Too Short Says The Industry Tried To Kill Conscious Rap In The 90s

French Montana has been arguing that the industry is trying to kill street rap with conscious rap, mainly Kendrick Lamar.

Too Short, who's one of the few rappers to work with both Biggie and Tupac, says it was exactly the opposite in the mid-90s.

Short Dogg was known for rapping about pimpin' and drug slinging. But it wasn't necessarily his choice that almost all of his tracks went "negative".

In an interview with HipHopDX, Too Short explained how the record labels -- including his label Jive -- began pushing all their acts to rap about violence and sex in the 90s.

I started noticing at that time in Hip Hop that the labels were actually signing the artists and promoting the artists who would bring in just the negative messages: let’s have sex, drop ya booty. We getting off into Crunk now, the bling bling is out there … it’s going down. It was a new swag and everybody wanted to brag about – Rap has always been about bragging, but everybody wanted to brag about the millions. And I noticed that at a certain point in Hip Hop the major labels stopped signing and promoting the positive artists, the ones that was just really positive. Positive images were hard to get out there. So I’m just saying that at some point it wasn’t that Hip Hop changed on its own, it had a little push. I’m a real conspiracy theorist, and I just feel like there had to be a gathering of the major labels and somebody had to say like, “Look, we gotta keep this positive shit off the airwaves and let this booty-shaking shit take over. It’s time.” And after that it’s like the floodgates just opened with sex and violence.