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It’s hard to say when, exactly, 50 Cent crossed the line in his feud with the Miami rapper Rick Ross. The more apt question might be: How many lines are there? He tracked down the mother of a Ross associate, DJ Khaled, at work, filming her sleeping on the job. He taped himself taking the mother of one of Mr. Ross’s children to buy a fur coat. He acquired and posted to the Internet a pornographic video starring another of Mr. Ross’s ex-girlfriends.

Rick Ross must have seemed an especially easy mark — it had already been a tough few months for his fourth wall. Before he was Rick Ross, the drug boss M.C., he had been William Leonard Roberts, and last summer a photograph surfaced of him from the mid-1990s, graduating from a corrections officer academy. He denied its authenticity — until The Smoking Gun got hold of his Florida Corrections Department personnel file, which included a certificate for perfect attendance.

The facts of Mr. Roberts’s life were getting in the way of Mr. Ross’s career.

To all this upheaval, Rick Ross — who, while he has been popular, has never quite been great — has replied, improbably, with art. “I see no reason to run to the dark,” he said in a recent interview in the Manhattan offices of his label, Def Jam. His songs aimed at 50 Cent have, hands down, been sharper and wittier than those of his rival. And the just-released “Deeper Than Rap” (Maybach Music/Slip N’ Slide/Def Jam), his third album, is unexpectedly fantastic, by far his best.

If albums were all that mattered, that would be that. But Mr. Ross’s persistence and the fact that though over the last nine months he’s been all but stripped bare, he’s emerged from the fray relatively unscathed, which indicates something much more noteworthy. Impenetrability of image, that old signal of hip-hop authenticity, somehow no longer seems to count.

And what a relief that is. Like all great pop music, rap is theater, and Rick Ross, now 33, is one of its most ambitious characters. He arrived fully formed in the summer of 2006: the busting-out gut, the outsize presence, the scratchy voice, the always-there sunglasses. At worst he was a Young Jeezy clone, spewing empty drug talk in comically repetitive fashion. At best he was an utterly believable and improbably charming exponent of the cocaine-rap making the rounds at the time. Clipse may have done it with more technical precision, and Jeezy with more magnetism, but Mr. Ross sounded in charge, his voice a gravelly threat.

“Deeper Than Rap” is just as certain as his first two studio albums, “Port of Miami” and “Trilla,” but reflects the view from the top, not the bottom. Now, instead of climbing up to success, he’s achieved it. Produced largely by J.U.S.T.I.C.E. League and the Inkredibles, this album is lush, erotic, entitled, a stunning leisure-class document of easy wealth and carefree sex. It’s a throwback to a time of sonic and attitudinal ambition in hip-hop — the Bad Boy era of the mid- to late ’90s, with its warm soul samples connoting the new hip-hop luxury comes to mind. Few rap albums have sounded this assured, this sumptuous, in years.

Also, unlike before, Mr. Ross can now rap, impressively: either he’s been studying or is having his hand held. It’s the only thing at odds with this album’s casual ethic; rapping well need not be a priority, but Mr. Ross seems to take his newfound affinity for polysyllabic rhyme schemes as a point of pride.

On “Usual Suspects” he raps:

“Seventeen, trying to man up

Feed the fam, boy, I put that on these canned goods

All I got was diabetes and a damn hug

People talking down, calling me a damn scrub.

What’s also notable about “Deeper Than Rap” is what’s not there. 50 Cent is a target on at least three songs, but Mr. Ross doesn’t belabor the battle nor does he touch on the aspects of his personal life that have lately haunted him.

In an age of routine tabloid invasions and the microrevelation as celebrity news, it’s become commonplace to expect access to all aspects of the lives of the famous. But in the hip-hop world, the stories behind the stories can be too grave to tell.

“Right now as we speak, I got two of my best friends that’s on the run from two separate cocaine conspiracy indictments,” Mr. Ross said. “This is a reality that I can’t glorify. The relationship I have with these people is deeper than rap.

“When I say something like ‘deeper than rap,’ that’s possibly death involved. That’s possibly prison time involved.”

The idea of “deeper than rap” has become a hip-hop touchstone of late. When the rapper Crooked I was shot, or not, earlier this year — he wouldn’t confirm or deny reports — he demurred from discussing the situation, saying, “It’s deeper than rap.”

Last month, on the MTV show “T. I.’s Road to Redemption,” that rapper calmly detailed the criminal activities that led to his arrest in 2007 on weapons charges. Coming from T. I. himself, it was shocking, an alternative history of his career that had nothing at all to do with music. (He is scheduled to begin serving his year-and-a-day sentence next month.)

Though his life beyond rap has been used against him, Mr. Ross still teases about an unknowable dark side. On the new album he name-drops Harry O, a Los Angeles drug dealer (who claimed to have provided the seed money for Death Row Records), and Big Ike, a Miami street kingpin.

Mr. Ross took his name from Freeway Rick Ross, a Los Angeles drug lord, and was mentored by Kenneth Williams, known as Boobie and now serving a life sentence. On “Gunplay,” from the new album, Mr. Ross raps “Boobie Boy still/ Boobie Boys real/ You can name a lot of lames that the Boobie Boys killed.”

Perhaps he’s overcompensating. Mr. Ross’s outing as a former corrections officer was the most spectacular and public implosion of a rapper’s self-styled tough-guy image — the hip-hop blog NahRight.com gleefully refers to him as Officer Rawse — since The Dallas Morning News picked apart the looser sections of Vanilla Ice’s biography during his rise to fame in 1990.

But Vanilla Ice’s songs weren’t filled with homage to the drug trade and its leading lights. And no one expected unvarnished truth from him. Mr. Ross must submit to a different standard.

