The whole "Kato Allah" character is something that I've been rolling around in my head for a while now. Some of the hip-hop music that I listen to (groups like Mobb Deep and M.O.P., for example) are just so comically violent and over-the-top grimy that it stops being threatening and just becomes sort of funny. I'm sure that the first time a guy got on stage and said he was going to shoot somebody, it got a reaction, but the fact that nowadays I can see rich, pampered superstars like Sean "P. Diddy" Combs talk about pulling out guns has exponentially reduced the impact of that sort of stuff. So as a result, talk about stuff like gun fighting and drug dealing have become more stylistic elements in the music than legitimate declerations of violent, illegal living, which is really bizarre, but nobody ever really points it out.

So, despite my not having ever pushed a "block", "ki", "brick", "bundle", "dime" or "nick", and despite the fact that I've never busted a "gat", "glock", "hammer", "heater", "burner", "banger", "tech" or "steel", I was able to put on the mean mug, pour out the liquor and appropriate the deep, raspy "smoked too many blunts" voice and create an image and some songs that have nothing to do with my real life but are as legitimate as the fairy tales that a lot of these cats speak about.

Too many hip-hop artists rely on stereotypes and stylistic canons to make their music. So, everybody carries guns, everybody sells drugs (even after they've sold millions of albums, for some reason), everybody gets mad girls in the club. Everybody has a hot club song, everybody has a mixtape freestyle song, everybody has a "street anthem", everybody has a thug love song. There are rappers who are talented that don't really get the chance to shine because they get shoved into this methodology of creating music by the books. Be it the fault of greedy record labels, lazy artists, overly fickle consumers, or perhaps a combination of all of the above, hip-hop music gets relegated to being the same four songs done over and over by everybody with different lyrics and slightly varied beats. And it's sad, because the roots of the music are so much more creative than what a lot of today's product would indicate.

Also, with the site more than the character as a whole, I wanted to try to represent some of the disconnect between the artist and the website that a lot of these "official" musician sites seem to have. You've got an artist that is (at least supposedly) a rugged street dude who's "real" as all hell, and yet you go to something like the Eminem or Snoop official site and you have these artsy layouts and fancy Flash effects, and it makes no sense. It has nothing to do with what the artist is supposed to represent, and it's just sort of silly when you actually think about it.

But anyways, I don't want to give the impression that I'm some hip-hop-hating kid who thinks he can judge the culture as a whole because his friend loaned him a Mr. Lif album or something, but there are problems with the music right now, and I really just want people to have the opportunity to make the best music that they can. I want there to be big, flashy party songs, and I want there to be big, dumb violent thug songs, but I don't want that to be all there it to the popular iterations of the music. I really just want a balance and some variety. But anyways, that's my long, boring explenation about this project.