According to The Smoking Gun our favorite African-multi-platinum-ex-criminal crooner, is a liar and has greatly exaggerated his past life of crime for street cred and record sales. Apparently he’s not the car-stealin’, amphetamine flippin’, prison fightin’, superthug he led us to believe he was.
Akon’s ad nauseum claims about his criminal career and resulting prison time have been, to an overwhelming extent, exaggerated, embellished, or wholly fabricated, an investigation by The Smoking Gun has revealed. Police, court, and corrections records reveal that the entertainer has created a fictionalized backstory that serves as the narrative anchor for his recorded tales of isolation, violence, woe, and regret. Akon has overdubbed his biography with the kind of grit and menace that he apparently believes music consumers desire from their hip-hop stars.
While the performer’s rap sheet does include a half-dozen arrests, Akon has only been convicted of one felony, for gun possession. That 1998 New Jersey case ended with a guilty plea, for which the singer was sentenced to three years probation. Another 1998 bust, this one in suburban Atlanta, has been seized upon by Akon and transformed into the big case that purportedly sent him to prison (thanks to his snitching cohorts) for three fight-filled years. In reality, Akon was arrested for possession of a single stolen BMW and held in the DeKalb County jail for several months before prosecutors dropped all charges against him.
Damn, what part of the game is that? Like what kind of world do we live in when we can’t trust a Konvict to keep it real? But seriously, it says something about our own skewed view of reality when an artist would feel the need to embellish tales of his criminal past to increase his marketability. If this is all true the joke is on us in more ways than one.
Read the full article here. Props to Brown-Skinned Jesus