The Gangsta Rapper Tully Blanchard

An article relating hip hop to wrestling:

I watched Ric Flair and The Four Horsemen with the boy the other night, and it really struck me how Bad Boy/Death Row these dudes were. The whole aesthetic--"private jets...finest women...most expensive cars...biggest house"--is basically what popular hip-hop became as it matured. And then of course emphasis on mike skills (someone in the doc literally called it that, I think it was Triple H) the ability to be able to talk, almost off the dome, and expound on the character your playing.

Likewise, there were all these moments where wall of reality came down. If you listen to Arn Anderson talk, it's really not clear when he's talking himself or when he's talking about the character he's playing. Less interesting, but still with on the same theme, is the Flair v. Bischoff beef. You have a guy basically cursing out his boss in front of millions of viewers, except he means it. Of course a lot of the similarities boil down to the respective target audience for wrestling and hip-hop--young boys. Hip-hop pulls from the post-pubescent angst, and wrestling pulls from post-pubescent fantasies. Of course the "rapping" in wrestling is ultimately centered around an actual fight, and is a little less meta. But while I loved watching, say, the Road Warriors do work, I think I liked listening to Ric Flair rap at least as much as I liked watching him wrestle.

A shout out to Triple-H, Ric Flair and Dusty Rhodes. They all had some really sharp points about wrestling and what the Four Horsemen meant. Triple H had a great breakdown on how the Horsemen fit into the whole psychology of the 80s. He talked about how Dusty Rhodes, the son of the plumber, represented the common man going to war against Horsemen, on the representation of villainous, capitalist excess. And capitalist excess almost always won...More?

source: the atlantic.com