Love & Hip-Hop...?

Unless you've been living under a rock, or have zero interest in turning your television to any station promoting full-blown ratchetness, you have heard of the pseudo-urban music focused reality drama Love & Hip-Hop on VH1. These shows have become a wild success and continue to spawn season after season. It would be safe to call it a cultural phenomenon at this point. The problem with that is, nowadays anything massive enough to be able to impact an entire culture is usually at someone else's expense. Whether it be the "artists" (and I use that term very loosely) on the show, or an entire generation of youth who actually look up to these people as role models. Sad but true fact.


Love & Hip-Hop is a reality show that has absolutely nothing to do with love, and even less to do with Hip-Hop. It's a shame that an artist with any level of integrity would submit themselves to such outright buffoonery, tarnishing their own brand, and possibly putting the nail in the coffin of their careers altogether, at least on the music end. These shows are always full of either no name talents who have never been able to establish a buzz, or artists who may have had a hit or two in the past and have simply fallen off since. These shows often revolve around producers who once were considered the best in the game, but are now trying to tread water via a reality show that has nothing to do with what they are trying to promote.


The first time I ever watched this show, like a dumb ass  I actually expected it to be about the love OF Hip-Hop music. I should have known, since it was on VH1, that I would get nothing but an overblown soap opera full of everything that is wrong with our culture and exacerbating it on a scale that continues to grow with every rerun-.


My question to the BITM family out there is, do you see celebrity reality TV as life support for the talents that are on these shows? Or is it literally a graveyard from which there is no coming back? Or maybe it's a promotion tool to reach out to an entirely new audience (ie: hood bitches, primarily).


This season of Love & Hip-Hop has 1/4 of the Slaughterhouse collective's own Joe Budden on it, and it just makes me wonder will this show destroy Budden 2.0 since his reemergence on the scene a couple years ago. Budden is the closest thing to "Hip-Hop" to ever grace this show, along with famed ghostwriter/ex-Tribe member/ex-Kanye affiliate Consequence (with past members being Lil Scrappy, and Jim Jones). So it's just a shame to see either of them waste their time with this trash, since the show seems to focus more on Budden's drug habits and Consequence's Muslim faith than any actual music.

What do y'all think?