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Sure, we all work at home sometimes, but when you're off the clock, you're off the clock.
THE 10 CRACK COMMANDMENTS BIGGIE SMALLS PROFESSIONAL
I like to keep professional and personal stuff separate. "Hustlers of the world, there is one mark you cannot beat: the mark inside."įor me, Biggie's commandments five and seven are really two sides of the same coin: Never sell no crack where you rest at and keep your family and business completely separated. Don't let academic faction get in the way of friendship, fun, or human values generally. Keep clear, if only in your own head, the distinction between who you are for professional purposes and who you are at home. And this is also true of the larger academic community: Chant scholars don't come across like hip-hop scholars. But think of it this way: when you are up in front of your students, you are not necessarily "being yourself." You have a persona, or several personae, that you adopt as a way to frame the meaning of the material you're teaching, and to impart a sense of your own relationship to that material. Admittedly, a harder one to square with academic life. Number four: Know you heard this before, never get high on your own supply. Those of you who are freshly minted Ph.D.’s polishing the nameplate on your new office door (you took a picture of it with your cell phone, didn't you? admit it) are going to find out. Those of you who have been working in academe for a while, you know what I'm talking about.
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But then, you never know, do you? You never see it coming. Well, not your Mom, necessarily - Actually, I would amend this one to Black Thought's line, trust your fam, or trust nobody at all. Number three: Never trust nobody/Your Moms'll set that ass up, properly gassed up/Hoodie to mask up, shit, for that fast buck/she be layin' in the bushes to light that ass up. Or, to put it in less poetically, if you want your mind to be you own, or if you want to be master of your own destiny, you need to live alone, metaphorically speaking don't confide, or a weakness will be shown, and your hustle will be wrong. Nope, and when you confide stuff about yourself that you wouldn't announce from the lectern of a plenary session of the American Musicological Society, you could end up like Youngblood Priest from Superfly, who accidentally kills his best friend when he drops the name of his connection in a nightclub.Īs Curtis Mayfield comments in the title song: "But a weakness was shown, 'cause his hustle was wrong/His mind was his own, but the man lived alone." It's easy to get suckered into the illusion that you're confiding your innermost thoughts with an anonymous Them you'll never actually meet. Seriously, bloggers, always assume that everyone you know, and everyone you might want to know, will read your blog. Or, as MF Doom says, never let your so-called mans know your plans. Number two: Never let 'em know your next move/Don't you know bad boys move in silence or violence. And don't go around bragging about how you've got the 10 best people locked down for your edited anthology of new scholarship on Aquitanian verse, because the 11th guy, the guy you didn't ask, will be waiting out by the dumpsters with a chair leg. If you're a hotshot junior professor with one monograph coming out from Harvard and another under contract at Cambridge, along with 9 major articles and 14 essay-reviews and a teacher-of-the-year award, be cool about it. People want to know what you've been up to, but not if you're doing better than they are. Especially worth remembering at academic meetings. Rule nombre uno: Never let no one know how much dough you hold/Cause you know the cheddar breed jealousy. All hustles obey the same logic, so heed Biggie's words. "The Ten Crack Commandments" only looks like it's about drug dealing. All you professors starting out at new institutions (like me) will be getting orientation sessions to show you the academic ropes - procedures on academic misconduct, FERPA guidelines, sexual harassment policies, etc., but you can save some time and just listen to hiphop. Time for a refresher course in professional deportment - by which I mean "The Ten Crack Commandments," by The Notorious B.I.G. We're staring down the barrel of another academic year.