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The Pros and Cons of Saigon’s Retirement

Saigon

Contributed by Ryan Strauss on 11/21/07

On Monday, Saigon, who’s been keeping fans anxious in anticipation of his album The Greatest Story Never Told for over two years, suddenly announced as a blog post on his Myspace, “I QUIT.” Though plenty were shocked by the announcement, retiring actually seems to be in perfect harmony with the rapper’s consistently inconsistent and defiant persona.

For those who don’t know, Saigon has been on the grind for a few years, using a role in the hit show Entourage and a franchise player tag for Just Blaze’s Fort Knox label to propel his name into the press and into the minds of hip hop fans across the internet. His list of personal events since entering the national stage have also brought attention, as it reads like a slightly tamer extension of the wrap sheet he racked up before spending half his young life in a prison cell.

In January 2006, he was stabbed in the head when two men snatched his $18,000 chain and he snatched it back. In September of this year, he literally fought Prodigy of Mobb Deep on stage in a club in NYC, followed by a drunken radio appearance on Shade 45 in which he offered up a trademark tirade, including an assertion of violence against music video model Melyssa Ford. In between, he’s had beef with everyone from Prodigy to Joe Budden to Jim Jones (who doesn’t have beef with Jim Jones?), and never failed to make it clear that he would put a man in the hospital if he ever saw him in the streets.

Naturally, those who haven’t been following the story of Saigon will most likely think that he’s a basket case, the representation of life imitating art and the reason to fear the influence that hip hop has in our current culture. That’s what has made Saigon hip hop’s most intriguing prospect in the past year and change. He tread the line between “conscious” and “thug” as he tread the line between visionary and nuisance, disregarding concern, always saying what most in the game were too afraid to say. That’s the reason that he rapped, “But if you a true to life thug/ sweep that shit under the rug/ and give each other a hug,” on the hook of “The Color Purple,” and at the same time, constantly reiterated his status as an ex-convict and went out of his way to actually fight someone, even under the national media spotlight.

So why would a man who opened himself up to media fodder by acting like he’d never back down, back out of the game altogether and blame it on the media? This is the contradiction that defined and plagued Saigon, the trap that would often lead to his message being glossed over for “Saigon Disses Whoever,” as he rightly noted in his blog Tuesday. No one’s saying he was Nas or Tupac, but that’s exactly the mold that he haphazardly attempted to fill, in music and in life, sprinkling poignant, heartfelt messages between graphic depictions of the streets, knowing that the message was there, just hiding in the midst of the stuff of entertainment, intending more so to spark thought than to convey it.

Even if the messages in his lyrics never truly resonate, Saigon as a figure in hip hop points to a much larger point. Right now, Saigon is hip hop. The confusion of identity. The untapped potential. The internal anguish projected upon the supporting structure. The game is just as much a walking contradiction as its pawns, born of a need for cultural expression and having grown into chains of ridiculously over-exaggerated stereotypes. Since Saigon thought that he had to be a stereotype to get a release date, he decided that he’d do something, anything, to break those chains.

If this is to be a eulogy of Saigon’s career, before we throw him in a bin with Ron Artest, note that he claimed to be exiting the game to dedicate more time to his nonprofit foundation, In Arms Reach. By doing so and stepping aside when his buzz is as strong as ever, Saigon is only staying in character as hip hop’s most perplexing prospect. So don’t believe him just yet. As already noted in forums across the internet, he’s erratic enough a character to pull a Jordan or Jay-Z move even in the coming weeks if he hasn’t already decided that he’s staged his own career’s death just to toy with the game he so constantly berates. There’s no telling with someone so unpredictable, though. Maybe he honestly will never come back, leaving questions unanswered about his potential to grow into a hip hop icon, and doubters satisfied. If so, someone will step up in his absence, probably someone more fit for the role, but in the meantime Saigon’s entertaining and often thought-provoking display of disregard will be missed.