“I got accepted by the gangster crowd because they saw that I wasn’t afraid of nobody and I would fight anybody…Before I knew it, I became the most popular kid in Jersey City as a good bad guy.”
Akon, 2005

“I always had a way of getting over on people, whether manipulating or conning them.”
Akon, 2007

Sweet soul singin’ sensation Akon has been outed as a dirty liar by those investigative journalists (what, what the fuck is one of THEM?!) over at The Smoking Gun.

Turns out the crooner DID NOT go to jail for a combined 4 and a half years like he claimed, the basis of his whole career - his label is called Konvict Records, every song he does has the sound of prison bars clanking, etc. His public personal has been like a cross between Robin Hood and Simon Adebisi from Oz.

Akon has claimed over the years he was the “ringleader of a notorious car theft operation,” who went to jail after some underlings snitched him out. In prison Akon was a scrapper who “had fights every day of his life”, AND a singer. He claimed he wrote his hit Locked Up in jail.

The song, he recalled, “was like an anthem in there” and C.O.s would often ask him to sing its chorus, which goes “I’m looooocked up! They won’t let me out!”

N. E. WAE. Transpires that whole backstory was “to an overwhelming extent, exaggerated, embellished, or wholly fabricated” according to The Smoking Gun:

“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.

So there was no conviction. There was no prison term between 1999 and 2002. And he was never “facing 75 years,” as the singer claimed in one videotaped interview.”

Damn homie! What next, we find out Lil Wayne never shot crack?

Here’s a video of Akon telling porkies. Now, these revelations aren’t gonna make me enjoy dude’s excellent music any less. I never believed a word of it anyway. But These interviews? Not so much. I like interviews. They are one of my favorite side effects of the pop star thing. But I do like to be able to believe an interview. Is that perverse?

Music journalism is an oxymoron, and I have said this for a long time. Music writers, as they should be called, primarily copy-paste press releases these days, with no thought, or care, for the content, or consequence. But, since we’re aware that politics is merely the entertainment arm of the war industry, should we really give two craps about pop singers?

I mean, don’t we all know it’s bullshit by now? Do we really want our pop stars to be one hunnerd percent honest? Does a rapper need to pretend to be a bandit in real life in order to sing abut it? I mean, it’s not like Johnny Cash ever did. What do you mob think?

Stream: Akon ft Nas - Locked Up (remix)

Stream: Obie Trice ft Akon - Snitch

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Tags: akon, backstory, bullshit, car theft, con, crooner, dekalb county jail, dirty liar, fabrication, felony, fiction, guilty plea, gun possession, investigative journalists, jersey case, Johnny Cash, konvict, lies, lil wayne, Oz, porkies, pretend, prison, prison bars, rap sheet, ringleader, Robin Hood, scrapper, simon adebisi, singer, smoking gun, suburban atlanta, untruth, Wayne