Or at least he still acts as if he must. Of his stint on the side of the law, Mr. Ross said, “The truth is more sinister than the obvious,” suggesting an undisclosed layer to his time there.

Miami, he said, is a city where young go-getters “sell dope, buy Lamborghinis and get buried in them.” This month he filmed a video for “All I Really Want,” a collaboration with The-Dream, in Medellín, Colombia. In footage from the trip, available on YouTube, he stands outside the house where Pablo Escobar was killed, sunglasses off, soaking in history.

Whether it’s a validation of Mr. Ross’s extramusical credibility or an elaborately staged pose might not matter: creating this scene allows for a productive ambiguity in how he is perceived by outsiders. All the revelations about him get dwarfed by the question of who Rick Ross might be when he steps away from the microphone.

Asked how he’d explain to his children the more insidious of the ex-girlfriend videos 50 Cent has disseminated, Mr. Ross was philosophical: “I’d say she was an actress for a day. I love actresses.” In other words, an acknowledgment that sometimes it’s acceptable to just be playing a role.

Beyond Authenticity: A Rapper Restages,
NYT,
23.3.2009,
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/23/
arts/music/23ross.html

Rudy Ray Moore, 81,

a Precursor of Rap,

Dies

October 22, 2008

The New York Times

By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Rudy Ray Moore, whose standup comedy, records and movies related earthy rhyming tales of a vivid gaggle of characters as they lurched from sexual escapade to sexual escapade in a boisterous tradition, born in Africa, that helped shape today’s hip-hop, died Sunday in Akron, Ohio. He was 81.

The cause was complications of diabetes, his Web site said.

Mr. Moore called himself the Godfather of Rap because of the number of hip-hop artists who used snippets of his recordings in theirs, performed with him or imitated him. These included Dr. Dre, Big Daddy Kane and 2 Live Crew.

Snoop Dogg thanked Mr. Moore in liner notes to the 2006 release of the soundtrack to Mr. Moore’s 1975 film, “Dolemite,” saying, “Without Rudy Ray Moore, there would be no Snoop Dogg, and that’s for real.”

Most critics refrained from overpraising “Dolemite,” with the possible exception of John Leland, who wrote in The New York Times in 2002 that it “remains the ‘Citizen Kane’ of kung fu pimping movies.” The film, made for $100,000, nonetheless became a cult classic among aficionados of so-called blaxploitation movies — films that so exaggerate black stereotypes that they might plausibly be said to transcend those stereotypes.

Very little of Mr. Moore’s work in any medium reached mainstream audiences, largely because his rapid-fire rhyming salaciousness exceeded the wildest excesses of even Redd Foxx and Richard Pryor. His comedy records in the 1960s and ’70s — most featuring nude photographs of him and more than one woman in suggestive poses — were kept behind record store counters in plain brown wrappers and had to be explicitly requested.

But Mr. Moore could be said to represent a profound strand of African-American folk art. One of his standard stories concerns a monkey who uses his wiles and an accommodating elephant to fool a lion. The tale, which originated in West Africa, became a basis for an influential study by the Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr., “The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism.”

In one of his few brushes with a national audience, Mr. Moore, in a startlingly cleaned-up version, told the story on “The Arsenio Hall Show” in the early 1990s. Other characters he described were new, almost always dirtier renderings in the tradition of trickster stories represented by Brer Rabbit and the cunning slave John, who outwitted his master to win freedom.

Mr. Moore updated the story of an old minstrel show favorite, Peetie (which he changed to “Petey”) Wheatstraw, a k a the Devil’s Son-in-Law and the High Sheriff of Hell. Others in his cast were Pimpin’ Sam and Hurricane Annie. Mr. Moore became a master at “toasting,” a tradition of black rhymed storytelling over a beat in which the tallest tale — or most outlandish insult — wins.

Rudolph Frank Moore was born on March 17, 1927, in Fort Smith, Ark., where he was soon singing in church. He moved to Cleveland at 15, found work peeling potatoes and washing dishes and won a talent contest. He was drafted in 1950 and performed for his fellow soldiers as the Harlem Hillbilly, singing country songs in R&B style.

After his discharge, he resumed his pre-Army act as the turbaned dancer Prince Dumarr. He made some records as a singer under the name Rudy Moore, doing songs like “Hully Gully Papa,” who liked to “coffee grind real slow.”

His life changed in 1970 when he found himself listening to the stories of Rico, a regular at the record store in Hollywood, Calif., where Mr. Moore worked.

He was particularly captivated by Rico’s rude, rollicking stories of Dolemite, a name derived from dolomite, a mineral used in some cements. Mr. Moore perfected the Dolemite stories in comedy routines, most of which he recorded, then spent all his record earnings to make the movie “Dolemite.” A sequel, “The Human Tornado,” followed. A second sequel, “The Dolemite Explosion,” also starring Mr. Moore, may be released later this year.

Fallout Entertainment bought the rights last year to remake the original movie. Bill Fishman of Fallout said some of Mr. Moore’s famous lines would be used.

Mr. Moore is survived by four siblings; his daughter, Yvette Wesson, known as Rusty; and his 98-year-old mother, Lucille.

Violent scenes in Mr. Moore’s movies included a man’s guts being ripped out by another character’s bare hands in “Dolemite.” Almost none of the dialogue in any of his movies can be printed in a family newspaper, not to mention the language of his more than 16 comedy albums — or even many of their titles.

But what is probably his most famous line is also his most typical:

Dolemite is my name

And rappin’ and tappin’

That’s my game

I’m young and free

And just as bad as I wanna be.