Jay Smooth - An Old Person's Guide to "No Homo" lyrics

One of my favorite things about hiphop Is our everlasting love of language One of my least favorite things about hiphop Is our everlasting fear of being gay So I guess I shouldn't be suprised that one of our favorite slang terms Combines our tremendous pa**ion for word play with our tremendous insecurity about s**uality "NO h*mo" The no h*mo phenomenon is an old thing A sad Old thing But it's still a new thing to a lot of old people So as a public service I will now present a brief history of no h*mo The phrase no h*mo which traces back to an earlier slang word 'pause' Is a defense mechanism utilized by young men who are not only afraid of being gay or looking gay They're actually afraid that the words they speak might sound linguistically gay [Comment: Timm See] It's basically when someone says something that could be even vaguely construed as being h*mo-erotic or h*mos**ual Someone will put no h*mo either before or after the phrase No h*mo was first popularized by New York's Dipset crew Led by the rapper Cam'ron Who was known for being clever with words And also for wearing a lot of pink And wanted to be absolutely certain that nobody inferred anything from that And since Dipset's fanbase is made up largely of hip hop bloggers like myself Who also tend to love playing with words while feeling insecure about our geekiness The blog world quickly fell in love with no h*mo And turned it into a never-ending contest to see who could use it the most often and in the most outlandish ways And at this point a lot of people who who didn't intend to be h*mophobic Were still attracted to the comedic device and the absurdity of it And they felt like they could use no h*mo without being anti-gay [Comment: Mazzi] It's just a juvenile game we play It's no disrespect to anybody at all [Comment: Timm See] It's like so absurd and stupid That it's mad funny And some people argue that when they take it to such a silly extreme They're really critiquing and satirizing h*mophobia instead of promoting it So the question is how do you decide when if ever it's okay to play the no h*mo game Me personally I've always been in the anti no h*mo camp It felt like it was offensive no matter how you said it But even I have to admit that whenever I have a conversation about it I always get tempted to start playing the game Even when I'm in the middle of rejecting and denouncing it And I tell myself that I'm only saying it to make fun of people who really say it And I'm with my friends and I know that they know that I don't mean it like that So it's just harmless fun But then once you start It gets really hard to stop And you find yourself saying it every 10 seconds for the rest of the night And you don't really remember why you started saying it And even though you tell yourself that you can stop anytime The truth is You are now a no h*mo addict Don't let this happen to you I'm not gonna to say that nobody should ever say it Cause just like with any other word you really got to judge on a case-by-case basis But as a general rule If you are not the original target of an insult You can't be the one to reclaim it And nine times out of 10 If you are not sure whether you should use it You probably shouldn't Plus, it's like 5 years old and it's kind of played out So if you never heard of no h*mo before you saw this video Just forget I brought it up Forget that it came out of my mouth I'm not gonna say it