ciara was overly controlling and unwilling to compromise. Future’s public side of the story, as told to Rap Radar’s Elliott Wilson in the “Like I Never Left” documentary, was that he and Mike Will wrote and produced songs for Ciara (like “Body Party”), which helped bring back some relevancy to her as an R&B artist. After this success though, Ciara chose not to work with Future & Mike Will, who went and worked with Miley Cyrus in the meanwhile.

Future & Ciara were still in a relationship though, and were planning for marriage, but Ciara wanted a big Kim Kardashian type wedding on E!, that Future was not down for. Ciara has not been as relevant in pop culture as Kim K, as of late, and Future came from the streets, so this sounded doomed to begin with. Future wanted more of a low-key, family type affair, but according to him, Ciara would not compromise and therefore, they had to break up.

The pain that Future felt from this break-up is what caused most of his music since then. A lot of young men in the ‘hood feel Future, because they too have invested in relationships with women who do not want to compromise. Often, when relationships are over, other women assume that the man was the reason the relationship ended, as if they don’t know, as women, how crazy and out of touch with reality women can be. Sometimes though, women are the cause for the end of relationships.

If a man is doing his best for a woman, trying to marry her, impregnating her, and she then chooses to not compromise and leaves, that will of course hurt the man’s ego and pride. It also hurts because men don’t get to that point of commitment with every woman, and rarely do men get to that point with one woman. So, if a man finds a woman that he would not mind marrying, but she is the woman that makes his life unnecessarily difficult and chooses to leave him on top of that, as if he did her wrong, that woman could be defined as manipulative, controlling, and the like. To also go right into a new relationship, and bring the man’s child around your new boyfriend is also disrespectful and unsafe, at the point that Ciara brought her and Future’s son around Russell Wilson, very early in their relationship. It essentially shows that Ciara has no street smarts, and is not from “the ‘hood,” which is why a lot of Black women criticized her in the beginning of her relationship with Future anyhow –since a lot of Black women know the pains of dealing with polygamy, and have red flags to that topic, such as a man having more than one child, with more than one woman.

Women critiqued Ciara for being with Future, at first, but, now other (and some of the same) women criticize Future because they saw men say that Ciara was wrong for her choices with their son and Russell Wilson. It seems, through actions, that Future’s version of the break-up is what happened. Contrastingly, Amber Rose and Wiz Khalifa broke up under similar circumstances, except that they were already married, but Amber made it seem as if Wiz cheated on her, and did not want to be with her anymore. However, even if he did, Amber was not spiteful, and when she began to date MGK, there were never any public pictures of she and Wiz’s son around MGK. That shows that Amber could date whoever she wanted, but chose to respect her son’s father, by not trying to embarrass him in the public, and also, chose to not introduce her son to someone she was not sure she would be with for a long time. In most males opinions, Amber Rose’s behavior is more in tune of what a “good mother” would do. There was no reason for Ciara to behave those ways with Russell and her son, except that she wanted the public attention that Future did not want with her, and to be petty and hurt the pride of her child’s father.

Most women, from “the ‘hood”, can identify with the pain of a failed relationship of course, and colored women love to twerk and dance, which is why they love Future’s music as well. ‘Hood chicks, like Blac Chyna, Amber Rose, or the regular dime-piece from around the way, can enjoy Future as well. Ciara knew that Future was from the trap, knew he had other children, who had other mothers, and still got engaged to the man, only to leave him, not because of the other children or the other mothers, but because he wouldn’t do what she wanted. The pain that Future felt from this is the driving force behind his current music, and the mix of all this pain is why he is currently the reigning People’s Champ in “the ‘hood”.