I sit back sometimes and marvel at how fast people will flip things
that we straight up avoided back in the day into new and exciting things
one must try. Part of my disdain for some up and coming trap rappers, is
the prevalence of ‘molly’ in their music. They turn it into a catchphrase
because it anchors the rest of their dime-store rhymes. And you’ve got
people using it and repeating it without really understanding what it means.
So, let’s do a quick breakdown.
‘Molly’ is pure MDMA, or commonly known as ecstasy. It used to be called
‘X’. I remember hearing about it as far back as 1997, from friends of mine
who’d hit raves and drum and bass parties out in the Lower East Side. One
of the cats I’d see at parties used to rag on it, saying ‘that’s that white people
s—-t! Straight hippie s—t!’ And as far as the time was concerned, he was
right. I remember one girl I was close to in college at that time, who was
going to take X with another friend for Valentine’s Day. Drop a tab, kick
back and enjoy all the sensations. ‘X’ soon hit the hp-hop world, and in so
doing exacerbated a lot of issues. You had a few MC’s drop references to
it here and there. I remember Sadat X speaking on it and being a bit floored.
You’d go to a spot and there’d be one cat posted up by the bar, or on the
wall who you could approach about getting some. I knew a stripper who
paid off a car note by being the hookup for her fellow dancers, especially on
‘celebrity night’. It got so heavy we started referring to those folks as the
‘rock and rollers’.
Then the horror stories started. You started hearing about rapes of women
AND men. Deaths because people took X and mixed it with everything else.
Then talk shows started in on it. Oprah even had one girl come on with a
doctor and they showed her ‘holes’ in her brain scan. Now ‘X’ was looked at
warily. But with hip-hop, it never really faded away as far as usage. Using
it for some meant in their mind that they could avoid getting hooked and
that they ‘made it’. I still remember the infamous video of a certain producer
and rapper getting caught on cellphone cam footage in a club in Ibiza copping
about a grand’s worth. Because the thing to note here, is that in the realm
of hip-hop these days, people will forget and forgive things real quick.
Look at cocaine for example. I came up during the time where ‘White Lines’
was still precautionary, and I saw the devastation brought about by crack rock.
But, when you got to 2007, you saw a resurgence of coke use by the generation
after us who saw that as the ‘in thing’ along with peroxide streaks in their
hair and Nintendo gamepad belt buckles. Especially in the ‘hood. Now you
have ‘molly’ making ecstasy resurgent once again with some young dummies
out here who in a sense are birthed in the same era as ‘strawberries’ and
when Chris Rock was best known as ‘Pookie’ taking it. Even mixing it with
their Optimo blunts. But that is one of the unfortunate parts of contemporary
hip-hop. Those part of that machine don’t do their due diligence and it all turns
into a case of ‘everything new’. Hell, if the club ‘Speed’ in NYC can change its
name to ‘Rokk City’ and no one blinks, why wouldn’t ‘molly’ be in the limelight
like it is? New things are sometimes old problems repackaged.