Now here’s something we’ve never really witnessed before - a bit of transatlantic beef. We’re all too familiar with the 50 Cent/Game feud, with Nas/Jay Z and Ja Rule/50 Cent but squabbling across the waters doesn’t happen often.
When US rapper Common sat down to pen the lyrics for ‘Heat’, a track that was to go on the Like Water For Chocolate album, I guess he felt he wanted to get some shit of his chest: “State senators, life twirls, most sell out - like a dread with a white girl.” The album went gold. But little did he know that a pissed off UK journalist would wait five years to avenge those lyrics.
And so it came, the June 2006 edition of Touch magazine in which Elle J Small finally got the chance to interrogate Common. Perhaps she assumed that the rapper would relinquish his thoughts when images of her milky skin raced through his mind. Unfortunately for her Common was more than happy to elaborate.
It was the Rastas who only dated white girls that were the ones he didn’t get; the brothers that were so meticulous about their diet and their dreads yet they intentionally sought out women from the opposite race. Surely that undermined the core principles of Rastafarianism? And was their narrow pursuit fuelled by a lack of self love, he wondered. Above all, it was down to black men to think about how their choices affected black women.
Admittedly, this was a lot for anyone to digest, let alone a white woman. As Ms Small herself acknowledged, the fact that she lives in Britain probably didn’t help either. It’s highly probable that she has a penchant for black men, that maybe her sister is married to a black man or (continue...)