Steroid Up and He Won't Come up out That Bitch

Lyrical gym workout, amino acids, we do sell steroids
Lyrical gym workout, amino acids, we do sell steroids
That's right if you wanna press up and bench up for cheap
We do.. have.. steroids

- Kool Keith

Various NY tabloids, including the Times, are taking swipes about the irrelevant baseball steroid scandal's slow, aggravating lava flow trickling down the island to Village of Rap (population: 100?).

The Times piece in particular spills an awkward nut graph trying to explain why rappers would do steroids in the first place. The answer is obvi - a battle aesthetic and (haha) "pressure ... to maintain perfect, even superhuman physiques."

Blaming rap culture for steroids is too crazy, given that many of the greats were total heavies.

In rap, as in most things (barring professional sports), if you want to have more than 5% body fat, most people won't care. If there's anything interesting about the rap-steroids thing (which is debatable), it's that steroids have different applications. 50 Cent is not juicing so he can one-up The Game by making it through 600 bars. He's doing it so that women continue buying his albums.

Also: Mary J. Blige? The Marion Jones of rap? Baby girl is not a runner, and while I give her props for those pipes, they're probably not pumping any more wind thanks to the shots in the butt she's taking. This solidifies my point. In addition to making you hit home runs or knock receivers over like Atari Bigby or (sadly) sometimes make you flip out and kill your family, steroids can make you hot. The extent to which rap is vulnerable to this is the extent to which everyone is vulnerable.

The extent to which rappers are subject to investigation for it is the extent to which they are rich and famous.