In a way, the only way to make a name for yourself as a rapper is to play a character you're not, while trying to convince everyone that you are that character. Sure, there are always shades of reality in the fiction, but most of the posturing and posing is simply a bunch of bullshit. They're always harder, sexier, richer, more clever and having so much more sensational sounding sex than they really are. It's illogical that any one of them could ever live up to the boasts and the braggadocio that they perpetuate in their forever "high" state, though we question the amount of weed that they're smoking as well. We shouldn't really insist on their authenticity though because it doesn't do us or them any good and we don't really even want them to be authentic in what they're rapping about all the time because then there's no way we couldn't only see them as disgustingly perverse and deranged citizens, fully out-of-control. We get just as much out of the amusement as we do the music. It's supposed to be a fantasy, even when it hits close to home or is about real bullets and real death. It's theatrical and effective.
A guy like Kosha Dillz is something like was just described - minus the abusive use of drug and thug life in his words - and then you know that he's really that times a hundred. He's off-the-charts caricature and yet, he's not. It's really tough to understand it. It's really tough to understand him and somehow it makes it all right. He's a guy who, a few days ago posted the following on his site, under the header of "RIP Whitney Houston," "Thank g-d I got off drugs. It's kinda butty. but yeah..thank g-d it didn't happen to me. I'm happy to get out alive and have what I have now. RIP to all those who fall to the disease of addiction," and you chuckle a bit because there's a latent insinuation that the tragic and untimely death of the great Whitney Houston made this squirrely fellow take stock in his new lease on life. It made him see the glass as half full and his life as something that he's glad he saved.
Kosha Dillz seems to be a real lover of life and it's impossible to know who he really is, other than someone who - we believe - has toured with Snoop Dogg and maintains that the greatest thing that ever happened to him was getting deported from England on his birthday a few years ago because if he hadn't, he never would have been in the studio with GZA a few days later. In his songs, he sings about going to garage sales, sweat pants and the crazy ups and downs of life, and you just wonder how he's made this so-called world of his come so true. He's an authentic MC and most definitely holds his own. One of his songs was featured a few weeks ago in one of the most well-received ads that played to 111 million viewers on Super Bowl Sunday - the Budweiser commercial that featured the rescue dog named Weego, who fetched beers every time someone said, "Here Weego." It seems illogical, but it really happened and it comes down to Kosha Dillz being one of "those who make the most out of life." It's part act and nothing like it, just coincidence gone wild. It's okay to brag about that stuff.